The embrace of networking as an occupation that everybody needs to pursue with a single-minded avidity of an insurance salesperson is very disturbing. These days, even scientists are classified into the good, useful Networkers and the useless, despised Scholars. Scholars have the gall to believe that their primary duty is to – and just imagine the conceit on those losers – engage in scholarship. Just to think that, instead of wasting their time in those stupid libraries and labs, they could be using every chance they get to chirp up a storm at networking sessions!
The worst offenders are, of course, those nasty foreigners who are clinging to the delusional belief that a talent for small talk does not a good scientist make:
What I have noticed is that US-born candidates from strong groups are much more likely to have these numerous and varied connections, whereas foreigners have fewer on average. I am sure it’s partly cultural, perhaps stellar candidates who grew up in the US have had longer to absorb the need to network and have worked on it, many of them having started to do research and present their findings at conferences as early as their undergraduate years. When I see a foreigner with a great publication record but a very brief list of references, I wonder why those advisors haven’t pushed the candidate to network more.
And without networking skills, abandon all hope of getting hired. It’s the chirpers and the tweeters the world needs, not those silent, introverted types who sit there stupidly, staring at books:
If, on top of this, the candidate is perhaps unsure of their English and not crazy about giving talks at conferences, or the candidate has a small child and cannot travel, then you have a potentially great person who has not received enough exposure or had the chance to develop their own reputation as a rising star, and despite all their potential and hard work they will not bode as well as they should on the faculty job market.
And here I was, hoping that my scholarship would “develop my reputation as a rising star.” Silly me, I should have been spending the time I dedicate to scholarship to hunting down people and informing them I plan to do scholarship. Drat! But what do you expect from us, the hopeless non-US-born anti-networkers.