How to Find the Aggie Network After Moving to a New City
Moving from Aggieland to Dallas, Houston or Austin is exciting—but one of the biggest changes is social. In College Station, being an Aggie gives you a built-in common language. You can meet people almost by accident. After graduation, that same connection still exists, but you have to become much more intentional about using it.
Grant Bynum’s advice to Aggie grads is simple: do not move to a new city with only a job plan and an apartment plan. Move with a social plan, too.
His goal is not to keep an Aggie grad busy every night forever. The goal is to use the first 90 days to build a recurring life—real places, real groups and real people you connect with every week.
The direct answer: start with a 30-day social plan
If your schedule allows it, Grant likes the idea of arriving before your first day of work so you can get settled and begin building your network before the job consumes your attention. Whether that is possible depends on your lease, employer timing and property qualification rules, so treat the timing as a planning goal rather than a guarantee.
Once you arrive, build a 30-day social calendar. For the first month, try one social interaction or mini-event every day. That does not mean a giant party every night. It can be as simple as walking to the same neighborhood coffee shop, introducing yourself to someone, going to the apartment gym at a consistent time, attending a resident event, visiting a church, volunteering, or trying a local young-professional gathering.
You are experimenting. The point is to learn what fits you well enough to become part of your normal week.
Grant’s first milestone is this: by day 30, have two recurring weekly connection points.
Make the local Aggie Network your foundation
Grant would make the local Aggie community one of the first places an Aggie grad plugs in. The Association of Former Students maintains chartered A&M Clubs specifically to connect former students in local communities, and those clubs commonly host events such as Aggie Muster and game-watching parties.
But Grant would go beyond simply putting your name on a membership list.
Participate. Volunteer. Help with events. Join a committee. Consider leadership.
That is where repeated exposure happens. You stop being the person who showed up once and start becoming part of the group.
During football season, game-watching parties can become an especially easy recurring connection point. If you are not headed back to Kyle Field or traveling to an away game, a local watch party can give you a natural Saturday rhythm with fellow Aggies.
Young-alumni gatherings can be especially useful because they put recent Aggie grads around other former students at a similar stage of life. The formal structure varies by city and club, so check the local club calendar rather than assuming every city runs the same program.
Grant’s rule is: use the Aggie Network as the foundation, not the entire house.
Start with people who already understand Aggieland, the traditions and the shorthand. Then deliberately add non-Aggie connections too.
Build at least three recurring weekly connections
Grant’s minimum target is three recurring social or community connections per week. By the end of 90 days, he would love to see four solid recurring connections plus one or two alternates.
Those connections might include a local A&M Club or Aggie game-watch routine, church or another faith community, a volunteer organization or nonprofit, a young-professional group, a fitness routine where you actually interact with people, a recurring neighborhood event, apartment resident events, a dog-park routine if you have a dog, or the same coffee shop or social place at the same time each week.
The important word is recurring. One giant networking event does not replace seeing the same people again and again.
Choose a neighborhood that makes connection easy
When Howdy Apartments thinks about apartment fit for an Aggie grad, Grant wants both the neighborhood social score and the apartment social score to matter.
A socially useful neighborhood is one where connection has low friction. Think walkability, nearby coffee shops and restaurants, apartment density, parks, neighborhood activity and places you can reach without turning every social outing into a major driving project.
Grant is a big believer in spontaneity. If you can decide at 6:15 p.m. to walk somewhere, grab coffee, attend something nearby or meet people without a 35-minute production, you are more likely to actually do it.
That is why he would often rather see an Aggie grad pay a little more—or accept a modestly longer work commute—for a neighborhood that makes building a life easier, assuming the overall budget still works.
He does not recommend choosing an apartment mainly because it is quieter or a little cheaper if the tradeoff is being isolated from the life you are trying to build.
Let your apartment help do some of the work
Grant ranks apartment social features this way:
#1 — Recurring resident events. Several events per month are much more valuable socially than a one-off event every now and then.
#2 — Coworking spaces. They can create repeated everyday exposure to the same residents.
#3 — The gym. Especially if you use it consistently enough to begin recognizing and talking with people.
For dog owners, a dog park can be one of the strongest social features because residents may use it multiple times a day.
Pools, lounges and basic coffee stations rank much lower for Grant because they tend to create less consistent interaction. A true staffed/on-site coffee concept could be a nice bonus, but he would not assume that is a normal apartment amenity.
