Viterbi Graduate Student Association organized their 3rd Annual Alumni and Student Mixer yesterday!!!
The event was successful and students had a such a positive review about the panel discussions. I had an amazing time inviting our Viterbi Alumni to this event and coordinating with them. We’re so grateful to our alumni who showed up yesterday even though it was a game weekend. Talking of which, we beat California 30-20!!! Woohoo!
Thanks to the position I hold in VGSA E-Board, I had the opportunity to talk to every single Alumni yesterday and I learnt so much from them. One thing that almost every alumni spoke about was the importance of networking. So I wanted to share this with you guys and hopefully it will help you in some way.
Networking and personal branding are important skills that every student should have. Networking is not sending a connect request to a person on LinkedIn ( and then forgetting about it! lol) and it’s definitely not about having 500+ connections. In my opinion, it’s about making friends in industries. And hopefully, when positions open up in their companies, they should have you on their mind because you’re their friend. Or you should be in a position to ask them for a referral for a position in their company. But again, networking does not end their. It’s not necessary that every connection you make should benefit you in some way. I’m a huge advocate of networking with people outside your department. For example: in future, if we ever feel like making a transition to a different domain, we’ll have friends to reach out to from that industry.
I still have so much more to learn and I’m definitely looking forward to more such events. If you know of any such events, let me know at bathala@usc.edu.
Published on September 25th, 2017
Last updated on September 25th, 2017