Last night, Chris and I had dinner, broke through an Escape Room, and had drinks with my friend and her friends in Little Rock. For the first time probably since college, I was surrounded by people who were not from one coast or the the other and who were all in the sciences. Her friends are all specializing in different areas in the same medical residency program, and one of the friend’s boyfriends is a microbiologist working for the FDA. Their places of origin included Kuwait/Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Orlando, and Austin.

We were sitting at a table over drinks until past midnight, talking about everything from what truly defines Tex-Mex cuisine (the guys from San Antonio claim that Austin “Tex-Mex” is “whitified” and not real, and that San Antonio is the only city in the entire South where you can get “real” Tex-Mex) to immigrating to the U.S. as a brown Bangladeshi person from Kuwait, to what “diversity” means in different environments. One conversation I had that surprised me was that one of the women said to me that she found Little Rock far more diverse than Baton Rouge, where her family currently lives and where she did her undergrad and medical school studies. “In Baton Rouge, all I was meeting were people who either didn’t want to do anything meaningful with their lives and stay in their home town forever, or people who were obsessed with work, superficial, and frankly very uninteresting as people,” she said. She expressed annoyances that it was hard to meet someone who was a working professional, dedicated and passionate about what they were doing, who is also interesting and good to have conversation with. “It’s been easier for me to find that here in this residency program,” she said. “People are actually interesting, they’re from everywhere, and it feels diverse!”

We all live in our bubbles. I spend time mostly with people in tech, consulting, and the agency world. They are surrounded by doctors and biologists and others in the medical and science professions every day. I thought to myself that night that it would be great if we could meet people not just from different racial and geographic backgrounds, but also different professions. Some of the conversations I had that night were some of the most thought-provoking and stimulating I’ve had in a while. It was certainly a pleasant break from what I usually hear at my work.