 Hello, this is Kim Doherty, and I'm the iSchool student and alumni career coach. And we are going to be talking about something that's very important for your career opportunities immediately and sort of down the road. And that is how to go about building a community of colleagues while you're in grad school. This is also known as building a network, but networking and having a network has such a sort of negative mental image, I would say, that I want to clarify that what a network is really about is relationships that you have with people who you are going to share parts of your career with. So what exactly is a professional network? That is you in the middle, that is all of your colleagues that you are going to be building relationships with as you go through your career. I would define a network as your community of personal and professional relationships. And these are the ones that you build and nurture over the lifetime of your career. So think of it as starting with a small community or a small family of people who are important to you, that you share an interest with or experience. And then it keeps growing and growing and growing as your career and your experiences grow as well. But the really important thing here from my perspective is that having a network and networking, i.e. connecting for various reasons with those individuals in your network is not about using people. Instead, the way it really works is it's about how to find ways to help each other. And the cool thing is that the further you go in your career, the more opportunities you will find to be able to do that, and it gets incredibly rewarding. So now that I have convinced you that you really do want to have your very own community of colleagues, why are reasons, other reasons, more probably I would call them strategic career reasons for why you need to have one? Here's why. This is sort of at the bottom line here is that as you may have heard throughout your entire lifetime, what you know is important, but who you know is more important. And I would sort of translate that to who you know is equally important. The reason this is becoming a more and more critical issue is that at least 70% of jobs are now coming through personal connections. So that when a company or a library or any kind of an organization is going to post a job or fill a job opening, they will usually go internally first and say, does anyone have someone they could recommend for this position? So the more people who know you, the more people there are who could recommend you for those positions. And what that translates into is that a broad and deep community of colleagues continues to provide you with a competitive edge throughout your entire career. And I'm told it's true whether you are looking at academic librarianship or public librarianship or working for non-library organizations who you know and who knows you is going to be increasingly important for opening up career opportunities for you. So in case I still haven't convinced you, here are some other benefits of this. Your network can help you explore careers very often, not very often. Many times people will reach out to me and say, Kim, I know that you've done this weird thing in your career. If you have a friend who's thinking about doing that, would you be willing to talk to them about what you think the pros and cons are or what you think they'd like or not like about it? It can help you with employer research. One of the cool things with LinkedIn, and we're not really going to do LinkedIn tonight, but just to mention it, is that you can see through your connections on LinkedIn who may be working for an employer that you're interested in potentially working for as well. What can do company research through your network, through your community of colleagues, through all of these relationships that you have built up? And if there's no one in your community who has experience in that company, very often they can say, I don't know, you know, I don't know anything about them, but I have a friend who used to work for them. So let me connect you with that person. Firstly, they can help you with job searching. They can help you with expertise and experience. One of the things that I have learned to do throughout my career is that when a potential client has asked me if I would be willing to take on some type of challenge that I have actually never done before, and several times no one had ever done before. I was always willing to say yes, and have always been willing to say yes, because I know that within my community of colleagues, the requisite expertise exists, and because we help each other mutually, I can always reach out to one of those people and say, okay, I just did a really incredibly stupid thing. I said, yes, I can do this project, and I kind of have no clue to start. Can you help me brainstorm this a little bit? So the availability of expertise and experience within your community of colleagues expands and extends exponentially the kinds of opportunities that you can step into and perform and contribute within. Another area where your community can be incredibly valuable for you is vendor and product recommendations. And oftentimes, that's as much about, oh my gosh, don't, you know, don't go with that service as we license this product, and it's been incredible and the students love it, and their customer service is terrific. You get the real inside information about what it's really like to use a certain product or a certain vendor when there are people in your community, as there usually will be, who have direct experience. Your community is also great for brainstorming. Say you're considering a career change, or you have been offered a promotion, or you're going to possibly pivot in a new direction with your information skills. All of those things can be challenging to think about from lots of different directions, which is absolutely what you want to do when you're making those kinds of major career decisions. When you have a group of people whose judgment you trust, and who know you, i.e. your community of colleagues, then you have people that you can run ideas by. You can ask for their honest opinion, do you think I, this will be a fit for me. Do you think the kind of strengths that they're asking for in this job really are the kind of strengths I have, or do I have a different set of strengths that would be better applied in a different direction. It's a great way to to get a reality check about I'm thinking this, and of course any idea that I have probably is brilliant and so I should do this. When you have colleagues