Networking tips for PhD students
A PhD isn’t just about developing your technical knowledge and getting research experience. There are also a few important soft skills that can help you both during and after your PhD.
One of the most important, but most often overlooked soft skills is networking.
Once you graduate and start looking for jobs, your network is almost as important as your publication record, because if you know people in your field you’re more likely to hear about jobs, and you’re at a huge advantage in your job applications if people already know you. It might not seem fair, but that’s just how the world works.
But it’s not just about building a network for a future career. I strongly believe that to do good research you need to work with other people, and that the whole idea of an independent researcher is nonsense.
And I think that networking, or just being able to engage with other people, just makes life better.
So in this post I’m going to share a few quick tips to help you start making these connections.
As with all skills, networking starts on a small scale with the things you do on a daily basis. So it starts with the smaller, personal connections you make with the people around you, rather than thinking in terms of building a professional network just to help your career.
Mindset and impostor syndrome
So the first aspect of networking that I’d like to talk about is your mindset. A lot of PhD students I’ve worked with tend to make themselves small and invisible, possibly because of impostor syndrome, where they don’t want to draw attention to themselves for fear of being found out.
You might be able to avoid attention in the short term, but in the long term this way of thinking turns everything inwards and you end up in this tiny, stressful inner-world. The more time you spend there, the more you’ll stress about what other people think, and the more you’ll worry about rejection. But this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because you end up isolating yourself.
But if you do the opposite, and instead of making yourself small and invisible, you expand and let yourself be seen, it opens up possibilities to connect with others.
Making contacts: Daily habits
If you work in a university department, there will be people you see every day, who you recognise but you’ve never spoken to. When you pass them in the corridor, just say hi. If you’re in the queue for the coffee machine, start a conversation with the person next to you. If you’re sitting in a lecture theater and someone you don’t know sits next to you, say hello and introduce yourself. If you see someone new in the corridor who’s clearly just started, again, you can just introduce yourself.
If you’re a bit shy this can be daunting, but the more you do this, the easier it gets. And I know this because I used to be unbelievably shy and often had quite severe social anxiety. But I realised that my introversion and shyness were defence mechanisms… and as defence mechanisms they were terrible because in the long term they caused me a lot more distress.
So I made a decision to open myself up and start conversations with people…
What I found is that most people walk around with a kind of protective shell around them, but if you make the first move they open up. They’re happy that someone has noticed them. And from that point on, they’ll say hello to you in the corridor.
If you don’t work in a university department, or if you find it difficult to do at work, you can practice this anywhere. When you go to a cafe, find out the barista’s name. They’ll appreciate it, and then every time you go there you’ve got that existing connection. That feels good and helps reinforce the habit.
Asking the name of a barista doesn’t directly build your professional network, but it helps you build the habits and skills that will help you later, and it’s just a nice thing to do.
The important thing here is that you’re connecting with other humans purely for the sake of connection. It’s not because you want something from them. If you only think of networking in terms of what you can gain, people will pick up on it and probably react defensively.
Be interested
Once you’ve made those initial connections, the next level is to just be interested in the other person.
The common mistake is to think, “I’m not good enough… I’m not interesting enough”. But the way to be interesting to other people is to be interested in them. If you’re talking to another PhD student or academic, find out what they’re working on. Or once you know them a little, ask how they are or how their weekend was.
Or you can take a proactive interest and keep track of what others in your department are publishing. Read their papers and ask a question about the work, or just say, “Hey I saw you just got a paper published in whatever journal, congratulations”
Show that you care about other people and they’re more likely to care about you.
Of course, not everyone will be open to conversation. There will be some academics who see you as beneath them, or they might just be a bit socially awkward, or maybe they’re just having a bad day. But if you do this kind of thing a lot, individual negative reactions affect you a lot less because you realise that it’s not about you.
Building a broader network: Conferences
Having started to develop these basic skills on a local, everyday level, how do we apply them to build a broader network of connections?
Conferences are great for this- I mean it’s why they exist- but not many people know how to make the best use of them.
What a lot of people will do is stick with their little bubble of people they already know… Or, they’ll target one person, perhaps some expert in their research area, that they want to talk to and ignore everyone else in between.
Now there’s nothing wrong with checking the conference program and finding out who’s speaking. That’s a good thing to do. But if you just target that one person, it puts a lot of pressure on that single interaction, and you miss out on a lot of other potential connections.
So if you see someone you don’t know who isn’t talking to anyone, or you’re next to somebody in the queue for coffee, just introduce yourself and be interested in what they do.
If you’ve practiced this in your everyday life, then it’s easy to do in these slightly more daunting situations.
Again, you should make these connections without looking for anything in return, and just talk to anyone and be interested in them and what they do. This has a kind of snowball effect, as some of the people you speak to introduce you to others, OR, if you really want to make an impression, you can start making introductions too.
Because most people stick to their own bubble, it really doesn’t take much to stand out. And once you’ve got those initial contacts, they might not be immediately useful to you, but months or even years later they could lead to important conversations, collaborations or even career-defining opportunities.
Cold emailing
Finally, I’d like to talk about cold emailing people you have no prior contact with.
The same basic principles apply, you generally don’t want to email people you don’t know just to ask them for something. They’re busy and they probably have 1000 emails to get through, so your chances of getting a reply are low. But remember, the way to be interesting to other people is to be interested in them and their work.
So if you’ve read a paper that’s interesting and relevant, you can email the author and ask a question about it. Or if you went to a conference and saw a great talk but didn’t get to speak to them, send them an email complimenting them on the talk and asking a question. Be interested in what they do. Maybe you’ll never hear back from them, but that’s OK, at least you tried. But maybe it’ll lead to a conversation. Then later, when you’re looking for jobs, you’ve got that established relationship.
I also think this is a great way to get into a PhD program- basically by establishing relationships with academics whose work you’re interested in, long before you actually apply. It takes work and patience, but this will put you far ahead of pretty much any other candidate, because despite how many people I say this to, despite how many people will watch this video, nobody else is going to do it.
What about remote PhDs?
Now I know that some of you will be watching this and thinking, “yeah, but I’m doing a remote PhD so I can’t do these things”
And yes, it’s tough…everything is way more difficult when you’re isolated and you don’t have regular contact with other researchers. But this just makes it more important to make extra effort to make connections.
I’d say to start with the same basics I mentioned earlier, saying hello to your neighbours and asking the name of the barista in a cafe. Then you can start to think about how to make connections with other students and researchers, and I’ll leave it to you to come up with ideas, because there are always solutions, if you think creatively about the problem.
