Blog Post 2- The Importance Of Networking

I went to a high school that believed heavily in the importance of each student having their own advisor, along with fostering each student’s relationship with their advisor. It also happened to be a fairly small high school with a graduating class of 75 students. When we were given this networking assignment, my idea of who I wanted to network with came near immediately. I would attempt to find a sort of faculty advisor within the CS department and pitch the idea of a relation similar to what my high school had. While the CS department does suggest consulting faculty for certain types of advisor, as far as I could tell they did not ever formally assign a student a faculty member.

As for the specific faculty member, I decided upon the professor who lectured my CS 125 class. He seemed to be a dynamic and knowledgeable person who would be Extremely useful to have in my network. I proceeded to email him, and once he learned a little bit about myself and the system I was proposing, he was more than happy to forge on with the advising relationship. After a minor scheduling mishap, he and I will be meeting for the first time this Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully all will go well J

My grasp of the importance of the networking has cemented over the course of my high school career. Both in leading a robotics team and my internship over this previous summer, networking has showed itself to be an invaluable tool. During my junior year in robotics competition, our team was playing at nationals and while there met a team located around 100 miles north of us. The team we met was actually a fairly dominant team within the competition, and after pleasant times spent between many members of each of our teams, they offered for us to come up and tour around their workshop. Being a fairly rookie team at the time, this experience was invaluable and provided inspiration to many of our members not to mention the tricks we picked up just from watching them work.

The reading from Kelley makes an important in one of its opening anecdotes as well, that is to network when neither party really needs anything to begin with. This rings especially true after thinking about the above stated robotics anecdote, fostering the network before either party needs something is essential and can lead to unforeseen benefits not directly related to needs.