Reply To: “I’m A Mensan Now”
One more thing to add, because I haven’t devoted nearly enough space to writing about this yet… 🙂
The American Mensa website and the national events I mentioned earlier give a better idea about what happens in Mensa on the national level, but I thought it might help to talk a bit about what happens on the local level. At the local level, it’s something along the lines of a social club where local chapters organize different kinds of get-together events to suit the tastes of the local members. In our chapter, this is how we roll…
We see arty and/or thought-provoking movies and talk about them over dinner afterwards. We get together at members’ houses for potluck dinners, movie nights, holiday parties and game nights (usually involving the same kind of brainy games that were talked about two posts ago). We get together for dinner and conversation at restaurants we like. We put out a newsletter that talks about local, regional and national Mensa events and issues, along with whatever the various people who contribute articles feel like writing about that they think would interest the group. Some Mensa groups organize field trips to interesting and/or scenic places in the region or they’ll attend or teach classes that cover topics of interest to the local members… we haven’t done too much of that ourselves, I think we tend to focus more on socializing locally.
To be totally honest, I see the same basic mix of people and personalities at local and national Mensa gatherings that I see at any other geeky gathering I go to, and I think it’s the same basic mix that anyone else would see at their geeky gathering of choice… comic book convention, sci-fi convention, game convention, JoCo concert, JoCo internet forum, take your pick. Think about what the group dynamics of those gatherings are, and you’ll see pretty much the same thing at a Mensa gathering of comparable size.