 This is Kim Doherty. I am your iSchool student and alumni career advisor. And I would like to welcome all of you to our workshop for this evening, which is how to build your professional network without feeling really weird about it, which I think is the issue that a lot of us have. And I would like to welcome all of you who are here with me as well as a number of old friends I'm seeing, excuse me, in our participants. So I'm looking forward to sharing this evening with you. Couple of housekeeping things. As I just mentioned, this presentation is being recorded and in about a week's time, it will have been produced and excuse me, and sort of cleaned up the way that our wonderful production group does. And it will be posted online and we will let you know what the link is for that. Second thing is, I'm hoping that you all have lots of questions and I am more than happy to stay with you online this evening for as long as you would like answering questions. So my plan is to sort of go through the information that I'd like to share with you and then open it up to all the questions that you might have. And you can type them as I'm going through and you think of them. And then when I'm done speaking, I'll start at the tub and just start working down through all of your different questions. Or I would also encourage you to share information with each other. If there's something that I've said and you happen to know more about like a resource I've referenced, please feel free to post it for your fellow participants. They would love it and I would be thrilled as well because I am continually learning new knowledge as I go through my career as well. So that said, let's take it out and let me get my cursor working here. And we will start now looking at networking or how to build a network. And this is really sort of a, what would I call it, a question or a distinction that I think it's important for us to make. There are two different terms that people use and they're two different activities or processes. The first one is building a professional network or what I would call your community of colleagues. That's the group of people that you connect with professionally and otherwise and we'll go into that in more depth. But the second thing is networking. And networking is when you reach out to individuals for a specific purpose, generally to ask for a favor, to share knowledge, to connect to people that you know, that sort of thing. So what we're going to be talking about for the most part is how to build your professional network while you're in the iSchool program but we'll also touch a little bit on networking. And then you are welcome to hit me with questions about either one of these topics. So with that said, here's my definition of what a network is. And this is how I've approached it as I've gone through my career. I would say a professional network is your community of personal and professional relationships and it's the ones that you build and nurture over the life of your career. I take a very long view of the process of building a professional network because I am still in touch with professional friendships that I established with people 30 years ago. I would also like to emphasize and we'll again talk about this a little bit more but I have very specifically said that it's a community of personal and professional relationships. And the reason I don't just say professional relationships is that you will find when you graduate and go into the world with your amazing information superpowers that your professional opportunities, your career opportunities, your job opportunities aren't necessarily only going to come through professional connections. There are many ways that they can come to you through personal connections where you have a friend who has a brother-in-law who's starting up a new business and needs some research done, some market research or competitive intelligence or your sister is working for a company that desperately needs someone who can help them put together a database of all of their products. And she recommends you because you're the only person she knows who knows anything about doing anything with information. You will find when you're in the library universe in a library or hanging out with other librarians we all take for granted that everybody knows how to do the incredibly cool stuff that we know how to do but in fact that's not the case. And so in order to support you having the most wild and dynamic and adaptable and resilient career possible my recommendation to you is that you consider your professional network to include both personal and career relationships. And to the point that when you say networking to people lots of people gag and run out of the building here's my point again about networking and building a professional network. This is not about using people. It is absolutely about finding ways to help each other. And as someone who has had the gift of literally hundreds of people in my career who have become friends and colleagues of mine the greatest reward all of us have is the ability to help each other. All right, so now I've just like totally convinced you that having a robust professional career is a great idea. All right, so maybe I haven't convinced you. So, okay, here are some more benefits. If you have lots of people that you can reach out to because they're part of that community of colleagues it's easier to do all of these things. Explore career paths, explore employers, find out whether or not this is a toxic disaster as an organization and you don't wanna work there or if it's the greatest place on earth to work you can find that out through your connections. You can do job searching through your connections by letting people know you're looking for a job. You can do job landing through your connections. An example of which is one of your faculty members who I will not mention by name but is a good friend of mine thinks that he landed his job at one of his job