Chemical Network - the online Chemistry Weblog

Why network?

We could write about this at length but Prof Pagre of UCLA has written an excellent article which really captures the essential importance of networking - here is an extract.

The first thing to realize is that Internet-world is part of reality. The people you correspond with on the network are real people with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their own. Things you say on the net can make you friends or enemies, famous or notorious, included or ostracized. You need to take the electronic part of your life seriously. In particular, you need to think about and consciously choose how you wish to use the network. Regard electronic mail as part of a larger ecology of communication media and genres -- telephone conversations, archival journals and newsletters, professional meetings, paper mail, voice mail, chatting in the hallway, lectures and colloquia, job interviews, visits to other research sites, and so forth -- each with its own attributes and strengths. The relationships among media will probably change and new genres will probably emerge as the technologies evolve, but make sure that you don't harbor the all-too-common fantasy that someday we will live our lives entirely through electronic channels. It's not true.

One might engage in many forms of communication on the net -- one-to-one electronic correspondence, network discussion groups, Web publishing, and so forth. And these interactions might be employed as part of a wide variety of professional activities: sharing raw data, arguing about technical standards, collaborating on research projects, chasing down references, commenting on drafts of papers, editing journals, planning meetings and trips, and so on. Underlying all of these disparate activities, though, is the activity of building and maintaining professional relationships. Electronic communication is wasted unless we use it to seek out, cultivate, and nurture relationships with other human beings. Unfortunately the existing mechanisms for electronic interactions, by reducing people to abstract codes (like "c2nxq@loco.blort.com"), make it difficult to keep this deeper dimension of interaction in mind. Still, there's no escaping it: if you aren't consciously building relationships, you're probably getting lost.

At the most fundamental level, then, most of my advice has nothing intrinsically to do with electronic communication at all. My real topic is not (technological) networks but (professional) networking. Therefore I'll discuss networking in a general way before describing how electronic mail can accelerate it.

In the past, the only ways to learn networking -- not just being part of a social network, but having the skills for systematically seeking out and becoming acquainted with new people in the service of professional goals -- were to be born to a socially well-connected family or to apprentice yourself to a master of the art. Many people resist the idea of networking because they associate it with "playing the career game", "knowing the right people", "kissing up to the powerful", "cynicism", or "politics", or because networking supposedly takes time away from "getting real work done". Some people grew up being told the dangerous half-truth that "if you do good work then you will be rewarded", as if rewards magically appear whether anybody knows about your good work or not. Others are allergic to the Machiavellian overtones of "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Indeed, people will accuse you of all sorts of terrible things if you admit to having worked-out ideas about networking. This is all terribly unfortunate, not least because it helps to stratify the world of research: networking is about community, not hierarchy, and people who don't learn to network are less likely to succeed.

The truth is that the world is made of people. People out of communities are like fish out of water or plants out of soil. Research of all kinds depends critically on intensive and continually evolving communication among people engaged in related projects. Networking cannot substitute for good research, but good research cannot substitute for networking either. You can't get a job or a grant or any recognition for your accomplishments unless you keep up to date with the people in your community.

Establishing professional relationships with particular people and involving yourself in particular professional communities will change you: not only will you internalize a variety of interesting points of view, but you will become more comfortable in your writing and speaking because you will be engaged in an ongoing conversation with people you know. And if no community is waiting for you, you will have to go out and build a community -- one person at a time. This "overhead" can be a nuisance at first, but none of it is terribly difficult once you get some practice and really convince yourself that you cannot sustain your professional life without devoting about a day per week to it.

For a more in depth and formal discussion group join Chemtogether.com, the Online Chemical Community, where you'll find regularly updated Chemistry news articles, directories of useful contacts and a forum. More importantly you can search for and find people in the Chemical & Pharmaceutical Industry such as ex-colleagues, old friends/alumni or just network with people who have similar interests to yours. You can use the Chemtogether Intelligence Database to search and find people or information.