Being students on Cornell’s campus, I’m sure that the majority (if not all) of us have had to attend networking events, cocktail parties, alumni gatherings, or situations of a similar nature. For some, these can be fantastic opportunities to make connections and gather insight from experienced individuals in your field– for others, they can be highly dreaded events. It’s not the idea of meeting new people that is so terrifying, per se, but when all of your past experiences have consisted of highly awkward interactions and uncomfortable bouts of total silence, you tend to avoid gatherings that throw you into a forced environment of conversation.

That being said, the Rose Cafe House Fellows meet and greet was nothing like the embarrassing and unpleasant experience that I had been expecting. In fact, it came to an end long before I would have even liked it to. As a mildly antisocial individual myself, I have to thank the event coordinators’ foresight to design the meeting in a speed-dating type of style with a list of provided questions to reference if things started to lag (which they never actually did, for me at least). It was the ideal layout for avoiding uncomfortable lapses in conversation, and even preemptively took care of the typically awkward end of the conversation by providing a strict time limit for each chat. Needless to say, the structure made the process of interaction as painless as possible, and for once I was actually able to learn and enjoy myself at such an event.

Getting the chance to interact, entirely one-on-one, with some of the fellows was a great experience and really gave me a sense of the Rose House community– a perfect takeaway for my first event attended. Every single fellow I had the opportunity to chat with seemed genuinely interested in my area of study, view of Cornell, and hopes for the future. Our fellows come from such a wide variety of backgrounds that I felt as if the thirty minutes I had to interact with them taught me more than a good portion of my lectures this year have so far. It was a surprisingly good end to a very long day, and one particular fellow smiling and saying “I support you” turned out to be the exact encouragement I needed to solidify my decision of a major in that same week.

I will definitely be attending future events with our House fellows, and I one hundred percent encourage you all to do so as well. We’re very lucky to have direct access to some of the most incredible people on campus through Rose House, and I would highly recommend taking advantage of it.