applications throughout his career because he got to know the head of the library there and when he was applying for a job that she was gonna have to give a recommendation for he thinks she put his resume on the top of the stack. That's there and that's a phrase, get your resume to the top of the stack, come referred, those kinds of things. More and more jobs are hired for, I'm sure that's not grammatically correct but more and more people are hired based on someone within the organization recommending them than any other way of getting a job. So the more people you know and the more people who know you're looking for a job the likelier it is job opportunities will open up for you. In addition, having a strong community of colleagues gives you also a strong community of expertise and experience. And as I'm guessing most of you have seen already as you've been going through the program there is so much to know about different aspects of working with information. There is no way that all of us can know that stuff and quite frankly, there's no way we can all keep up with all of that information. But if we build a community of colleagues whose areas of expertise are different than ours we can always reach out to them and get the knowledge that have it shared with us that we need to do our jobs or to write up that our request for proposal or to put together that grant proposal or whatever. When you have a community of colleagues a professional network, everybody helps each other. We're all there to help each other succeed. Same thing goes with brainstorming. I have had many situations where I've been asked to come in on a new project and I can see maybe five ways of approaching it but not sure about which one I have the most confidence in that's when I will brainstorm with members of my community and say how would you approach this? What do you see as the downsides? What do you see as the threats, as the opportunities? Your basic SWAT analysis. For those of you who aren't aware of this strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is what a SWAT analysis is. In the same way, people who know you and are in your corner basically with your network are the likeliest to give you the reality checks you need. When you have a great idea you don't wanna move on the great idea until you sort of set it up the flagpole as they say and let the people you trust shoot it down and say, have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? Have you considered that? So these are the people you trust to help you make your best decisions. These are the people who when your company or your library is looking for someone who's really, really good at something, you can reach out to your network and say, I'm putting the word out, we're looking for this set of skills. Do any of you know anybody you would recommend? Because the thing that's so valuable there is that they're not gonna, because they're putting their personal reputation on the line, they're not gonna recommend someone to you who they don't have confidence in. And so it's a great way for your organization to find really good people to hire. Another area is vendor and product recommendations. Asking your colleagues for recommendations of what they would use for a project management tool, for a group communication tool, for a cloud tool, for all of these different things. When you have a strong community of expertise backing you up, your decisions get better and better and better. And then lastly, my favorite, and the one that I have used over and over again throughout my career with great delight is that when you have great people in your community of colleagues, you will never be at a conference where you can't have a really good time, dining or drinking or having karaoke with your community of colleagues. So now that I have convinced you, yes, this is something that you want to do. Let's look about, look at ways to build your network or create that community of colleagues that are either active or organic. Both are effective, both work really well. Actually, from my perspective and my experience, they compliment each other really well. So let's take a look at active. This is when you are surprised, actively seeking out context. So you are purposely reaching out to people or putting yourself in situations where you are going to meet people. In some worlds, these are known as networking, get-togethers, I'm an introvert. So this kind of hits me as just shoot me now. But other kinds of active, engaged ways of building your network sort of purposely would be going to group meetings. For example, professional meetings where you have to sit down and have a meal with people. And so you end up talking to the people on either side of you, just because you're talking about the food or the speaker or whatever. You don't have to come up with something to talk about in that situation. You're just kind of thrown together in a space doing something together. Asking for introductions and referrals. I don't know how many of you are on LinkedIn and for those of you who aren't, I will hound you in your dreams until you do get on LinkedIn. Yes, it's important. Yes, it's obnoxious. Yes, it took me 10 years of just having a LinkedIn profile that was nothing but my name. So I feel your pain, but when it comes to building a community of colleagues, LinkedIn is your friend because it allows you to reach out to people for introductions and referrals. Here's an example. I'm on LinkedIn, I have about 2,500 people in my LinkedIn network. That means I have a direct connection. So if any of you were to connect with me on LinkedIn, just send me an invitation and say, let's connect on LinkedIn. Or if you can't figure it out, say, Kim, send me an invitation and let's connect on LinkedIn. Happy to do it. But once you and I are connected, you can see the 2,500 other people I'm connected to. And then you can say to me, Kim, I'm looking at a position in this company and I see that you know someone who works