This past week, I spent an afternoon walking around UBC campus (my alma mater) reminiscing, admiring the many changes to the campus and revelling in the spaces which felt exactly as they had almost three years ago when I was living at Gage. UBC campus is breathtaking. It pains my soul that so many of the older buildings have been replaced with more 1960-style steel, concrete and glass structures in place of the older, early 1900-style monuments. Still, having attended the university during the beginning of its physical reconstruction – back when there were no private companies doing business alongside the busloop – I can see where the spacial changes have made improvements for student life on campus … but I mourn the loss of the old face of UBC nonetheless.
Each time I walk into a networking event and I see all the faces I’ve never seen before, I always think of how unfortunate it is that I knew so little about networking while I was at UBC. Students in BC are simply not adequately taught about the concept and practice of networking while they are in school. Even at BCIT, a post-secondary known for producing work-ready grads who have been trained through a more practical lens than other institutions, students are encouraged to network, but are never really forced to put the concept into practice as with other topics of study.
I`ve spoken with a number of UBC and BCIT grads – business students among them – and the majority would agree that they wished they fully understood the significance of networking while they were students.
Consider the life of a typical UBC arts student – this is a classical education where you spend more time reading scholarly journals and arguing rhetoric on paper than you are conversing in class. Although UBC students meet hundreds of people each year, their mindset is focused on getting somewhere quiet to finally begin that paper which is due in 12 hours, and not on building relationships with the hundreds of strangers they sit beside in lecture halls.
Granted, the network of friends that I built while attending UBC is strong – they include the greatest friends of my life – but networking is not about having access to a select few who are gems. Rather, it`s about extending a hand to people you perhaps do not see often, but you know nonetheless.
I consistently emphasize that people have reservations against networking because they have a skewed perception of it. Oftentimes, networking is viewed as creating false relationships centered on making business favours, but this is not what networking is! Networking is about building relationships with people, period.
Having said that, the life and perspective of a student is so centered on completing required courses or deciding if graduate school is realistic that even those who comprehend the notion of networking have the mentality that they will network after graduation. “Why would I spend $20 to attend an event when I’m just a student?” they ask. Then in the four months after graduation when the summer has ended and students are looking for work, they wonder “why do I have such a limited network – I just have my friends?”
The value of networking needs to be taught to post-secondary students somehow – this message needs to get through to them. It is commonly understood that in today`s reality, university grads are not guaranteed to find employment simply because of the credentials they received. So why is it that no one discusses the need to network in order to deal with that fact?
If literally hundreds of applications are being sent in response to each job posting in public view, networking will increasingly be the answer that university students will not suspect.
Posted by Geraldine Sangalang 
