What's your view of PhD students who constantly name drop?

How do you deal with situations where a person constantly name drops and attempts to appear impressive via this route? I'm curious because I have noticed quite a few students doing this on my masters course and I feel it impedes the development positive working relationships. How do you 'manage' such situations?

Well, it's a straightforward choice between ignoring the name-dropping and trying to beat them at their own game by name-dropping even more shamelessly, no? Personally I'd go with the former, because the latter might only egg them on.

I think part of the issue is that I feel tempted to say, "Cut the crap!". It's hard for me to pretend to listen without coming across very rude. What does 'ignoring it' entail for you?

This, but also in some situations maybe you're just being a bit sensitive to it? I know that I socialise with a lot of people in my field - both at my university and others - who have pretty high-profile, big name supervisors. We talk about department members - those we're working with and not - and some of them are very big names. It's not really bragging, it's just our lives. I hope that makes sense.

Also, when a HUGE name in my field is sitting in the back row of my conference panel while I'm presenting, I'm going to tell someone about that - not in a bragging kind of way but in a 'Holy Sh*t' kind of way.

When you get to this level, depending on the university you go to or the postgraduate community you have, it's just something that happens. People work with big-name professors.

I'm not sure what to say to that... I think I don't care enough about 'big' names in the same way - I mean, I used to feel excitement, but it kind of died over time and I now think of them as pretty ordinary human beings. Perhaps that's why I'm 'sensitive' to it, because I'm not in awe of the names - so I perceive constant name dropping as 'blah blah' I'm forced to listen to. I realize I sound a bit unfriendly here, but it does get tiring having to feign excitement just to keep the conversation going. Some of the name-droppers don't even seem to know what these 'big names' have contributed to the field, just that they are worth approaching because they have a following. It's quite hard to avoid these individuals because I share a supervisor with one and others are always eager to name-drop around me.

Maybe they're just being descriptive?

Stop feigning the excitement. Pretty soon, the name-dropping will stop if people realise that it's not winning them any points.