with whom you have built relationships, and they know that you want the truth from them, they are much likely to give you the reality check that you need than someone who doesn't know you very well. So those are examples of how my own personal community of colleagues has been incredibly beneficial to me and I think your network or your community would be to you as well. So now let's think about, okay, I've convinced you that this is something you want to do, how do you actually go about establishing these relationships and nurturing them and sustaining them. And I kind of think of it as two different ways. The first way is actively going out and creating these relationships. And the other one is organically having them happen on their own almost. But you make the effort to sort of capture that moment to capture that relationship and make sure that you maintain and sustain it. So if we we thought about how those two things would look. Active network building is where you are making an effort to seek out contacts, it can be seeking out contacts with specific individuals, or within a certain discipline of expertise, or in a certain geographic region, but you're you're making the effort to reach out to a whole bunch of people and say essentially I would like to get to know you better. Can we chat can we go out for a cup of coffee. So some of the ways that you end up doing that you can go to any kind of group meeting so it could be a community group. It could be a professional association. It could be your homeowners association, anywhere where people are great are coming together, and you have an opportunity to introduce yourself purposely saying, Hello, I'd like to meet you. This is who I am, and I'd love to know more about you. So that's active network building. And that's, that's an especially easy and comfortable way, or people who are extroverts to build their community of colleagues. Organic network building is more sort of gathering contacts, as they wander through, or as things that have have happened in your life have ended up putting you in contact with someone who you then think, Whoa, I really enjoy this individual. I think they have interesting ideas. I think their, their activities are really fascinating. I'd like to get to know them better. So it's people that you naturally come into contact with through professional or personal activities. And maybe you just sort of exchange stories and maybe you both whip out business cards and say well let's stay in touch maybe you know let's go grab coffee one of these days this was really fun chatting with you. The easiest way to think about approaching though organic network building is by starting with the people you already have in your life. When you think about a community of colleagues. It's not just people in the information professional in the library world in the archives community. The more people you have from lots of different walks of life from lots of different discipline communities from lots of different aspects of what interests you in your life. The broader your network is, and actually quite frankly the more rewarding it is. So that could be family and friends that could be your coworkers and your bosses, if you like them past and present. It could be vendors that you work with on the job. Fellow members of your community and social groups, people you have volunteered with and you will probably find over the course of your career. It's the people that you volunteer with that you end up having the deepest longest term relationships with, and you end up becoming extremely good friends. And at some point in your career, you are only going to conferences so that you can hang out with your buddies that you have known all of these years pitch for volunteering in associations. It could be surprisingly because most people don't think of this. It could be parents of your kids friends. So, if you have parents that you stand on the slide sidelines at a soccer game with get to know them get to know what interests them get to know who they are. What is their background, what do they do. The reason I raised this point is that I have had several projects come to me through people who did not know me through the information universe. They knew me as the only person they had ever met who know how to do research and find answers to stuff. So, from a completely different community of connection, I ended up with projects coming into me as a content developer. So, when you think of your network, go broad, go deep and and just include people that you want to nurture relationships with. You don't have to look at them think oh that person's really going to do me a lot of a good. It's just better to say that person's really interesting to me, and I like them well enough that I would want to help them succeed as well. Those are the kinds of people that you are looking for. Also, while you're in grad school, and I'll go into this more deeply, but don't forget about alumni. One of the things you will see on the website for the iSchool is a whole bunch of really cool alumni profiles. These people can be wonderful, wonderful networking contacts. So, they're another option for you and they're really easy for you to reach out to. All right, so I think I have skipped ahead. A slide here so let me go back here. All right. So, as you're, you're also thinking about people who you've already connected with people that you might have done an informational interview with say before you started grad school. Maybe you were thinking about starting the program, and you weren't sure so you went and talked to a couple local librarians or a couple local archivists, or other people who could help you with insight about whether or not it made sense for you to get your MLIS. Those people can be relationships that are part of your network. If you've done any internships or done job shadows, again, you've already established those relationships. It's just a matter of maintaining them, staying in touch with those people. Not a whole lot if it doesn't make sense, but maybe once a quarter just dropping them a note and saying just wanted to catch up and say hi and check in and see how you're doing. Let's go grab a cup of coffee, you know, if that makes sense with how crazy our schedules are right now. You may be already a member of a professional association. Those fellow members who have gotten to know you are people who would be great to have in your community of colleagues because you already know that you have shared interests and shared interests are one of the things that make these relationships. So much fun