there. Would you be willing to introduce the two of us? Or I'm looking to find someone who does this kind of work that I could do an informational interview with. And I just look through your network searching on this term and I see that you know someone who works in financial services doing records management. Their name is whatever would you be willing to introduce us? And my response would of course be yes. So asking for introductions and referrals to people is an incredibly powerful way to use LinkedIn. But actually approaching people through social media in general makes sense. It's another way that you can reach out actively, introduce yourself to someone and say, I would like to connect with you. I'd like to get to know you. I'd like to do an informational interview with you or whatever. And that's as easy as following a Twitter feed and then reaching out to that person with a direct message saying, I really enjoy your insights on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever. So social media is another great way for actively reaching out. Volunteering to do something with groups where you may not know anyone yet but you share the values of that organization. For example, if you are an animal lover and there's a chapter of the Humane Association in your community, it would be great to join that chapter even though you don't know anyone there, you know that everyone you meet there is going to share your same passion. That makes it much easier to talk to people when you already have that bond of a mutual interest. And the same thing goes for hobbies. I'm based in Colorado, so it's mountain biking and snowshoeing and mountain climbing and all sorts of weird things. It could be political issues. It could be bonding over faith-based activities or sports or anything where you have a passion for something and other people do as well. Again, that may not be what we would call a professional LIS connection but it could be a very wonderful, personal connection that in the long run may have professional opportunities for you. So that's actively seeking out context. All right, so now let's look at the organic way which is kind of how I've gone through my career. Basically, it's figuring out who you already have in your life as the start of your existing network. And so as you can see, I've made some notes there of people that you might not have thought of as, oh, these people are part of my network, quote unquote, but they all are. They're people who know you, people with whom you have a relationship, people with whom you have something in common that you could talk about. And they're generally speaking, if you give them an opportunity, people who would like to help you if they can. So let's think about that organic network building of I'm already here, this is already going on around me. Where could I pick up some more connections or build some more relations as I'm sort of going through doing the iSchool program? These won't take you a lot of effort. They're things where all it involves is just telling these people or making it clear to these people, you'd like to stay in contact with them. You'd like to know more about them. You care about what's going on in their lives and in their careers, and if at all possible, you'd like to help them succeed. So think about all of these different opportunities that you have while you are going through grad school. There are all sorts of opportunities for you. One, I wanna point out to you, it will to the two at the bottom, fellow iSchool 2.021 participants, I'm going to assume that you all know about the annual or now I think it's done more frequently, virtual conference or conferences, many conferences that the iSchool puts on throughout the year. These are target rich environments for you to reach out and introduce yourself to other people who are attending conference presentations on topics that interest you. It's a great way, again, to build on what you have in common with people. It's also a great way for you to identify people who are doing cool stuff in topic areas that are of interest to you and reaching out to them again. And with the very authentic, honest message, I heard you present and I really liked what you said. I thought it was fascinating. It's an area that I'm interested in as well. Would you be willing to do an informational interview with me? And trust me when I tell you, in this profession, literally everyone will say yes to you because it is the nature of LIS professionals that we are here to share and we are here to support other people's success. So I would encourage you to think about checking out the virtual conferences and seeing if there are interesting opportunities for you there. The bottom one is people you met while organizing a virtual career day. Now I threw that in there for a very specific purpose. I, for about 20 years, taught a class at the University of Denver MLIS program called Alternative LIS Careers. And I had a student who was very interested in working in a special library of some sort. And so what she did in order to meet a whole bunch of people whose special libraries she might wanna work in was she organized a career day and asked each one of those special librarians to come and be a panelist for the students for the career day that she organized. And so that is how she met all of these special librarians that she was interested in out of that career day that she organized, she netted three internships and one job. So this is my way of saying as a student you have this incredibly cool, what I would call the student halo, which means people are willing to say yes to you wherever you're proposing because you're a student and they wanna help. So while you're at the iSchool, there's no reason you couldn't organize a virtual career day with panelists from all of the organizations that you might want to work for or do something similarly creative that allows you to reach out to and meet and get to know and build relationships with people who are of interest to you. I would encourage you also and given the virtual work that all of us have been doing over the past year and a half, I would consider you to look at online opportunities to get to know people as well. First of all, LinkedIn groups is a great way to join a special interest group relative to whatever topic you're interested in and get to reach out directly to the members of those groups. