An unexpected epicenter

While I'm sure most of us found similar trends in our Facebook social networks, I was quite surprised at the distinct organization of my communities. Before mapping out anything on Gephi, I assumed that I would have a rather large network from both college and high school but I had no idea just how segregated they would be. Each network is very integrated within itself but I have one connection that almost exclusively links the two, my friend Andy Grube. We were best friends for all of high school and both very involved in the music program. We were also both thinking about pursuing chemical engineering in college so we took essentially all of the same classes. It is because of these overlaps in activities that our social networks converged. When we both ended up at Northeastern University to study chemical engineering, our communities continued to develop in similar fashions. When I mapped out my friends on Gephi, I saw a single node connecting two large communities and knew it had to be him. Based on our history and friendship, it makes sense that he would be the epicenter of my network, but I never would have expected it to be so obvious.

I also found the organization of my high school community to be quite interesting. While there are many overlapping connections within my other communities, the amount present in my high school network is overwhelming. The fact that there are so many shared connections shows just how closed of a community my high school was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was very little information transferring in and out of my high school community, which is characteristic of a closed network. My high school was relatively small, so everyone knew everyone else, meaning information tended to get “stuck” in our community. If anything happened over the weekend, you would hear about it from multiple sources within the first hour of class Monday morning. This is very characteristic of a closed community and moving away from this type of social experience was one of the main reasons I decided to attend a large university.