At today’s class, Serdar gave us the story of his networking life, which proved to be way more interesting than we at first expected it to be; we’ve heard a lot about the importance of networking, but hearing a real life story derived from personal experiences provides a much deeper understanding!
This got us to talking about networking in our lives!
At first glance, KTH is the perfect place for networking; there are thousands of intelligent and outgoing students all around us, and in this, endless possibilities for networking! However, you soon realize that all of these people are students in the field of engineering, and therefore tend to have a similar mindset in many regards; when stuck in this bouble that is KTH, we do not get much interaction with people in the fields of art and social sciences!
Then again, our careers will likely keep an engineering and managerial focus, so having a network based on KTH will absolutely be something positive! Unfortunately, this ensures that we’re stuck in our paradigm until, through chance, our network gets further developed!
At the end of our discussion we came to the conclusion that is is important to actively try and get out of this bubble and diversify our network.
There is this saying: The more similar we get to each others, the more different we become to everyone else. This is something we actively have to tackle in Den Lilla Konsulten (a student consulting firm) since the Stockholm Office was started by engineers and most of our consultants are engineers. Therefore we have to actively recruit consultants and market ourselves at other schools such as Handels and KI.
The only problem with this is that going with like-minded people is very easy. But I recommend everyone to once try the hard way and go outside the safety zone. If you don’t like it then you’ve tried it and learnt something from it.
Good to know that it was not boring. It was a messy drawing but I hope I was able to explain importance of networking and results of it in my personal experience.