Building Your Network - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Building Your Network

Landing a job — and most of what comes after it — runs through people who already knew you before you needed them to. I neglected networking during an internship with one of my own research funders and didn't get a job offer — and, looking back as a supervisor, I wouldn't have hired me either. In contrast, several relationships I built over years were critical enablers of my 27-year career at ExxonMobil.

Start Building Your Network Now

Long before I had a job title worth putting on a business card, people around me were already shaping my career — a professor, a couple of internship mentors, my graduate advisor and his industrial advisory committee. The lesson took a while to fully land, and one experience along the way is the cautionary tale I still tell against myself.

Undergrad: One Recommendation That Made My Career

I took advanced coursework in optimization and process control. The Real Time Optimization professor offered me an undergrad research project to set up simulations and run cases supporting their work. That professor is the one who suggested that I apply to Lehigh University for grad school. That one piece of advice from one relationship was the make-or-break of my career because every other grad program I applied to rejected me.

Co-op: Mentors Who Saw the Gap

Cincinnati's co-op program ran students through alternating three-month work rotations — seven of them, in my case, at Quantum Chemical's Allen Research Center. Catalyst synthesis and testing, a pneumatic-to-Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) system migration project, time as a board operator on a pilot High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) reactor. Two mentors there, J.H. and S.L., saw my potential and started the long process of addressing my interpersonal skills (see Mentors Began to Intervene).

Grad School: Funders Are Stakeholders

My research, under advisor Christos Georgakis, was jointly funded by Exxon, Air Products, Praxair, and BOC, and I presented progress to that group of funders every six months. That's a real, low-stakes way to practice no idea sells itself before your career even starts. Research funders are stakeholders, and a six-month check-in is a marketing exercise whether you think of it that way or not. My advisor was very savvy about marketing and earned a reputation among the faculty as a salesman — and he had the results to show for it. He had funding for 10 students when many faculty could support only 1 or 2, and all of his students had jobs landed before graduating, nearly all with the companies funding the work (see Know Who Funds Your Professor's Research). One of the Exxon representatives, AC2 (see Mentoring Integration with Stage Development), recommended me to his managers, setting up the interview that landed the career I spent the next 27 years in. That rep became one of my closest mentors for the next 15 years until he retired; we ended up co-teaching the Basic Controls Engineer Training course together.

The Connection I Didn't Know Was Happening: The Hiring Manager's Son

Unbeknownst to me, while I was a Teaching Assistant in grad school for William Luyben and William Schiesser, my future hiring manager's son was taking their classes. During my onboarding at Exxon, that manager told me he asked his son what kind of teaching assistant I was, and if his son had said I did a lousy job, I would not have gotten the interview let alone a job offer. There are a lot of multigenerational engineering families, so the students you interact with may have relationships with the hiring decision makers. The number of degrees of separation between any two members of the engineering community is in the low single digits. Treat everyone professionally no matter your perception of who is above whom, and don't burn bridges.

The One That Didn't Go Well: Lone Wolf at Air Products

I had a three-month internship at Air Products, one of the companies funding my research. The objective was to better connect industrial practice to the academic work. I did solid technical work there (or at least I thought I did), and nothing else. I stayed in my lane, kept my head down, didn't build a single relationship worth keeping, and left without an offer. It's the one stop on my Career Timeline I still flag with an "X" when I tell this story — not because the work was bad, but because the network-building was completely absent, and I didn't even notice the gap at the time. Many years later, as a supervisor, I looked back on that period and realized I wouldn't have hired me either — a lone wolf and not a team player (see Teammates or Competitors?). It took me years to see it that way; for a long time I chalked it up to the economy or the interviewer instead. That realization is its own story: see Only What You Take With You, where the enemy in the cave turns out to be wearing my own face.

None of these relationships was planned, each one took time to build, and all of them mattered. Had I neglected the others the way I did at Air Products, my career would look very different today.

Pro-Tips for Networking

Build and leverage your network deliberately. Co-ops and internships are one of the most effective tools available to you for this — use them as such, not just as résumé lines (see Cooperative Education). If you're a grad student, your network should include the people funding your research (see Know Who Funds Your Professor's Research).
Be professional with everyone, not just people who can hire you today. Anyone you interact with is a potential future employment decision maker, and the relationship network gets denser as you gain experience — see the teaching assistant story above.
Landing the job is the beginning of the interview, not the end of it. You'll be evaluated many more times over the course of your career than you were during the hiring process.
Present, present, present. Every presentation you give highlights the value you add, demonstrates communication and advocacy capability that every employer is looking for, and improves your skill level (see Presentations and Public Speaking).
Never stop networking. Building your network is a lifetime habit. Relationships with teachers and coaches (see Extracurriculars) in high school can open up college opportunities most in line with your interests and aptitudes, some of which you didn't know existed. The same applies to college connections leading to employment or grad school, and to each of those networks leading to the next assignment or promotion in the workplace. On the social media side, LinkedIn has become a key networking platform for job seekers and employers alike.

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.