My first night back in Los Angeles, after a year of living in New York, I ended up at a bar on Sunset called Coach & Horses. It was dark, dank, a jukebox kind of place. I started talking to a guy, a friend of a friend, about our jobs, favorite movies, favorite television shows. He worked in the writer’s room of a popular TV show, we were both addicted to “Top Chef,” and we agreed that the first four seasons of the “West Wing” were brilliant and far surpassed seasons five thru seven.

It was refreshing to talk to a guy who shared my interests and taste, because in New York it was hard to find someone I had anything in common with. I felt like I’d struck gold, and then I remembered: I wasn’t in New York anymore. This was Los Angeles, a city full of my kind of people.

It’s not just a myth that everyone in Los Angeles works in the entertainment industry in one capacity or another; you’re hard pressed to find someone with no industry connections. Everyone in LA seems to have a script they wrote tucked under their arm, and most would rather win an Oscar than a Nobel Peace Prize. Some might hate this, but I love it and talking to this guy at Coach & Horses felt incredibly good.

Unlike life on this side of the cap and gown, people who share your interests - or at least similar day-to-day experiences - constantly surround you in college. There are shared teachers, shared majors, friends, gossip, dining halls; you get the idea. While in college I’d always make sure to get to my classes early on the first day of the semester so I could scope out each guy, tallying in my head who I’d date or hook up with. Eye candy and silly class crushes are what got me through Expository Writing and Brit Lit. I had the security of knowing that if I met a guy in class I knew he was around my age, was also interested in writing and literature, and was at least intelligent enough to get into college.

Post-graduation, the convenient college admissions funnel that weeds out the freaks and morons is gone. You’re suddenly thrown into a pool of singles that would appear to be an endless sea of possibilities, but is actually the ninth circle of hell. Instead of bars full of potential boyfriends, there are bars full of unemployed college dropouts, divorced guys, and (in one particular encounter of mine), sleazy paparazzi photographers.

If you live in a multi-industry city like New York, you’re going to meet people from many varied professions and backgrounds. If you like this, then you’re in luck. If you’re more interested in meeting people on a similar career track and with similar life experiences (like the good old college days), there are a few tricks I’ve learned.

First, find an after-work bar near your office; there’s a better chance there that you’ll meet someone with a job similar to your own. If not, you will at least meet people who have come from a job, and not some freaks off the streets.

Second, accept the reality of your location. If you want to meet a stockbroker and you live in Los Angeles, you might just be out of luck, or at the least you’re going to have to search pretty hard.

Third, and most important: try to keep an open mind. Bill Gates, after all, was a drop-out (yeah, it was from Harvard, but still), so you never know if that unemployed college-failure ordering his scotch-on-the-rocks at the bar is the future richest, smartest, wittiest and most-successful man in the world.