If the grad genuinely likes the apartment, Grant would give the property’s social score about 50% of the decision. Finishes, square footage and a slightly lower rent still matter—but the apartment is also part of the infrastructure for the life you are trying to create.
If your job is demanding, protect the weekend
A demanding job, hybrid schedule or frequent travel does not eliminate the social plan. It just changes where you put it.
Grant recommends placing at least two of the three core recurring connections on the weekend when possible. A Saturday Aggie watch party during football season and Sunday church are obvious examples. Then the third connection could be something more flexible, such as a morning routine or another activity that can move around your work schedule.
For truly recurring activities, convenience matters. Grant’s practical rule is that roughly 15 to 20 minutes away is ideal, and around 30 minutes is about the outer edge before an activity becomes much harder to sustain unless it already fits naturally into your routine.
He would rather see an Aggie grad consistently attend three good nearby activities than theoretically belong to three amazing things across town that they rarely attend.
Keep the Aggie spirit of service—but broaden it
Grant loves the service part of A&M culture. The Big Event is one of the clearest examples of that mindset. After graduation, keep that part of Aggieland alive by serving where you live now—through church, a nonprofit, your local A&M Club or another organization you care about.
If you want to return to College Station for The Big Event itself, check the current participation rules first. The official Big Event program is described as a student-run service project with Texas A&M students volunteering, so alumni participation should not be assumed without verifying the current year’s process.
The bigger idea is to keep serving. Service gives you something meaningful to do with other people instead of making every social interaction feel like networking.
Parents and friends: support, don’t manage
Grant thinks parents can be helpful during the first 30 days—especially if the Aggie grad actually wants the accountability.
A parent can check in about once a week and ask something simple: What did you try this week? Have you found your first recurring activity? Are you still going to that church, watch party or apartment event?
Friends are especially useful for introductions. If someone knows an Aggie or young professional in the new city, make the connection.
What Grant does not recommend is constant checking, solving every problem, or encouraging the grad to return home every weekend.
His phrase is essentially: let the bird leave the nest and fly. Aggies are capable. Be available, but let the grad learn how to build life in the new city.
For that first month especially, Grant would rather see the Aggie grad stay locally engaged than repeatedly retreat back to College Station or home every weekend.
The biggest mistake: expecting social life to happen automatically
College Station can make connection feel automatic. A new city usually will not.
The biggest mistakes are arriving without a social plan, going straight home after work every day, skipping apartment resident events, living too far from the places and people you want to engage with, waiting for friendships to appear naturally, and returning home so often that the new city never gets a chance to become home.
Grant uses a great analogy: treat your new social life like something you have to feed every day while it is growing.
Your career may already have structure. Your social network does not. Give it attention until it becomes strong enough to run on recurring routines.
Grant’s 30/60/90-day Aggie social plan
Days 1–30: experiment every day
Try one social interaction or mini-event every day.
Your goal by day 30: two recurring weekly connections. Maybe that is a local Aggie watch party and a church. Maybe it is an apartment event series and volunteering. The exact mix is personal.
Days 31–60: cut experimentation roughly in half
Once two recurring activities are working, you no longer need to test something new every day. Grant would reduce the experimentation by about 50%—roughly every other day, or around 15 of the next 30 days.
Keep the recurring activities and search for at least one more.
Your goal by day 60: three or even four recurring weekly connections.
Days 61–90: maintain the core and keep one exploration lane open
Once three or four recurring connections are established, Grant would reduce new experimentation again—perhaps one new activity per week.
Your goal by day 90: four solid recurring connection points plus one or two alternates.
They do not have to happen at precisely the same hour every week. What matters is that you have a reliable weekly rhythm and actual people you expect to see again.
How do you know you have really built a life in the new city?
At 90 days, the win is not that you have attended 50 random events.
The win is that your week has structure.
You know where you are going. You know some people there. They know you. You have a local Aggie connection, but your entire world is not limited to Aggies. You also have other communities—church, service, neighborhood friends, young professionals, fitness, volunteering or whatever genuinely fits you.
Grant calls that the point where you can begin to reap the rewards of all the planting you did during the first three months: a “bumper crop” of social activity.
That is the real goal of the first 90 days after Aggieland: not merely having a new address and a new job, but building a new home base for your life.
Gig ’em.