Notes and resources for workshop: Networking for success - mentorship, sponsorship and international connectivity in the digital age.
This workshop was developed by Kirstie Whitaker for International Max Planck Research School for Translational Psychiatry (IMPRS-TP) graduate student retreat in May 2019.
It is available under a CC-BY license which means you are welcome to re-use and re-mix any of these materials so long as you credit Dr Kirstie Whitaker.
Dr Kirstie Whitaker will lead an interactive discussion on networking for early career researchers. The word "networking" fills most of us with dread. It conjures images of awkward introductions and uncomfortable self promotion. Alternatively, networking can be seen as an opportunity to share your skills and expertise with others. It is one of the most effective ways of making a positive influence on the world. Similarly, mentorship and sponsorship are often conflated. Mentors are your support network, while your sponsors are the people who promote you when you are not in the room. (They are networking on your behalf!) During this two hour session we will work in small groups to discuss the benefits and challenges of networking using digital tools (social media, blog posts, community connections and 1:1 contacts) for early career researchers. Please come with a question that you don't know how to answer, and with a few thoughts about what you'd like to achive in the next step of your career.
This workshop is designed to be 2 hours long. It can very easily be adapted to being longer or shorter. Pull requests to suggest alternative timelines are very welcome.
| Time (mins) | Duration (mins) | Action |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 10 | Welcome, introduction, code of conduct & motivation |
| 10 | 10 | Post it session: Definitions and pain points 📝 |
| 20 | 5 | Feedback and reflection: Definitions and pain points |
| 25 | 5 | Demonstration: Personas exercise |
| 30 | 10 | Personas exercise 👨👩👧👦 |
| 40 | 15 | Feedback: Personas exercise |
| 55 | 10 | Reflections or short break |
| 65 | 20 | Discussion: Networking in the digital age |
| 85 | 20 | Peer support 👨👩👧👦 |
| 105 | 15 | Reflections & close |
10 minutes
For this part of the workshop the facilitator will introduce themselves and give a brief overview of the next few hours.
- Who I am.
- Why I'm here.
- Why I care.
- Incentive structures in academia.
- Meritocracy doesn't exist....even in (especially in) academia.
- Strategic career planning.
- Leveraging the power you have to change the world.
- Recognising your strengths and what you bring to a job/project/community.
10 minutes
All participants are asked to write down on separate post it notes a definition and a difficulty that they have for the following topics:
- Networking
- Mentorship
- Sponsorship
- Digital connectivity
The best way to do this exercise is to have four zones already set up in the room, one for each of the different topics.
Participants are asked to move the post it notes around and collect them together as they add their notes.
5 minutes
This feedback and reflection session allows all workshop participants and the facilitator to summarise the different topics and to identify key challenges that are shared across multiple participants.
A workshop participant should be asked to summarise and report out the key points from each of the four topics identified above. (A separate participant for each topic.)
5 minutes
The facilitator briefly outlines the personas exercise and briefly works through a set example. The choice of this example should be tailored to the group.
The facilitator should make clear the roles that mentorship, sponsorship, networking and digital connectivity all play in identifying the best pathways for this imaginary person to follow. One way to reinforce these links is to point to the four sections of the room where the participants have collected the post it note comments as the personas are being discussed.
A 1st year graduate student who wants to go to a lab for 3 months to learn a new skill.
Maria is a first year graduate student in a lab which specialises in child brain development. Her supervisor is really supportive and wants Maria to be able to do the most innovative work. Maria identifies a weakness in her skill set: she is not confident working with large brain imaging datasets. She knows that Dr Paula Ela, a research scientist at a data science institute in the USA, does a lot of work with these types of data. Maria wants to work with Ela to learn these skills and build up her confidence working with large datasets. She is also excited about experiencing a different university setting and living in a new country for a short period of time.
Maria writes to Ela when she is around six months into her PhD programme. She includes her CV and a few sentences about her current research. Maria suggests a concrete project for her three months in Ela's lab: transposing her lab's current analysis pipeline (many of the steps of which are done by hand) into the Ela lab's automated analysis. Maria offers Ela authorship on the analysis that she will work on based on this analysis pipeline, and also offers to promote the automated pipeline in her home university.
Maria is clear in her email that the timeframe of her visit is quite flexible, but suggests a visit around 6 months from now, at the beginning of her second year. This will give her time to apply for a travel scholarship offered by her institute to support her visit. She asks Dr Ela if she has any recommendations for adjustments to her proposed schedule or project plan.
