by Jean Sumner

Created on: December 08, 2006

Even in graduate school, that old tired truism prevails: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Today, networking is not just a means to postgraduate employment. It enables a necessary system for graduate students and their colleagues to gain information, visibility, feedback, career advice, friendships, social and emotional support, and refinement of their professional identities (1, 2). Building that successful network involves developing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with others who have the potential to assist your goals and your career.

No matter what your graduate field of study, networking is not just for getting a job. It may also be critical to the successful completion of your Master's degree or PhD (3). Phil Agre of the Department of Information Studies at UCLA insists that "becoming a member of a research community means knitting yourself into a web of relationships and dialogues" (3). His message tells us that if you don't schmooze, you may lose: building contacts can not only lead to internships, research collaboration opportunities, grants, and publications while in graduate school, but is also likely to help you shove your well-educated foot in the door when pursuing postgraduate job openings. Thus, as a graduate student, it is critical that you start casting your net at the beginning of your graduate studies.

But networking often seems like additional work that graduate students must pile on top of a neverending schedule and workload that already seem to bursting at the seams. As a graduate student, you juggle teaching assistantships, multiple ongoing research projects, graduate coursework, family life, as well as maintaining their sanity while performing all of these duties simultaneously on little or no sleep. In their book "A Balanced Scorecard Approach to Networking: A Guide to Successfully Navigating Career Changes," Monica Forrett and Sherry Sullivan reminds us that one of the great values of developing a successful net is to constantly seek "elegant currencies" - things that you can give easily that are of value to others (e.g., providing a colleague a research article or a contact), as well as things that others can easily provide that are of value to you (an hour of babysitting while you run an errand; 2). The 'little things', as we all know, add up. So skillful networking can not only save you time in the long run, but the right contacts may be able to help make your work more efficient and alleviate stress.

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