and so interesting and so valuable as you continue to grow in your career. Or maybe you've been in grad school for a while and you were the brilliant person who organized a virtual career day. Again, all of those people that you met while doing that organizing piece. Those are all people who now can be considered part of your network. So again, you follow up, you stay in touch. Just a story here. When I was teaching a course in alternative LIS career paths. I had one student who really, really wanted to be a special librarian. And she had identified the eight organizations and special librarians that she would wanted to pitch an internship with. So she organized a virtual special library career day specifically so that she could invite all eight of those special librarians. And get to meet them and talk to them and take them out to lunch and then follow up with them. And then she actually pitched internships with them. And she had out of out of her eight pitches. She had six internship opportunities. So, again, when you're thinking about building these relationships and creating these relationships, get creative and have fun with it. It's not, it's not something that you want to feel is an onerous part of building your career. Instead, it should be a fun part because it's the people part and just the people that you like that you want to hang out with and want to get to know better. Alright, so whether you are active or organic in terms of your building your network. Remember to look for what it is that you have in common and and that may not come out right away. That may be that you guys chat with each other for a while. And then one of you says something and the other one says, oh my gosh, you know, I love that kind of music as well. Or that's where I grew up to, or, oh my gosh, you know, I took that class to and I hated every second of it, or I loved everything about it. So you what you're looking for when you are establishing a relationship with someone is what you have in common that's sort of what the basis is for where you how you go forward. But the other thing, the other reason you're looking for more information about that person is that it helps you identify ways that you might be able to help. And that is the core of having a community of colleagues. It's not just ways that they can help you. It's ways that you can help them or help someone who is close to them. One really, really valuable way to do that is to connect them with others who you know will be able to help them, or you know will be able to open up an opportunity or share knowledge or whatever. Being able to connect people who can help each other where you're sort of the connecting point in the hub is an incredibly rewarding thing. And the longer you work, the longer your career and the more broadly you build your community of colleagues, the more opportunities you will have to do that. And then lastly, I think there was a book called build your bridge. No, dig your well before you you need it or something like that. But the main concept is build and nurture these relationships well before you think you might need to ask for help. It is as someone who has had this happen to me a number of times, it's really kind of offensive when somebody reaches out to me and says hi my name is Joe Doe and I'd like to connect with you and oh by the way could you do X, Y and Z for me. They haven't put in the time for me to get be able to get to know them, or to feel sufficiently positive about that I would be willing to help them quite frankly. So you want to have nurtured that relationship to at least some degree before you make an ask before you ask for help. All right, this was the slide that I was looking for, because this is is one that I get hit with a lot of times when I talk about building a network, which is yeah that sounds really good Kim but yeah I couldn't do that. I'm an introvert. Well, that doesn't cut it because I'm an introvert I can dirty and an introvert, and it doesn't sound like it when I'm talking to you on a web webinar like this, or when I'm talking to you in a zoom call or a telephone call about your career issues. One on one I'm great, but you put me in a room full of people, and it's just a matter of how many minutes I can stand to stand there against the wall, before I run out the side door and hope nobody saw me. So, one of the things that I had to learn to do in order to quite frankly have the kind of career I wanted to have as an independent information professional was figure out. Okay, so this whole networking thing where you go in and introduce yourself to people does not seem to be working for me. I don't want to tell you how much money I spent on networking lunches that I went to stood against the wall and then backed out of as quickly as possible, because I just couldn't get myself to walk up to a stranger and say hi I'm Kim dirty. So here's what I learned how to do. And I would call this the introverts guide to networking or building up your relationships. First of all, focus on one on one or small group opportunities, if you can. So if I'm thrown if there are three people and I'm thrown into a group of three people. I'm a small enough group that I can talk, I can listen, I can ask questions, and I'm still pretty comfortable one on one. Good to go. I, I'm comfortable with that. Get get over four people and I start to get twitchy, but I would encourage you to think about branching out into small group opportunities if possible. The next thing I did was to volunteer with groups where I wanted to get to meet people. Because what I realized is, if you volunteer, everyone is so ecstatic that you are volunteering that all of a sudden everybody knows who you are so when I joined a professional group here in Colorado. The first thing I did was send an email to everyone on the board and say, hi, I just joined the organization. And these are my skills. These are the things that I can do. I would love to volunteer my skills. Is there any one of you or any committees that could use what I'm able to do. And all of a sudden then people know what I do. They know what my strengths are. And then you're on a committee where you're working with people and you're getting to know them through your shared activities. And that's the easiest way in the world to get to know someone is by sharing an experience or a project or a goal in common that you're working toward. Every once in a while, when I'm at an ALA conference or a PLA conference or some other conference, I'm trying to challenge myself to actually actively network. And I will go to, you know, some event