In the scrapbook I made this summer, I have a clipping from my old planner. A fragment of a week, it bears the agenda for three days, all covered with shorthand for things I had to do and places I had to be. On the scrapbook page, a nearby annotation reads: “Hell Week.”
This fall, my planner looks like that every week. My once-proud consistent gym routine has fallen apart; my classes assign readings that would have made me wince in freshman year; my schedule is dominated by meetings- weekly, biweekly, and one-off- for myriad acronyms representing various obligations.
And yet, my schedule of engagements grows and grows. Alongside the meetings and homework, my planner lists applications and recruitment events. This fall, I’ve inquired about numerous jobs and joined two new clubs. I even agreed to join a friend’s Pathfinder group without a second thought, although this unfortunately never panned out. Although I am rapidly adjusting to my new work-life balance, my scrapbook-writing self might have called my situation a perpetual hell. So why do I continue to burden myself?
One of life’s greatest joys: when I go to new places, I meet new people. This elementary truth makes life much more exciting, even when I’m not doing anything too different. Small changes in routine, like going to my dining hall at a different time, are a thrill. Who might I run into? Which forgotten acquaintance of mine likes to eat lunch at this hour? Don’t even get me started on how it feels to leave campus and talk to strangers.
The promise of meeting new people is often what gets me out of my routine to explore a new place or join a new organization. Therefore, one might think that I have strong feelings about networking, the omniscient game of firm handshakes and business cards in which every ambitious college student is a perpetual player. I don’t actually have any one way or the other, but I plan to unpack what I do feel in this blog post.
According to Investopedia, networking is “the exchange of information and ideas among people with a common profession or special interest, often in an informal social setting.”
Informal social settings, to me, are usually the domain of networking’s more popular older sibling, Making Friends, but that’s because my default state is informal. I imagine that for a professional working a 9-5, socializing informally with other professionals is a rare chance to loosen up and not think about work.
Why, then, would you waste that chance by thinking about networking? Having to constantly be in career mode, even after hours, sounds pretty miserable for someone whose life is dominated by a full-time white-collar job. And yet, I feel like I get it. I go to a school where freshmen get multiple jobs in their first semesters; the career culture really does take over your brain. After a little while, you don’t even notice how messed up your priorities are.
When you’re a college student, there are no business hours. Everyone has stories about battling their circadian rhythms to do homework in the early morning. I’ve messaged Slack channels well after midnight and gotten responses in 30 minutes. The other day, someone sent me a LinkedIn connect request at 2:53 AM.
LinkedIn is pretty awesome. I like LinkedIn a little too much.
I’ve never posted on it, and dread the day when I will have to, but the platform offers so much more than just that. For one, my customizable job title: “Dean’s List, Honors Photography and Economics Student at American University.” So much self-aggrandization packed into one little sentence fragment! Look how important I am! There’s also the free professional tutorials I used to learn Adobe InDesign over the summer, which gave me the high-quality instruction I needed while saving me the indignity of having to search for it on a post-dislike button YouTube.
And of course, my favorite part: connections. It’s one great scavenger hunt to me, as well as a mindgame in itself. Do I know this person well enough to connect with them? Why did this random person choose to connect with me? My answers to these questions are resolute yet inconsistent, as intentional as they are arbitrary. Will you be permitted to connect with me? Are your distant ties to me enough for us to be joined in blue-and-white polyamorous matrimony? Depends on my mood! As of this writing, I have 217 connections.
LinkedIn is a fine tool for maintaining established relationships. Unfortunately, it falls short in helping me establish new ones. Multiple times, I’ve sent a Hail Mary connection request with a 200-character plea for comment on an article or advice on a research paper. I have never gotten a response. With time, I’ve found that connection requests are meant for people I’ve met at least once. I’m sure this will become more important if I start going to conferences.
Conferences are the belly of the networking beast- or so I’m told. They exist as an abstract idea for me. I’ve read articles about reporters going to them. My relatives visit them for work. I’ve stumbled on career advice for college grads in which they are a critical part of Making It in academia or other professional disciplines.