Paula Ela says yes to Maria's visit because she is a junior faculty in a data science institute working mostly on methods development. It is very helpful to her to have external collaborations that apply her software to interesting questions. As Maria will be self-funded, it seems worth the time investment to build up this link. Ela asks one of the postdoctoral researarchers in her lab, Luka Vanni, if he would be interested in supervising Maria on a day to day basis. Luka is happy to help promote the lab's work and looks forward to collaborating with a new student.
There are quite a few failure points in this plan, most of which can be overcome by having some back up options in development while the main plan is being developed. Maria will need to get a visa to visit the USA. She needs to be successful in recieving her travel scholarship. Maria's supervisor must be happy with adding these two new authors to a future publication. It is also hard to get settled into a new place for a short period of time, and Luka and Paula will be busy once she arrives so it may also take time to get her started.
The benefits are high though. Maria can build up her collaboration network and bring back the skills that she has learned to her current lab. She still has time in her degree to develop the skills and incorporate them into future collaborations. It is likely that this three month exchange will give her a boost in her graduate studies and introduce her to new tools and practices that she can not learn in her home institute.
10 minutes
Participants are assigned into groups of 4 or 5.
Each group is asked to discuss an example future goal. They can choose a persona from the list below, or they can create their own persona. The group can choose a persona who has similar challenges and goal to themselves, or on that has different requirements. The point of the exercise is to imagine different pathways to success and the points of view of the different stakeholders in the ecosystem.
Suggested personas are:
- A 1st year graduate student who wants to go to a lab for 3 months to learn a new skill.
- A final year graduate student who wants to get a postdoc position in a new research area.
- A 2nd year graduate student who wants to get a job as a patent attorney for a pharmacutical company.
- A 3rd year graduate student who wants to get a 6 month internship at Deep Mind.
- A final year graduate student who wants to get a job in government policy making (eg UK civil service, US congress etc).
The group are asked to reflect on:
- The student's goals.
- The pathway they should take to achieve those goals.
- An appropriate timeline.
- Who are the key people who should also be identified and consulted? Their goals and motivations.
- A best case scenario.
- Key failure points and actions that can make the pathway more resilient.
If materials are available, each group could make an A1 sized poster about their person to make it easier to report back.
15 minutes
Each group has 2 minutes to report back to the whole group of workshop participants about their recommended persona and associated pathway.
Note that this section of the workshop has the potential to take quite a long time. It is up to the facilitator whether they want to be strict on timings or let it roll into the second half of the workshop.
10 minutes
These workshops can be very intense and personal so this 10 minute break allows people to rest and reflect on the first half of the session. Participants can go to the bathroom if they'd like, or check their email. They are also encouraged to return to the post it notes, move them into additional clusters or add new comments as they would like.
20 minutes
This part of the workshop is an open discussion (all participants together) discussion some of the goals and challenges of networking in the digital age. The facilitator should maintain the links to the previous discussions on mentorship, sponsorship, networking and digital connectivity throughout this session, capturing key points to remember on post it notes and adding them to the different topic areas in the room.
Many of the networking points and digital connectivity points may have already been captured in the personas exercise. There is no need to repeat them if so. The goal is to identify and discuss outstanding questions and challenges that participants have about the best ways to use digital technologies to progress their career.
Topics should be motivated by the post its that were collected at the start of the workshop, and may include:
- Personal website, being google-able.
- Helping others vs helping yourself.
- Horizontal vs vertical networking.
- Introducing yourself in person and online.
- Building relationships.
- Short vs long term gains.
- Social media.
- Blogging and vlogging.
- Informational interviews.
- Survivor bias.
- Tailoring your strategy to your personality and goals.
15 minutes
Participants are assigned into groups of 3.
Each person takes it in turn to present a challenge that they currently have, and the other two members of the group listen and then give their suggestions for ways to overcome the challenge. The timings are a strict 2 minutes for description and 3 minutes of brainstorming the suggestions.
It is important in this session to listen thoughtfully, and be considerate that people may wish to take a different pathway to the one you would pick for yourself. Having said that, it is valuable to hear suggestions from different points of view. No one is compelled to undertake any of the suggestions from this very fast peer support session. The are intended as a jumping off point for future problem solving.
These discussions are not reported back to the whole group, and all participants should keep any confidential information they hear in the support exercise confidential outside of the peer to peer discussion.
10 minutes
The whole group comes back together to reflect on the workshop and identify outstanding requirements.
Thank you to Hania Koever and Eugen Visan for their feedback on early designs of this workshop.