that some group is putting on and walk in and try to think how, how do I do this how would I actually go up and introduce myself and I finally realized, I look for the other person who's standing against the wall. I like a woman start talking to them and just say, man, I'm a total introvert I find these kinds of activities completely unnerving. How about you, or, you know, where are you from or do you have something you have to be doing here, or whatever. But by starting off saying, we may have a shared connection, ie, these kinds of activities are a challenge for us. It breaks the ice. And it lets the other person not be embarrassed and be able to say, Oh, yeah, I'm an introvert to and, and, you know, I'm still trying to work up my courage to say hello to someone. So that's another thing that I started doing. The last thing that I realized was amazing for building a community of colleagues is networking online. So I'll go into that in a little bit more detailed. But here is an example of an unanticipated consequence that sort of speaks to what can happen when you network online. I was asked to give a presentation at an SLA conference about networking and social media. And at the time I had a new look, excuse me, careers and social media career development social media. I knew lots about career development. I knew literally nothing about social media. I didn't like it. I didn't want to play. I had too much other stuff. I was writing a book. But I thought, okay, this is not going to go well. If I try to talk about this and I have no clue what I'm talking about. So I decided, okay, I will look at all these social media platforms and activities. I'll choose the one that has the smallest learning curve and the least amount of ongoing maintenance. And that's the one I'll choose. So I looked at all of them and I thought it's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is what I would call a super, super high leverage social media platform for a little bit of work you get a huge amount of payoff. And we won't go into that. I will be doing a LinkedIn presentation and we'll deeper dive into that. But because I realized that about LinkedIn, I set up a profile on LinkedIn. And then because I was writing a book about LIS career options, I thought, well, this is cool. I'll start a group, which you can do on LinkedIn for people who are interested in LIS career options. And maybe I'll get like 35 members. And that would be a wonderful focus group as I'm writing this book. That group that I started LIS career options on LinkedIn now has just short of 16,000 members on it from 80 different countries. And people post job openings and they post job questions and job answers and all sorts of things. It's just taken off with a life of its own actually. But that means that I have this incredible community of people whose profiles I can see that I can reach out to. So do not underestimate how incredibly valuable social media platforms can be when you are looking for your peeps, looking for the people who share your interests and your passions in the world. All right. So now we're going to talk about how to max out your student status while you're in grad school, while you're in the high school, because while you're in school, you have this thing that I call a student halo around you. And that means that because you are a student, almost anyone will talk to you who's a practitioner. So anyone who has any job that you look at and think, Oh my gosh, I'd kill to have that job. You can send them an email and say, Hi, I'm a grad student in the San Jose State iSchool program. I wondered if I could interview you for paper and working on or do an informational interview with you about your career so far or your career advice for a student or those kinds of things. You have lots of legitimate reasons to contact people while you're a grad student and people in the profession and this is unique to our profession. So you want to really take advantage of it. Our people tend to want to help students succeed. And they tend to be willing to give you lots of advice that is very useful and actionable. So I would say that to the extent that you can realizing that yes, you are crazed you're taking classes you're probably working part time you probably have kids at home. I realize that you know this may be asking you to do the impossible, but think about it more opportunistically use these tips when you can think about while you're in school, who can you easily add to your network. So, I would recommend that you sort of actively work to establish and maintain relationships with at the least these people. Any guest speakers, faculty and advisors and administrators that you build a rapport with my first job out of grad school came because a publisher. I contacted the graduate program I was in and asked for someone who knew writing and editing and research and publishing. And because I knew the administration people and they knew I had that background, they recommended me, and that's how I got that job. So never underestimate how incredibly valuable advisors and administrators and faculty can be for you. They can give you for assignments assignments aren't like the coolest excuse in the universe to reach out to someone and say, please give me your feedback your insights your ideas about this topic. It may not feel like it right now. But trust me when I tell you that some of your classmates are going to end up being your colleagues. And even better, they may be people who are going to be recommending you for jobs that they hear about in their library systems. So, all of these people that are sort of in your surround as you're going through the ice school are people that you can just sort of incidentally build good relationships with. That means be nice. So, in a little bit more detail, get to know your professors and your advisors. So let them know who you are. Let them know why you're in grad school. Let them know what your goals are. Because the more they know about you and the better they know you, the more confident they can feel when somebody reaches out to them and says, we're looking for someone you feel could fit this kind of a job opportunity. I get lots of outreach like that, asking me if I can recommend someone who could take this job or that job. In my case, that's because I've been in this profession for so long. But in your case, that's why you want to build ongoing relationships with the professors that you like. And that, you know, like you and the advisors that you work with, because the more they know about you, the better position they are to advocate for