If, let’s say, this photography thing doesn’t work out and I have to start working my way up the think tank circuit or the federal government or whatever, I’d have to visit these conferences to learn more about my chosen field. However, the actual main draw for ambitious young professionals like myself (aside from the chance to live large on the company dime) would be the chance to meet important people that can make things happen in our careers.
This is the true test of networking ability, the crucible where careers are forged and the dreams of the weak and mediocre go to die. At these conferences, you are selectively elevated from the unwashed masses to rub shoulders with the rulers of the world, and you had best be prepared to make a good impression because this is your one shot at the big leagues and any faux pas or slip-up will ensure that you stay rotting with the dregs of society forever.
These conferences don’t just have to be conferences, either. The way I see it, a conference is any one-off or perennial event where college students get to shake hands with important people. The last conference I attended was actually a music festival at Nationals Park, which I attended to cover for student media.
I guess you could say I networked with someone important there, but this is a developing story, so I won’t go into any more detail. However, I did meet several other people at that “conference” that span the spectrum of willingness to network with college students that might want to email them and ask for something later.
For instance, there was the radio journalist in the elevator that offered me and my colleague (Hi Kate!! Shoutout Kate) a tour of his office. We were very receptive to the idea in the moment, but we left the elevator without asking for a business card or even an email. In retrospective, it was an utter failure, a catastrophically bad networking performance that can only be compared to saying “Awesome, have a good night” to the cute cashier who just told you that their shift ends in 15 minutes.
On the flip side, there was the photographer who was happy to politely respond to our questions about his occupation, employer, and reasons for being there, but offered little more information than that. I have to admit: if I were sent to some far-flung place to do a job, leave, and get paid, I would probably not rank the satisfaction of college student curiosity very high on my list of responsibilities.
I said it was the flip side, but this photographer was probably closer to the center of this spectrum. After all, we didn’t meet anyone who was outwardly hostile, and that would have been the opposite end of Mr. Elevator Journalist. Even the people with real responsibilities who were probably more stressed than anyone else we met were always polite, which can really make you feel a little guilty when you’re bugging a grown adult about your tiny collegiate problems.
Of course, there’s also another type of professional that a career-minded student might meet: the ones who are hoping, even eager, to meet college students and recruit them for their own mysterious ends. You typically encounter this third kind at job fairs or other events designated as safe spaces for people to network (if you can call it that), but that hasn’t been my only experience with them.
However, the person I am thinking of is also at the center of an unfolding story, so if you want to learn more, you should hit me up in real life or on one of the social media accounts I have linked to this website.
I will say: it is definitely a surreal experience meeting one of those guys. I haven’t read any, but I imagine it feels like being the protagonist of one of those gilded age novels where all you need to make it out of poverty is a good head on your shoulders, some elbow grease, and a little bit of luck; and you just got to the part where opportunity is knocking on your door and you best answer. Of course, that doesn’t always mean you should.
After all this, the only strong feeling I have about networking is that it must be really annoying to be in a position of power relative to college students. Authority figures have been encouraging young people for years to be bold in their requests to their superiors, reminding them that you don’t get anything unless you ask. Now the middle management of the world is paying the price.
Of course, I’m aware of the important role interns play in society. If there were no interns, we would lose thousands of corporate social media accounts, a library of copy writing, and unquantifiable projects of quantitative research. In order for society to continue functioning, we need the only group of people in this world that can afford to work short hours for low or no pay to play its essential part.
But since we all want the same jobs, we have to distinguish ourselves from the competition. And while we feel great after we boldly saunter up to that one important person with all our gumption and pluck and introduce ourselves, I would imagine that all the bold go-getters all start to blend together after a while.
Maybe it’s not that serious. Maybe those who get to introduce themselves to their prospective hiring managers actually are part of some exceptional elite and I’ve just lost perspective on how good I have it. But you probably don’t come here for empirical facts or nuanced perspectives. You probably come here because you’re my friend. So I hope you enjoyed this blog post. I’ll try to make another one soon.
Peace!
P.S.: I thought that I could embed Spotify playlists on this website, but it turns out my plan doesn’t cover that. I made a playlist of songs I’ve been listening to lately to accompany this post, and I’m still including it, even though hyperlinks aren’t as fun. Here it is.
P.P.S.: I figured it out
Ben Ackman's Photography Website 