Professional networking...so what?

Yesterday as part of the OU’s Doctoral Training Workshop Session – I spent two hours pondering the topic of “Developing personal and professional support networks” run by an expat South African boytjie nogals. Not it helped the session anyway!.


In the session yesterday, even though the facilitators used various experiential pedagogies and tried the whole touchy-feely approach, I had to ask myself “So what is the point of all of this, other than having two hours to talk about your own personal experiences or rather listen to the facilitators own personal experiences?” Also I had to say something right? So of course it was me being devil’s advocate and saying “Sure it’s great to have fellow students to talk to because only another PhD student will understand what you are going through, but what about all the competition between students!” I don’t think people there even considered that there might be competition in this game. Today I actually thought about sending the facilitator an e-mail and saying that I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the session was all about, maybe he could point it out to me. I was keen to attend the session because on Sunday I’m off to the SRHE Conference (Society for Research in Higher Education) http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2009/pgnr.info.asp
and simply wanted to learn something about networking, especially that ‘small talk thing’ that I just can’t seem to master. Its fine when people approach me and ask me questions, but I can’t seem to do the same in return. I actually remember telling a friend this when she dropped me off at the airport on my way to Dublin about 3 years ago. So the session didn’t bring me any closer to uncovering the great secrets of how to be good at breaking the ice at these big conferences. What I did however gain some insight about, is how networking can be a really organised and structured activity (my American discussion partner seemed to be so clued up on this, she even uses software and had management system to organise her networking activities, complete with an approach to fellow up e-mail post conference). The old adage applies “It’s who you know, more than what you know that will get you places”, and the session was just a fancy way of expressing this.

Also I became aware how important it is to be able to explain what your research is about in 2-3 sentences. To strip down all the juicy (but often complex) bits and just express the overall ideas – usually by referring to the general topic, rather than the specifics. This is something I must pay more attention to, and work out some strategy, especially for those small talk ice breakers I will probably encounter in South Wales on Monday. I have to add, that I was happy to brag about my ‘support’ network in South African and I guess this ties in with what I mentioned in my last entry – that I find the English PhD process more inclined to support a more individualistic approach, which often sits at odds with my needs and wants. I do however wonder, if all I am seeing are examples of practices that reinforces my existing perception, my somewhat ‘pejorative’ perception, that the processes here just does not work for me – that all they do is exclude me. An alternative question therefore is, “Am I (un) consciously excluding myself?