you. Introduce yourself to the career resource person. That would be me. I'm going to be your advisors as soon as you start your grad school program, or as early on as possible. And with me, it would just be sending me an email saying, Hi, Kim, I'm Jane, and I'm going to the program. And this is why I started and I don't have any questions just yet, but I'm just reaching out to let you know I look forward to working with you and whatever. Same thing with your advisor or advisors. These are the people who are going to be coaching you academically as you go through the program. Again, you want them to get to know you. You want them to know what your goals are. They can be incredible advocates for you. Also, find out what connections they can set up for you. If you're looking for a mentor in a specific field, can they make them make a recommendation for you? Can they come up with contacts for information interviews? Or can they write you a letter of recommendation for an internship application? Can they come up with people, practitioners who are willing to let you be a job shadow volunteer for them? One of the incredibly terrific things about San Jose's iSchool program is that we have a lot of faculty, adjunct faculty, who are practitioners who have tons of connections throughout the profession, literally throughout the country. So when you think about why you went to the iSchool program, you may not have had this at the top of your list, but when I look at the iSchool program as someone who's had a long career, I can look at that and think, whoa, I would have killed to have had all of these practitioners teaching me the courses that I was taking because they know what's going on, they know what current practices are, and they are connected to people who can potentially provide career opportunities for me. And sort of as a further point, your adjunct faculty members are not working there because they're getting paid a lot of money. They are working there because they love working with you. They love teaching you. So I would say when you think of your faculty, when you think of your advisors, when you think of the work that I'm doing, we want to advocate for you if we can. So help us help you. Another point is to really get to know your fellow students. You're sort of going to be in survival mode together. As you go through your program, there is no way around it, going through a grad program, especially trying to combine it with other things going on in your life, is no easy adventure. You guys are working hard, but you are also working with other people that you're seeing work equally hard. So out of all of those group projects, out of all these courses that you're taking, you're going to come across some people that you think, I love working with them. I love their sense of humor. I'm interested in the same things they're interested in, or they're interested in something absolutely different, but their values fascinate me, and so I want to know more about what they're doing. The more you know about fellow students that you respond to, I'll say, the more you can figure out how to help each other. Actually, I saw that happen several years ago with two San Jose State students who basically helped each other get jobs in different states. It's kind of, you never know when there is going to be a benefit or what that benefit might be, or alternatively, when you can help someone, or how you will be able to help them. But the more you know about each other, the more opportunities you will see open up to connect that way. Really, really important, hugely important. While you're in the iSchool program, the iSchool will pay for a professional association in one of these disciplines, and I can't remember exactly which ones they are. But even if you're interested in a professional information association that's not on the iSchool roster, go ahead and join because as a student, your membership is just ridiculously discounted. It's embarrassing. So, if I'd known better when I was going through grad school, I would have joined every single association I possibly could. Because what happens is that once you join an association for these steeply discounted student fee, you have access to the membership directory. And when you have access to the membership directory, you can go through and you can see who are all of the special library association members in California, or in this chapter, or in that chapter. Or are there any medical library association events coming up that I might be able to go to with a student stipend if I apply for it. These associations work hard to recruit students and to support students. And so you want to take advantage of that being highly appreciative, of course, for the opportunity as much as you can. One of the easiest ways to do this in terms of networking is to see if they have a local group, a local chapter that you can join and become active in. And when I say become active, it can be something like staffing the check-in desk for the monthly meetings. You don't have to be the programming chair, but you do want to get visible with the local people who are going to know where the jobs are or you are going to be looking for openings. Oh, and then also, by the way, you want to renew your membership the day before you graduate because you can renew it at your student rate. You also want to consider online opportunities. I mentioned this before in terms of stealth networking for introverts. But one of the cool things here is that it's a great way to virtually connect with lots of like-minded people in sort of social media communities. So for example, LinkedIn groups like I was talking about. Facebook has wonderful professional groups. The librarians, the library community and librarians have created wonderful resources that you can just go in and search for to see what's available. Same thing with Twitter. A lot of librarians share connections, share information, share resources on Twitter. And then there are just special interest groups online and meetup groups and those kinds of things. What you're looking for is what group could I comfortably become part of where there's a common interest. Where these people are interested in community health services as well or health informatics or data analytics or whatever. You want to see where the online communities are that share your interests. As a student, you will be welcomed into those groups, which is of course what you would like to have happen. So what you're hoping for is to be able to build a comfortable, familiar bridge into a community of people who share your interests