I was isolated at the start of my PhD because of COVID restrictions. While this had its challenges, I feel it now provides me unique insight into the way networking could have helped me earlier on. It also starkly illuminates the way networking helped me later.
The information we can glean from networking that I outline below feels to me like unthought knowns, stuff we know but don’t realise we know. Actively seeking out friendships and learning more about the culture of our offices/schools/faculties can help in subtle but important ways.
To clarify, this post is not discussing kind of networking that is fundamentally about using other people for personal gain, which tends to feel greasy and gives networking a bad name. Students create and rely on networks, but we usually call it something more colloquial like “having friends”. This is the networking to which I’m referring in this post.
Starting my PhD: The Trials and Tribulations
I started my PhD in February 2020. Admin took a little while to assign me a desk on campus, so at the start of March, I was ready to load in. I rocked up, set up my desk, filled my drawers with pens, post-it notes and blu-tack, and downloaded the programs I’d need for the three years ahead.
I’d been in the office for about a week when COVID hit. Lockdown rolled around and everyone went home for six months.
The start of my PhD was hard for two reasons. First, it was in a different field from my undergrad. Not impossible to navigate – psychology and justice aren’t too far from each other – but I felt intimidated imagining my lack of expertise compared with my new peers. There was also new language I needed to learn so I could communicate competently with my supervisors.
Second, and more importantly, I was at a new university. I didn’t know my fellow PhD students or any of the faculty members. I’d met my principal supervisor through serendipity a year earlier, but I had no idea who to choose as an associate and deferred to his (thankfully benevolent) wisdom. I didn’t have any information about university procedures or culture.
My uniquely isolated position in those first six months made it easy for me to spot the ways networking helped my peers (often in circumstances they wouldn’t describe as “networking”).
Why Networking Helps
1. You know how the procedures actually work.
There is unwritten institutional knowledge that can only be accessed through word of mouth. No-one will write it down and no-one will email it to you. You have to be a trusted party to someone with the knowledge, then ask the right questions.
Example one. In theory, to get a desk in my previous office, the only step was to email an application to one of the various office-management-related people. In reality – as everyone in the office would later tell me – one administrator co-ordinates the desks. It’s best to email her the week another student is wrapping up their PhD and moving out, otherwise you might miss the boat. She apparently keeps a wait list but we were skeptical. One fellow Justice PhD candidate had been waiting patiently (not sending reminder emails) for six months; in the meantime, three new starts were allocated desks.
Knowing people in your office/faculty gives you insider information that is never on the uni website.
Example two. I recently needed clearance to buy gift cards to thank my research participants. In theory, I needed only email this request to my supervisors who could clear it. In practice, because it’s a gift card (which is special, for reasons that remain mysterious), it needs clearance from the Head of School. Further, it’s not really appropriate for me to email the HoS directly; my associate supervisor recommended that I email my principal supervisor asking for clearance, who would in turn email the Head of School, to provide a correct paper trail.
Sometimes it’s about knowing who to email, or when. Sometimes it’s about knowing which things you don’t have to do, or which things are SUPER IMPORTANT to make sure get ticked. Procedures and priorities are rarely fully explained in the official guidance. Talk to your friends, colleagues, and supervisors.
When we have this knowledge in hand, it doesn’t feel obvious that navigating the system with grace is a result of good networking.
2. You know the faculty.
Knowing people means you know who’s in your school and roughly what their research areas are. This seems like unimportant information until you really, really need it.
When I first submitted my PhD proposal, I needed to nominate an associate supervisor. Choosing this person is usually a conversation where both student and principal supervisor have input; with no information, I deferred to his recommendation. My associate supervisor turned out great – she’s driven, kind, and provides insightful, timely, and extensive feedback. Not everyone is so lucky.
3. You know what projects are in the works, and people know who you are.
As far as I can tell, when an academic has a project coming up that involves a lot of grunt work they want to pawn off onto a research assistant (RA), there is rarely an official process. They don’t advertise uni-wide or on Seek. They think to themselves, “Who could do this task?”. Sometimes they email fellow staff members to see if they know anyone suitable. And that’s it. As far as I can tell, RA work is distributed based on salience, who’s around, and who looks like they’ve been doing a good job.
My first RA position came up because I was in a subject where the lecturer, at the start of class, said he was looking for RAs for an upcoming project. I came up after class, asked him if I could join, and he brought me on. I’m not even sure if he asked for a CV (as a second-year undergrad, it probably wasn’t important).
Two RA positions I had as a PhD student came from recommendations made by my supervisors. The first was from my primary supervisor, who needed an RA to help one of his other PhD students do some stats for a paper. For the other job, my associate supervisor recommended me to a friend of hers who was looking for some survey input and data analysis work. My responsibilities in each position evolved over time; the former into a substantive writing role, the latter into literature reviewing.
This led to two contracts, totalling 220 hours, in the June-September period of 2021. Before tax, this totalled about $45 x 220 = $9900. All because I did an undergrad in psychology (making me uniquely qualified in quantitative research among my pool of qualitative justice academics) and my supervisors knew it (and were willing to tell their friends).
So?
‘Networking’ is considered a dirty word, but I firmly believe it’s knowing people and being friendly, even just in your own office or faculty. When I was an undergrad, I took this knowledge for granted; as a PhD student, when it was starkly lacking, I could fully realise its importance. As my honours supervisor would tell me, research is about finding friends who share your interests and doing cool stuff with them. Networking helps us do that and navigate effectively as we go.
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