Networking Beyond Your Home Department: An MIT CS/AI Case Study

How do you build real connections outside your home academic program or department, especially in a place like MIT? This post shares a simple playbook for doing exactly that, using my own path into the CS/AI community as a case study. The short version: find the right announcement surfaces, show up (even when you won’t understand everything), and keep the curiosity dial set to “loud.”

Case Study Set‑Up: An SM’s “Identity Crisis”

When I first arrived at MIT as an EECS Master of Science (SM) and MBA dual-degree candidate, I had a brief identity crisis about where I fit.

Conversations with other students or faculty often went like this:

Who’s your PI (principal investigator)?
I don’t have one. I’m a master’s student.
Oh, so you’re an MEng student then?
No, I’m SM 😅.

This happens because the majority of EECS graduate students are PhD students, followed by MIT undergrads continuing for their MEng. That makes being an EECS SM both rare and meaningful. In my case, I cleared multiple admission committees (three, in fact: EECS, Sloan MBA, and LGO) 😎.

With no lab affiliation, no RA-ship, and no matched thesis advisor (well, now I do 😉), I still wanted to engage with the CS and AI research communities at MIT.

I want to be in the room where it happens.

The Playbook: How to Network Outside Your Home Program

1. Set one clear objective

I decided one of my main grad school objectives would be to attend as many research seminars, talks, and guest lectures as possible. That single choice simplified a lot of decisions later (see: calendar collisions and FOMO).

2. Find the “Room Where It Announces”

Every community has places where information lands first: department‑wide digests, lab/center mailing lists, seminar calendars, student collectives, Slack/Discord, and newsletters.

Your job is to discover and subscribe. (My MIT‑specific examples are in the appendix.)

3. Go to the Rooms Where It Happens

Zoom is useful, but the hallway chat, the post‑talk question, and the walk‑and‑talk to the elevator are where many connections start.

In my first fall semester, I sometimes skipped a class (yes, one with attendance) to catch a talk.

Make your own call, but don’t sleep on the compounding value of being in the room.

4. Give yourself permission not to understand everything

Do I always understand the talks? Absolutely not.

But every time, I leave with something new: a topic to Google later, a name to follow, a feel for where the field is heading. Even if I can’t follow the proofs, I can still catch the pulse, and that alone is worth being in the room.

For example, in one seminar, I heard “Machine Unlearning” for the first time! That’s mind-opening when I was overwhelmingly exposed to “learning”.

So if you also feel “between the labs,” don’t wait for an official invitation. Just show up. Sit in. Be curious.

If you’ve found other ways to engage (clubs, reading groups, random Slack channels, or secret pizza seminars) I’d love to hear them.
Drop me a note, and maybe I’ll see you in one of those rooms where it happens.

Appendix: MIT CS/AI Links (Examples)

Disclaimer. All links below point to public pages already available via CSAIL’s TIG website or public org pages. I’m re‑summarizing them here as examples, not advocating misuse. Please be respectful of list policies and norms. If a CSAIL administrator would prefer these subscription links not be referenced here, email me and I’ll remove them promptly.

• CSAIL (MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)
  • CSAIL homepage: https://www.csail.mit.edu/
  • TIG: Popular Lab Mailing Lists: https://tig.csail.mit.edu/email-communicating/popular-lab-mailing-lists/
  • Note: some lists (e.g., csail-all, csail-internal) are restricted.
• Student & Research Collectives
  • Scale ML (cross‑lab MIT AI student collective): https://scale-ml.org/.
    • Just last month, they hosted Horace He, who co-authored “Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference”, the very first blog post from Thinking Machines.
  • MIT NLP Meetings Seminar Series: https://mitnlp.notion.site/
• Context
  • MIT EECS Graduate Programs - Admission Process (why SM/MEng confusion happens):
    https://www.eecs.mit.edu/academics/graduate-programs/admission-process/