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on LinkedIn today because I will do an entire workshop on LinkedIn in the future. And if you have questions specifically about LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to me and I'm glad to work with you on it or also we have an expert on LinkedIn in Carrie McKnight who works with us through the San Jose Career Center. But at any rate, I'm saying all of this because I don't want you to hyperventilate about, oh my God, I've got to do LinkedIn and I don't know how to do it. Don't worry about it. Facebook also has really cool LIS communities, Twitter the same and then any association that you belong to is likely also to have special interest groups. Two key points about that. The first one is if you join a group, a professional group while you're in the iSchool program which I can't recommend strongly enough, don't just stop with the group. For example, if you are a member of ALA and I know an awful lot of you are, don't be a member of ALA and then sort of ignore it. What you wanna do is to drill down to what are the groups, the divisions, the special interest groups, the sections that are the places that I wanna play. So for example, if you're looking at becoming a public librarian, you can't join PLA unless you're a member of ALA but if you are a student member of ALA, you want to then sign up for PLA or sign up for ACRL, which is another division of ALA, essentially a special interest group for academic libraries. They have federal libraries, they have special libraries, they have all sorts of special interest groups. So if you are in ALA as a student member, go look at what groups, what divisions you wanna join because that's where you'll get the greatest value. One other point about online opportunities to network. 20 years ago, I was involved in a virtual SLA committee that was a disaster as far as a committee. I don't think we ever accomplished what we were trying to do, but the way the committee worked was, we would all get on the phone for a conference call. As you can see, it was very long ago. And I ended up getting to know one of the members of that committee, a young man at that time named David Capoli, who worked at UCLA and worked with UCLA's MLIS program. And David and I struck up an online friendship. We had so much fun sending snarky comments back and forth to each other about what was going on with the committee that when the committee finally wrapped up out of a starting group of 40 people, there were only six of us still on it. Two of us were David and I. Well, David and I connected virtually via email for probably about 10 years and just had a great time checking in back and forth and how are you doing? And then we finally met at a conference, an SLA conference, after all of that time building a friendship online. And to this day, we are very, very close friends, very dear friends. And I realized through that relationship with David how many other professional friendships I have begun through online relationships. So I would strongly recommend don't discount starting connections online. So whether you're going active or organic, which I believe to be complimentary approaches, look for the things that you have in common. Especially look for ways to help each other. And the only way you can do that, and I think this is really important, is if you have genuinely made the effort to get to know that other people, to find out who they are and what they're trying to accomplish. You want to, whenever possible, don't just connect yourself with someone, but if you can connect other people with each other and with other opportunities. One of the really cool things as you go through your career, if you keep building your community of colleagues, is that you end up knowing so many people that just about any time somebody comes to you and says, can you connect me with somebody you know who's doing XYZ or knows something about this, you can usually do that because you have built a very broad and diverse community of colleagues. Earlier this afternoon, I was on the phone with a professional colleague that I have known virtually for 20 years and she was asking me about people I might know who are working in knowledge management. And so we had this very delightful conversation about all the people I could connect her to that might be useful for the client project that she was working on. That's when it gets really fun. It's just so rewarding to do this as you go through your career. And then lastly, this is a really important consideration. You want to start establishing and nurturing these relationships well before you need to reach out to someone and ask them for a favor. So for example, consider me part of your network. You wanna connect with me now well, I'm your student advisor so actually you can ask me anything at any point but say someone else that you've done an informational interview with and sooner or later you know that you'd love to ask them about helping you find a job. Well, it's okay for you to do that after you've had that connection established with them and you've built and sustained a relationship with them. It's not okay for you to reach out for an informational interview, have a great informational interview, send a follow-up thank you and then a week later say, oh by the way, would you hire me? This is a no-no. So you want to lay this groundwork and nurture it and sustain it before you need it as a benefit that you're looking for. All right, so here's the one that I get all the time. I just can't network, I can't