“we had nothing in common, they couldn’t explain why they chose to set up a meeting with me.”
To add on to this: even without any non-platonic vibe, I had a few people (single digits, maybe between 2 and 6 people?) reach out to me on Swapcard without any reason/justification and without any explanation. People requested a meeting without any context about what they want to meet about. In my mind, this is very similar to strangers attempting to add me on LinkedIn without any message; they are just “collecting contacts” through a kind of fear of missing out, or they think being connected to me might be useful someday. I try to respond with a polite way of figuring out what they want, such as “can I help you?” or “what can I do for you?”, but I do wish that people would be more clear about why they are requesting a meeting (or a connection).
To be clear, this was only a few individuals. The majority of people that reached out to me seemed to do a fine job of providing justification for why they wanted to meet and providing context.
Oops, I did this before! At my first EAG I was spending too much time thinking what to say for the justification, so instead I just sent out like 10 1-1 requests with no comment and it felt really nice. These were 1-1s where I just wanted to hang out and meet new people, and I didn’t want them to feel pressured into accepting like I had some super important reason that I needed to meet with them for. Although, this might be more ok between college students who’re more likely to have nothing better to do.
Just speaking for myself — I’m not a college student, but I’m totally happy to get meeting requests where the only point is to hang out / meet the person! Sometimes these kinds of meetings are awesome :) But I’d prefer the person to send a connection request saying that rather than not have any message attached.
To add on to this: even without any non-platonic vibe, I had a few people (single digits, maybe between 2 and 6 people?) reach out to me on Swapcard without any reason/justification and without any explanation. People requested a meeting without any context about what they want to meet about. In my mind, this is very similar to strangers attempting to add me on LinkedIn without any message; they are just “collecting contacts” through a kind of fear of missing out, or they think being connected to me might be useful someday. I try to respond with a polite way of figuring out what they want, such as “can I help you?” or “what can I do for you?”, but I do wish that people would be more clear about why they are requesting a meeting (or a connection).
To be clear, this was only a few individuals. The majority of people that reached out to me seemed to do a fine job of providing justification for why they wanted to meet and providing context.
Oops, I did this before! At my first EAG I was spending too much time thinking what to say for the justification, so instead I just sent out like 10 1-1 requests with no comment and it felt really nice. These were 1-1s where I just wanted to hang out and meet new people, and I didn’t want them to feel pressured into accepting like I had some super important reason that I needed to meet with them for. Although, this might be more ok between college students who’re more likely to have nothing better to do.
Just speaking for myself — I’m not a college student, but I’m totally happy to get meeting requests where the only point is to hang out / meet the person! Sometimes these kinds of meetings are awesome :) But I’d prefer the person to send a connection request saying that rather than not have any message attached.