Awkward Networking
November 28th, 2010I was reading through some of my classmates’ blogs today, and I came across an interesting post by my friend Mei Chi (sorry I’ve linked to you twice Mei Chi, but what can I say, you write some good stuff!). I found her thoughts on awkward “networking” scenarios quite amusing and I agreed with it immediately. Being in Commerce encourages us to attend as many events as we can so we can learn more and meet new people. Most business clubs will promote their events by including such, ie. “come to this event and listen to this professional speaker, followed by dinner and a ‘networking session'”. Most students go out to these in hopes of networking with professionals and impressing them so much that they’ll get an excellent job offer in the future. However, most of the time it ends up being mainly a networking session between your peers in Commerce (boring). I understand that these may be the people who you might be working with/for in the future, but a networking session isn’t really going to give you a good idea of what sort of person they are. I probably wouldn’t join a competition with someone whom I’ve networked, but never actuallyworked with. Working in group projects in your classes are a better way to get to know people you might want to work with in the future. I would join a competition with someone I’ve done a group project with in the past if I knew what type of person they were. (This I have done actually – I joined an OB teammate’s group and we won the 2009 UBCMA Battle of the Ads).
Whenever I see the words “followed by a networking session” on an event promotion, it’s almost a turn off. Especially if the ratio of students to professionals is extremely high.