We hear routinely from groups of interprofessional students that they want organic opportunities to interact and "just get to know one another" before being expected to work together during formal interprofessional education (IPE) events. In response, our IPE collaborative, which is a joint effort between Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health and the Notre Dame of Maryland School of Pharmacy, developed an introductory "social" IPE event that precedes other IPE programming that our students participate in during their respective professional programs. The goal of our IPE social event is to provide students with an opportunity to socialize with peers from other professions, learn about other professions' roles and responsibilities, and begin developing interprofessional core competencies. We believe early interprofessional socialization opportunities are important to optimize the interprofessional learning environment. Furthermore, our IPE collaborative leadership team co-designed this social event with medical students and doctoral nursing students. This was one of our first forays into student-led and engaged IPE event development. We have conducted this event in two formats: 1) in person at our School of Nursing, and2) synchronously via an online platform called Gather®. In this poster, we share the development and implementation of our social IPE event, including a review of factors such as: session design and preparation, engagement of students in the development process, event participants, session learning and social activities, and event expense. We also compare and contrast the online and in-person formats, as well as discuss challenges and benefits of these sessions from the perspective of our IPE collaborative leadership team. This poster addresses the Summit theme of "Preparing Students forInterprofessional Collaborative Practice" and will highlight for participants how to engage students and utilize input on IPE activity design, as well as how social events can be beneficial in setting the stage for optimal interprofessional learning and competency development. This session aligns with the priority criteria as it is a call to action to build meaningful opportunities for socialization with multiple professions (in our case 4 professions) to highlight the importance of learning to work together and learn about, from, and with each other. Finally, it demonstrates the power of listening to students about how they want to learn and the benefits of partnering with students to co-design IPE activities that they find engaging and valuable.