An ever growing network can help you get insights and experiences in a chosen industry, says Michelle Reeve.

Contributor Michelle A. Reeve

In the last six weeks I’ve attended two long conferences and I’m networked out. Putting names to faces, faces to names, shaking a seemingly endless number of hands and forcing smiles until your face aches. It’s exhausting. It’s invaluable. From these conferences, and other previous experiences, I’ve created an ever-growing network of science communication contacts that have benefited, and will continue to benefit, my professional career.

We all know it’s not about what you know, it’s who you know. Of course, that’s not entirely true – you can’t get relevant jobs if you know nothing about your chosen career. You have to know stuff to progress.

I recently spent three months doing a PhD internship at The Royal Institution (Ri), working on their prestigious CHRISTMAS LECTURES^®; this was a dream role for me. The only reason I got that position was through a chance meeting with a professor at my PhD interview over three years ago. Out of almost two hundred academics, I met with him, not knowing he’d presented the Lectures a few years previously. Continue reading →