This week I’ve been feeling unusually more sociable and felt a high appetite for conversation and connection form strangers, even before reading the assigned texts for this class. After reading Hamblin and Charlebois and Shen’s articles, I felt like I had a mini breakthrough with the triangulation method. The ultimate formula for every icebreaker! Once you realize that structure exists in everyday conversation I see it everywhere.
This week I had several mini-conversations with strangers, some of which lapsed briefly and some which lasted maybe 5 minutes. I’m taking an ECON 103 course and I was curious to know other people’s thoughts on the TA, because I thought the first tutorial last week was an absolute disaster. I used that as an icebreaker and exchanged names with 3 different students, right before the class and during break, and learned about them and they learned a bit about me. I was already incentivized to make friends in that class because the professor drove home the fact that the class was difficult and study groups were highly recommended. A couple of them seemed a little bit uninterested in conversation: either they were deliberately being uninteresting or they really were uninteresting. The girl I talked to Ellie, was interesting, and she talked about switching out from Engineering to Economics. I didn’t learn much about anybody that morning because the conversations were brief, but I have some leads now.
I had a more engaging conversation with this girl name Shub. I was looking at events on a posting board near the AQ, and she was putting up a poster for a Health Science Event that was happening this week. I asked her about it and she gave me some details, and then I asked about her Masters, which was in Health Science. I mentioned the coincidence between the event and me learning about the health benefits about talking to strangers and establishing social connections in the community. She concurred and mentioned that social isolation was one of the topics being discussed by one of the presenters in the event. She also thought it was funny I was using her to complete my assignment. I spoke with a couple other strangers that day, but I felt that I could do better. After all, these weren’t total strangers, they were people with whom I already something convenient in common. I was wanting to find someone on the street that I knew nothing about that I could approach, to really put myself out of my comfort zone.
However, I can already corroborate Hamblin, Charlebois and Shen’s findings, that talking to strangers have a direct effect on mood and wellbeing. I not only felt less depressed and more energized, but I was beginning to desire and seek connection more strongly than I did before. I felt like I was finally starting to understand this basic skill of meeting strangers that I used to be jealous of other people for having. It’s difficult to take the risk of breaking the ice with a stranger, but the more I do it, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, feels empowering and makes the world seem a little less isolated.
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