build a network because I'm an introvert. Well, you have come to the right place because I am such an introvert that I'm essentially known to everyone I know as a hermit. I am the person who could be told to stay in their house for the next 12 months and think that this was great news, this is like a holiday for me. I am that much of an introvert. Having said that though, I actually enjoy people. What I realized was I don't enjoy lots of people at the same time. And the way I figured out that I can build a network and build relationships is to do what I do well, which is to focus on one-on-one relationships. I'm great in a one-on-one conversation or a one-on-two conversation. One-on-three, I'm starting to stretch, but I'm guessing if you are an introvert, you're wonderful in those kinds of smaller conversations. And so that's what you want to have as your process for building relationships. I would also suggest that you be aware that it's easier for you to network in small doses. For example, if I go to a conference and I'm in a meeting with 20 people and it's a brainstorming session and it goes on for two hours, I need to go away and be by myself for probably eight hours, just because that's how I recharge. So don't feel like you can't do this, figure out how you can, figure out what works for you and takes into consideration that this is your personality and there's nothing wrong with this. Being an introvert in a network or relationship building situation is not a downside, it's not a weakness, it's not an obstacle, it's simply a characteristic that you want to figure out how to use. So it works effectively for you. One of the things I do is I look for other people standing by themselves looking miserable. I know that they're probably feeling exactly like I am and it's easy for me to go up to them and say, so usually I'd rather shoot myself than walk into a room where I don't know anybody. How about you? And usually they go, yeah, me too. And then you're off and running. If you are stumped by figuring out how to open up a conversation, the easiest thing to do is to ask other people questions about themselves, not stupid questions like if you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be? But questions that allow them to tell you enough about themselves that they're essentially giving you hooks that you can respond to. So it's like, where are you from originally? Why are you here at the conference? Or you're in a meeting together, how long have you been a member of the association and what have you gotten out of it that's been most valuable for you? So imagine that they're an introvert as well. You've just given them openings, things that they wouldn't think to sort of volunteer out of the blue. So let me tell you about myself. But if you've asked them questions, you have provided opportunities for them as introverts to connect with you and respond to your questions. As an introvert yourself, that takes you off the hook for an immediate performance. And then you can start responding to what they're saying based on who you are. Another way to network or build relationships if you are an introvert is to volunteer to do something. This is how I made myself go to professional meetings where I was trying to meet more people to expand my business as an independent information entrepreneur, was I knew that I needed to meet more people. And so I thought we'll all go to these network meetings and introduce myself to people. And I spent way too much money paying for luncheons that I never actually did anything at. And so I finally realized the way for me to get to know people is to be on a committee where I'm working with people. Because then I get to know them in a very natural way in the same way you would get to know a colleague at work. And so that takes all of the intimidation factor away. Lastly, it works for me to build relationships online because it gives me the time I need to reflect before I respond to questions. And that seems to be helpful for those of us who are introverts. All right, so now we're gonna very quickly go through some tips for how do you max out your student status or your student halo while you can. Okay, first thing, get to know your professors and advisors. That means you want them to know who you are, know what you want to achieve when you start your career, know what your goals are because they can become advocates for you. If you're just another student in your class, they can't help you, they don't know enough about you. So get to know your professors and advisors and let them know who you are. Get to really know your fellow students. And I know that we all hate group projects, but they're a great opportunity for you to ask them questions and group discussions are the same thing. Find out what they do, find out where they work or where they worked, find out what they're passionate about because if you get to know this information, then you can find out how you can help each other. What I would encourage you to keep in mind is all of your fellow students, everyone that's on this workshop with us this evening could be future colleagues of yours. So you want to be wonderful to each other and you wanna know how you can help each other succeed. You want to join professional associations in your areas of interest. One, because the iSchool pays, I think for at least one year of this and two, because you have access to their membership lists. Thus, the membership lists of all these organizations will tell you who you want to get to know, who you want to reach out to and who you would like to build relationships with. You wanna participate in your student associations. The one I know the best in the iSchool is the SLA student chapter because I was the student chapter liaison for SLA for a number of years. And I will tell you that the SLA student chapter is, how would I say this? Well, you're recognized as the best in the country. And I'm guessing that the other student chapters at the iSchool