and then to the individuals within those communities. Okay, next point. As a student again, do as many informational interviews as you can fit in. And here's why. If you reach out to someone who's a practitioner and you say, hi, I am a grad student in the high school at San Jose State. And I'm wondering if you would be willing to let me interview you for an informational interview about your career and your, your career advice, or about the kind of work that you do, or about what you see as the emerging trends in this discipline or any number of questions. Once you have said, I'm a student. Almost everyone will say, sure. They may say, I can only, you know, do this via email or let's set up a 20 minute zoom call. Or yell meet you at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. And by the way, in that case, you are always the one who's paying for the coffee. Those kinds of things. When you do that, two things have happened. The first one is assuming that you are incredibly well prepared for this conversation. And you ask really intelligent questions. You listen, you're appreciative. You are respectful. You have demonstrated how professional your demeanor is. You have just made a connection with someone who's going to think of you as not a student, but a professional in training who might be one of their colleagues at some point and they're going to be interested in you because quite frankly, you've made a good impression on them. But also, when you've had that kind of a conversation, that's your opportunity then to capture that relationship that got that was established, created in that discussion, capture it and keep it as part of your professional network. So that's the person that you would send a follow up thank you note to a written note or an email. That's the person that you would reach out to maybe once every three or four or five months just saying, checking in. Something happened today and it reminded me of your great advice in that conversation and that was, I just wanted you to know how helpful that was. Just moments of appreciation or sharing a resource or doing anything you can to keep that relationship alive, but doing it in a way that benefits the individual that you are connecting with. So, while you're in grad school, you can be reaching out to, for example, guest speakers who have done a presentation in your course. And then the association members as we just mentioned, even people you have read about, if you've read about, if you've read an interview about someone in library journal, or you've read something about a marketing program at the who hop public library in in some publication, or you came across it in your class. You can reach out to those people and just say exactly. I'm a student in the high school program. And I read about X, Y, Z, and I was so taken with that I would love to learn more if you might have the time to have a conversation with me. So, alumni or LinkedIn members or any of the community members in those groups that we just mentioned, all of those people can be, I don't want to say targets. They can be. How would I put this appropriate professional resources for you to reach out to when you are in this process of building your colleague community, while you are a student. And again, people are much, much more willing to generously give up their time and their expertise when you're within that student halo, then after you graduate. If you can consider an internship or volunteer opportunity. Again, I say this within, within knowing that your schedules are totally crazed. But you can also do these after you graduate. If you can work either of these in or both their target rich environments for building new relationships with people. And they're the, they're especially important because these are people with whom you are working, and they see how professional, how reliable, how responsible, how smart you are, how hard working you are. And so they're people who would be very willing to provide recommendations, referrals, introductions to job opportunities, career advice, all of those kinds of things. So again, it's another way of expanding that community of people who know you and really want to help you succeed. Really, really important. Never. Let me reiterate that, never. There's an opportunity to build a connection with a guest speaker, because these are people who love students so much that they're just going to show up and give you a presentation about their area of expertise. So, if you're even remotely interested in what their area of expertise is, you want to ask thoughtful questions at the end of the presentation, or whenever that person is taking student questions. You want to introduce yourself virtually afterwards just as a follow up if that's possible to do given the format that you are using the platform. And then most importantly, you want to follow up with an emailed thank you to that person for taking time to address the class. And you might say one or two things that especially resonated with you, or that you had never been exposed to that idea before, and it really sparked your interest, or whatever, just something that says, I was paying attention. And here's what I really, really appreciated. And then I would recommend that you follow up after that after you've sent that thank you with a request through LinkedIn to connect. And so you are LinkedIn connections then. Here's my favorite one. I always encourage my students to double down on their assignments. So if I give a student an assignment to do XYZ, do a research report on this, find the best resources on that, do a presentation on XYZ. What I encourage them to do is whenever possible to focus their assignments in such a way that they can either learn more about a topic that is sort of in their sweet spot, or they can use it as a reason to reach out to people that they'd like to build connections with. And I always tell them, you know, if you're going to use it as a reason to reach out to people, I'll back your play and someone reaches out and says, you know, we got this weird email from a student who says they're doing an assignment for your course. I will always say yes. And, you know, part of that is them interviewing practitioners. It's a great way to have essentially an excuse to connect with people to reach out to them. And then if you've done that, you want to follow up with them and say, I really appreciated you taking the time to help me out with your insights and your feedback that really made my paper deeper and richer. And quite frankly, then, if you don't have any assignments that sort of facilitate