A colleague of mine from grad school doing PhD astrophysics is in town (Person A), together with our mutual colleague who’s looking for a job in the industry after her doctoral defense (Person B). I called for a dim sum lunch to catch up with them. The idea to invite a few friends I’ve known from different stages of my life in US then came across my mind. Sure enough, I decided to invite them as well, since why not and since dim sum is always better in a medium sized group anyway.
At the end, there were seven of us. The four additional people are 1) a high school friend of my ex-officemate at my current research institute, who went to Carneige Mellon for her PhD and just moved to silicon valley for her job in AI (Person C); 2) a friend I met from college at Berkeley, who’s now working at one of the Big 4s (Person D); 3) friend of Person E, who also went to Berkeley for college (and in fact, in physics; although he’s now working in finance for Citibank; Person E); 4) a colleague at my current research institute, who also did her college degree in Physics at Berkeley (Person F).
Interesting, while Person E, F, and I did physics at Berkeley back then, we didn’t met one another. Person D also never came across Person E until after he moved to NYC. I also just realized that Person E is actually a former co-worker of my best friend from high school and college (who went to Berkeley and worked with Person E at one of the banks in NYC).
Not only that, but Person F worked as a software engineer in a banking company before joining the research institute I am at. In addition, Person B is looking for a job as either a software engineer or a data scientist, while Person A worked as a software engineer prior to starting grad school.
Such a combination and our experience certainly enabled a lot of interesting and engaging discussions. Since everyone was essentially connected through me, at the end, a lot of the conversations we had was about what you are working on, what is like to do this, what kind of physics classes do you take, what research are you working on, where do you see yourself in next 5-10 years, etc.
I used to be a very private person and dislike sharing about myself, or didn’t care much about the rest of the world since research is very much focusing on becoming an expert in your own field. Perhaps, it’s my experience over the years in grad schoo, or perhaps it’s what NYC does, I find myself enjoying these conversations a lot more. At the end, I called it a dim sum networking event and I think I did quite a good job at it! Everybody has something in common, perhaps a little bit focused on their careers.
I don’t know what does this mean? Does this successful “networking event” mean that I now know a lot of people outside of my field after moving to NYC? Or does it mean a lot of my connection is still tie to where I went to school? If I didn’t go to an “west coast Ivy League” school and a (traditional) Ivy League school, would I still be able to pull such a group? In other words, has my network really grown?