Networking reflection
I found my experience during the Grow Irish week in Milwaukee to be very transformative for my mindset. Among the connections that I made was Amanda Porterfield, a St. Mary’s graduate who is currently working as a news anchor in St. Louis. Amanda explained that she got her start by going out and filming news segments all by herself, and sent them as audition tapes to local news agencies. I found this to be rather inspirational and along with my aspirations in filmmaking this has inspired me to go and start creating my own film content to supplement an online portfolio. Additionally, our visit to Cramer Krasselt opened up new possibilities for me because it made me consider a career in advertising, one that I had not thought about a lot. In learning about the process of advertising for a company, I realized that my passion for storytelling could be satisfied in a different capacity. In hindsight, not only did the experience put me in contact with professionals who had valuable advice, but it also instilled significant encouragement for the future of my career. The only thing that could have improved upon it would have been getting a job offer.
The St. Camillus Satellite Team
Over the course of the semester, I have learned a lot about why it is important to maintain one’s social network. Perhaps the most salient takeaways of my networking efforts in the past few months has been that there is information that can only be gained by going directly to the source to learn it. As I move forward in my career, there are many actions that I would like to incorporate into a disciplined regimen. By consistently setting and striving for OKR’s, frequently conducting time audits on myself, and periodically re-mapping my network I intend to both design a habit for accountability and improvement and to continue to expand my network of personal and professional acquaintances.
Perhaps the most emotionally impactful exercise that we performed this semester was creating our objective key results. These were meant to be short term, achievable goals, that motivated us to remain vigilant in our pursuit of them. The activity of describing what we wanted to achieve and how we would go about doing it was effective for me because it helped me to visualize the actions and efforts necessary to achieve my goals. At the beginning of the new year and every six months after that, I intend to create new objective key results so that I can keep improving upon myself. While I may not always achieve those goals within my time frames, revisiting this activity will no doubt encourage me to keep trying.
Another activity that we did during the semester was our time audits. While this activity did not directly impact the expansion of my social network, it did reveal alarming things about how I spend my time. After conducting the time audit, I realized that I was not spending as much of my free time on expanding my network as I could be, and it also left me disappointed with the quality of my past time. Along with creating new OKR’s every six months I also intend to conduct time audits to ensure that my free time is being well spent. Ideally, I will soon be able to look at my time audit and track how many connections I’ve made, interviews I’ve had, and information received.
The idea of mapping one’s network stems from the “how to build your network“ reading and it encourages professionals to make a list of the contacts in their network and map them according to how the user met them. The goal of this exercise is to determine what percentage of your professional network was introduced to you by a third-party and how many people you met alone. The activity states that if over 65% of your network stems from one on one introductions, then it may be too inbred, or too full of people that resemble the user. Since we are attracted to people that are similar to us, these are often the people that make up the majority of our networks. However, for our network to be effective, it also needs to be diverse in perspective, background, and experience. Through mapping my network, I can diagnose whether it is adequately diverse, or too inbred and make changes to address this.