this opportunity, there is absolutely no reason that you can't make up your own assignment and say, I'm doing this research while I'm in grad school because I want to learn more about this topic. And I would love to interview you. And I may end up writing an article about this, or doing a presentation at the State Library Association conference. So, so you don't have to wait to have an assignment if you can see someplace, you want to make a connection. Even though you are a student, you are also professionals in training. You always want to have a business card at the ready that has this kind of information on it. And here's the reason why. You never know when an opportunity is going to stumble across your radar that you had no idea might make itself known, and you don't want to lose it. So you always want to have something you can give to someone who says, how do I stay in touch with you? Or do you have a card that I could give to my boss because I think you might, she might want to talk to you about this job. You'll never have your resume with you in a situation like this, but you always want to have business cards. You can get them very cheaply, like $25 for 500, and make them up online at vistaprint.com or mood.com. And this, as you'll see in this business card, this is the kind of information that you would have on it. If you know that you are absolutely looking for a specific kind of job, I'm looking at data analysis. I'm looking at digital preservation. I'm looking at digital humanities. On the backside of your business card, you could put a tagline that says, passionate about data analysis, passionate about community impact, passionate about whatever, if you know that that's what you want to have associated with you. And the good thing is, if you change your mind, you can always get new business cards because they're so ridiculously cheap. I would also encourage you to work up what is commonly known as an elevator speech, which will, generally speaking, cause people to run screaming from the elevator. But work up an introduction that you're comfortable using in a conversational manner. So I've written down sort of the basic elements, but what I would want you to do is personalize it. So when somebody says, what are you doing at the conference, then you can answer, oh, I'm actually a student at Santa's, a state in the high school program, and I'm going to graduate and so on. So I'm really, really interested to see what they've got on healthcare sort of openings or jobs or resources or whatever here, because when I graduate, that's a field I'm most interested in pursuing. So what are you doing here? This works like gold if you're an introvert, because you only have to say a few things and then you can throw it over to the other person and make them talk. The thing you don't want to do is sort of bludgeon someone with your rote elevator speech and then you're done. What you want to do is basically provide an opening, an opportunity to connect and then start looking for what do we have in common. That's what's going to form the basis of the relationship going forward. So what you're looking for is not so much, let me tell you everything I ever wanted anyone to know about me as tell me about yourself. Tell me what you're doing here, where you're from, anything you can think of that just gets a conversation going. And after that, it just takes off of its own volition. Sort of along the lines of the business card. I would recommend that because you're going to be actively creating all of these wonderful connections and relationships, they're going to be wanting you to succeed. And so they might be coming across opportunities where they could connect you with someone who could be terrific for you or a job opportunity or an organization. You always want to be ready to respond to that opportunity. That means you want to have a resume ready to go. You probably want to have a resume that responds, so that's basically a modular or a generic resume that is easily tweaked to pivot to that line of work or to pivot to that line of work over there or whatever the opportunity is. You want to have a very thorough, detailed, compelling LinkedIn profile. And by the way, on both the resume and the LinkedIn profile, I can help you with that. And we have great resources at the Career Center and through someone named Kerry McKnight, who is our liaison there. We can help you get those ready to go very quickly. But then also, you want to have in mind, what are some questions that I would ask these people who I've been introduced to? You don't have to have 20 questions, but maybe five key or core questions that will help you learn more about what they do, what they think about it, what advice they would give you, and what they would want to know if they were a student just starting out. So maybe you'll have five questions that sort of get them talking, they're liable to come back with many, many more types of information. But your job is to be prepared to ask questions if somebody says, sure, I'll be glad to talk to them. Okay, so now we've talked about ways that you can go about building that community of colleagues, building your network. Here's a little bit about the etiquette of networking because you want to be the person that everybody says, oh my gosh, I love being connected to them and you're going to want to be connected to them too. You always want to thank people for anything either that they did do for you, or that you asked them to do for you. So if you say to someone, could we have an informational interview? And they came back and said, in your dreams, I am like way too busy to talk to students. You want to follow up saying, I understand completely and I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. And I hope, you know, things, things become less stressed or crazed for you in the in the near future or just something that's a positive, but it's a sign of appreciation and respect. And it's a thank you. If you've reached out to some someone and you haven't heard from them in like two or three weeks, it's okay for you to follow up very politely and just check in with them. And I have done that by saying things like, I think it's possible that an email that I sent to you may not have may have fallen through the cracks. And so I was just going to check in to see if it would be possible for us to have an informational interview, sort of reiterate your initial request, and then say I completely understand if that's not doable for you. Then you of course want to thank them for an interview if they have had an interview with you. Email is