are probably as outstanding. But I'm putting in parentheses as you can there because I'm gonna be throwing a whole bunch of action items at you today. I don't want you to think that I am assuming that you currently have the bandwidth to do all of these things. So I wanna be realistic and say, choose for you what you can fit in, what's in your bandwidth. Same thing for informational interviews. I would tell you to stretch out your program length as long as you can in order to fit in as many informational interviews as you can because they are so valuable to you in terms of building your professional relationships. But again, same point, your mental health and your class assignments come first. One of the things that you wanna be paying attention to is what you already have to do in the program that actually turns out to be a target-rich environment for building really terrific professional relationships. Internships are one of those target-rich environments. When you have an internship, you don't wanna just go and show up and have nobody know your name and just do a little bit of work in the corner. You wanna look for every opportunity you can to introduce yourself to people, to express interest in what they do, to learn about the organization, to within the boundaries that are appropriate to your field mentor, to volunteer to do other activities if that works. If you can do internships, they will be golden for you. Whenever possible, multipurpose your class assignments, use them as opportunities to reach out to people for an interview, for a quote, for an insight, for an opinion. I would do that as often as you possibly can because it allows you to establish a relationship with the person that you are reaching out to. And a point there, if you don't get any assignments that lend themselves to this, make up some and then write a paper on it. Have business cards made up. Here's the important reason for this. When you are building a professional network, you want to capture every relationship that you possibly can. And so that means that when you've met someone, you wanna make sure if you can, they have every opportunity to remember who you are. So having business cards made up is a no-brainer for you. This shows what the front of your card might look like. On the back of your card, you might have a tagline that says something like, I can't wait to start working with healthcare information. Or I am really looking forward to a career as a taxonomist or whatever you might wanna say, that starts sort of getting your visibility out there. And reminds that person with whom you've just established a relationship, who you are and what you're about. Practice introducing yourself. Okay, so now we're all gonna freak out here because this is what makes all of us crazy. But you don't have to have an elevator speech. All you have to do is be able to introduce yourself very conversationally and very briefly. And all you're needing to do, similar to giving that other person an opportunity or an opening to start talking to you, all you have to do is say who you are, that you're part of the grad school program at San Jose, and you can't wait to graduate whenever and land a job in whatever. You've just told that person everything they need to know in order to start talking to you more about who you are. But so that in case they're not responding and you clearly don't wanna have to carry the whole conversation yourself, you can just say, tell me what you do. Tell me what's going on with you at the conference. Tell me whatever. All you have to do is have that first sentence and then tell me something. And then you're off the hook. And then they can start talking and you can start asking them more questions. All right, so quickly networking etiquette. And this is the difference between the building a networking part, building a network part and networking or asking for a favor from people. Regardless of what, when you've asked for a favor, you've reached out to someone and said, can we do an informational interview? Or would you connect with me on LinkedIn? Or would you introduce me to Jo Do? Or could I ask you for a reference for whatever? Once you've reached out to someone in your professional community and you've requested something, you're going to conclude or wrap up whatever your request is with, I know that you are really busy and this may not work for you. So I just wanted to thank you in advance for your consideration of my request. That's your way of acknowledging, I know you're busy or you may not wanna do this. That sort of lets them off the hook. I would follow up very politely in a couple of weeks if they still haven't responded to your request and just say, I know how things fall through the cracks for me. So just in case I thought I'd follow up. If they don't follow up or respond to you, that's it, drop it after that. But if they do follow up with you and do whatever it is you've asked them to do, you always, always, always send a thank you note. And if you wanna really dazzle people and have them remember you forever, you can send them a handwritten note. In addition, it is always imperative that if you have asked someone to do something for you and it involves something they've set up for you, an opportunity or an action, you always, always do whatever it is that they've set up for you and then you always let them know what the outcome was of the favor that you requested from them. When you're asking for favor, you always offer to reciprocate for them or I always say also someone you care about because it's possible that they don't need anything from me but maybe their son-in-law could really help benefit from someone looking at their resume. In that case, I'm more than happy to do it because it's sort of like whatever goes around, comes around, it's a karma thing. Again, if you reach out and they don't respond, don't pursue it after two times. And then value people's time especially if it's someone at a very high level