If you follow the link in this post title, you'll get to a pretty interesting two-person interview about job networking. The short version of the column is that a young English PhD from Princeton lost her job at Motley Fool and takes a serendipitous networking journey down to Baltimore that yields a job a year or two later. This is the kind of serendipity that almost had me taking a job in Austin at IBM writing manuals for their UNIX server division. This is the kind of story I try to impress upon my students--networking is about optimistic hustling and constant professionalism. After reading this, though, I kind of get the same cynical glaze that my students do. Part of me reacts viscerally: "Yeah, it sure is easy to be *professional* when you have 'Princeton PhD' behind your name ["let's play squash sometime..."]." I wonder if my "University of New Mexico PhD" behind my name [or more likely, just "PhD"] blows my entire story out of the water. I tend to alternate between my story and those of my friends who have made it in the business with M.A. and B.A. degrees.
Are we all that cynical?
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