just fine. But if you want people to sort of go into shock, you can send them a handwritten note. Although I now am being told that some people would be so astounded if they got a handwritten note rather than an email, they would think that you had way too much time on your hands. So I would say, read the room, assess your audience. If the person you're talking to is like 50 or over, maybe a handwritten note. 49 or younger, maybe an email. So just it sort of goes both ways there. And I don't want to say there's a hard and fast rule there. But the last thing, and this is incredibly important, be sure to follow up on any actions or any opportunities they've set up for you. And here's the reason why they've used some of their professional capital to reach out and request a favor from someone on your behalf. So they haven't asked for a favor on their behalf. They're asking for a favor on your behalf. If you don't follow through on whatever action or opportunity that person has arranged for you, you have burned that connection for that referral. You have built that referral connect, burned that referral connection for both yourself and the person who took made the effort to connect the two of you. And you will have burned that bridge forever. That person is now totally out of your network. And if you're lucky, they'll forget your name, because that's considered just an incredibly unprofessional thing to do. If they've set something up, if they've done a favor for you, let them know what the outcome was. Even if the outcome is this person had no interest in me, you still want to say thank you for doing this. And the conversation was fascinating. And I learned a lot from it. And I really appreciate your efforts on my behalf. I always, when I am asking someone to do a favor for me, I always say, let me know what I can do to return the favor for you or for someone that you care about. Because it's very possible when you're a student or you're just starting out, you're a new professional, there's not a lot that you could be able to do that might help someone who's the director of a library. There might be, but say there isn't, you want to make it clear that that's kind of open-ended if they have someone who's thinking about going to grad school. Say their daughter is thinking about going to grad school. Well, they might want their daughter to talk to you about what that's like, the pros and cons. So by saying what can I do to return the favor for you or someone else, that's a way that you are opening that up. Again, if you reach out and they don't respond, it's okay to follow up once, but then after that I would let it drop. And part of this comes under the heading, value people's time, especially if it's someone at a high level, which means they're probably in a very time-intensive job. Sometimes it just won't work for them. And then here's the question I get asked very frequently. What if you've lost contact with someone and then you find out, oh my gosh, they would be the perfect person to ask about that job and they could introduce me to the hiring manager. But I haven't talked to them for like three years and I'm really embarrassed about reaching out to them. What should I do because you're feeling really awkward? This has happened to all of us, quite frankly, who have been in our careers for a while. And so here's generally the drill. Here's how you sort of approach this situation. First of all, it's like when you're talking to another introvert and you just say, yeah, I'm an introvert, you're just acknowledging it right up front. You are going to acknowledge the lapse in time and say, basically, oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed that it's been three years since we last connected. And I really apologize that we haven't been in touch because, you know, we had so much fun when we went to coffee those times or whatever. But part of the reason is because I've been working on my doctorate or I've been in jail or just if there's any reason you can come up with, great to throw it in there, but no worries if not. Then you mention over to them, you hope they're doing well and that they've been doing well since you guys last caught up with each other. Then you just lay it out there, explain in a couple more sentences. I'm reaching out specifically at this point because I'm looking for a, I just came across a job posting for XYZ and I realized this is where you work and I wondered if you would be comfortable telling me a little bit about the job and about how you like working there. And then once that conversation gets going, then you can see about would they be willing to introduce you to the hiring manager. And then in that same email, you want to wrap up by indicating you're interested in helping them in return as before as we were talking about. But also by saying, oh my gosh, and when can we catch up? Let's get a catch up coffee on our schedules or a Zoom call or whatever, because it's sort of saying let's catch up and following through on that kind of diffuses the, I'm only talking to you because I want you to exploit your connection to this job I'm interested in. So again, you know, awkward situation, but everybody's been there. Key takeaways in terms of why you create this community of colleagues and how you do it and what it is, you are building a sustainable network that means sustainable it's going through your whole career. By making a long term investment that involves creating, and here's the key point, genuine relationships of mutual benefit. You always want to remember the golden rule of networking, don't keep score, because a lot of times you'll end up helping a whole bunch of people, but you won't need anybody to help you do something, or vice versa. Just me when I tell you career karma really works. It all evens out. You always want to be on the lookout for potential opportunities to create a new connection and to act on those opportunities. Remember that business card. And you never know when a relationship you've built tomorrow will provide a key opportunity, even five years from now. That's the way careers go. That's the way they grow. That's one of the reasons they're so rich and fascinating in our particular profession, because you can always take your career 100 different ways, different directions. And this is the way that opens up all those directions to you. Okay, well, thank you for your participation. And please consider me a part of your iSchoolSupport network through your program after you graduate. I love nothing more than helping students and alumni find the best career path for them. Take care.