because if they're at a very high level, they're probably really busy and so it will be hard for them to respond and you need to recognize that and acknowledge that and say, I realized how busy you must be and I appreciate you even taking the time to consider it. All right, so networking when it's awkward, here's the big one. Oh my gosh, I haven't talked to this person in five years but they work at the company where I want a job and I really want to reconnect with them. What do I do? You first acknowledge that there has been a lapse in time and I just say something like, oh my gosh, I can't believe it's been five years. I am so sorry to have lost touch because I really enjoyed the time that we spent where we were more in touch. If you can say I've been out of the country for five years or I've been in jail for five years or whatever but you don't really need to give a reason for the lapse unless you have a great one. Like I was working at a library of Congress doing all of their archives. You want to mention that you hope they've been doing well and then you want to explain and you just want to come out and say it. In another couple of sentences, why you're contacting them, be honest with what you need and why you need it because then that lets them know how they can help you. And then again, you want to be sure that you indicate your interest in helping them in return. That piece is critical. All right, key takeaways. You want to build a sustainable network that involves genuine relationships where you are truly trying to benefit each other. Golden rule of networking, don't keep score. Don't say I've done two things for you so I'm not going to do anything else for you until you do two things for me. It doesn't work that way. What goes around comes around. I would say always just trust Garmin. Always be aware of the potential for new opportunities to create connections and build relationships and act on them. Don't think, oh, that was a cool guest speaker. I probably should really reach out to them. Do it, reach out to them if you possibly can. And then realize that you are never going to know when a relationship that you've built 20 years ago is going to provide a key career opportunity for you 20 weeks from today. My whole career has been based on this kind of karma of things dropping in my lap that I never could have anticipated because of relationships that I built a week ago or a year ago or 10 years ago. So with that said, I am opening it up to chat and okay, first of all, yes to Gabriel. Please reach out to Gabriel for those connections. So okay, so I'm gonna start going top to bottom here. Okay. And hi Kelly as well from me. Hi Chris. Sounds like you guys had a great social hour. Yes, I am interpreted. I enjoy working with people. I enjoy working with students. I enjoy getting to know individuals but I am not great at big crowds of people. I'm not that kind of an extrovert. And yes, you do need to go to the next library 2.0. They're amazing and wonderful. Okay, and there's Gabriel. Okay, yes, so I'm telling all of you to reach out to Gabriel about ALA and SLA. All right, so if you guys have questions, shoot them off to me now in the chat box. And I am, well, I'm happy to just hang out while you shoot any questions off. Or if you can't think of questions or you really wanna go watch the Giants baseball game or you have to rush off to work on your e-portfolio or whatever and you think of questions down the road. Just send me an email and I'm happy to respond to you in that case. Okay, so Julie is asking how do we find out about 2.0 to register? All right, so I'm going to throw that out to the rest of the participants because I'm guessing you guys know better than I do. Hi, Kim, I'm gonna get the live, it's hard. It's hard to type everything, but yeah. So library 2.0, they've been going on now for 10 years. I was lucky enough to be involved. I volunteered to moderate sessions. It's a great way to get to know faculty, as Kim said. And it's easy, just Google library 2.0. Sign up to be a member. Then you get information on the webinars and membership is free. And they are having one, I think I put in there. I think it's June 17th, but it's really nice because they're only three hours long and they've always been virtual. And you can network, I work as the event coordinator for the ALA student chapter. And when I was thinking about people we could invite as speakers, I remembered this wonderful session that I moderated with Tina McPherson. And I invited her, she had a wonderful presentation on building community resilience and diversity inclusion initiatives. So that was a spot on topic for now. And I was able to reach out to her. She was excited. We had the events, it went really well. And she also turns out she lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. That's where my in-laws live. And potentially someday I may, but then I'll be visiting her in Richmond. All right, Kelly just gave you a perfect example of how networking works and how unanticipated opportunities can turn into these incredibly rich relationships that then lead into all of these other avenues that you never would have even considered. So thank you, Kelly, that was wonderful. Other questions. And by the way, I'm gonna respond to Chris's question. Chris's question was, he's graduating in August. Is it still worth getting involved in student groups? And I would say, yes. I would say, if you have the time, take every opportunity you can to get involved in the student groups. And by the way, I need to point out that you all, and this goes for Chris as well. You want to renew your association memberships the day before you graduate because you're still a student and you can still renew at the student membership rate. Other questions. All right, so I will let you guys go for today. Give me a shout if you have any questions that I can help with. And in the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and good luck in the program. Take care.