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Informal social relations, such as friendships, are crucial for the well-being and success of students at all levels of education. Network interventions can aim at providing contact opportunities in school settings to prevent the social isolation of individuals and facilitate integration between otherwise segregated social groups. We investigate the short-term and long-term effects of one specific network intervention in an undergraduate cohort freshly admitted to an engineering department (). In this intervention, we randomly assigned students into small groups at an introduction event two months prior to their first day at university. The groups were designed to increase mixed-gender contact opportunities. Two months after the intervention, we find a higher rate of friendships, common friends, and mixed-gender friendships in pairs of students who were assigned to the same group than in pairs from different groups …