Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for Ph.D. Students by Phil Agre

This article had some helpful bits, much of which I already knew but was a good reminder as to what I should keep in mind when working towards my Ph.D, presenting myself well, and ultimately reaching my goal of a full-time teaching career in writing.

Agre says you devote one day per week to networking. I thought this was a bit much, but when I stop to think about it, I might spend that much time making connections anyway without thinking about it. I speak with my current professors, correspond with journal editors, and constantly e-mail my colleagues at Goddard, Eckerd, and USF -- perhaps I never stop networking, but just consider it "friendships and schoolwork"!

So I've networked inadvertently, and I have to admit it's worked in my favor. For instance, I once took a graduate workshop with Sterling Watson, who teaches creative writing at nearby Eckerd College. I liked his style of teaching very much, and a couple of years down the road, asked him if I could co-teach a fiction class with him so I could observe more how he handled his class. He agreed, and then the following year asked me if I wanted to teach a couple classes on his campus as well as to advise the school newspaper. I agreed, met more people on campus, and established friendships, which I guess was networking, because now I have a great job there, and enjoy it very much. I know there are students at USF who wonder how I landed my job, and I used to think I was just lucky, but I guess I was networking ... just by accident.

How you present yourself on the Web is another matter I should consider. I'm online quite a bit, and I've engaged in a chat or two that now I wish I hadn't. They weren't "bad" chats -- just, perhaps, a bit snarky, and now they're preserved for all to see if someone does a Google search on my name. I was joking at the time, but if you read it out of context, well ... it could show me in a bad light. I've also shot a nasty e-mail or two at people who were driving me nuts; it might have been cathartic at the time, but now they have a record of my unprofessionalism, and I regret it.

Also, a fellow student here once disagreed with a discussion he was having with a friend and me about how writing should be handled. His position was along the lines that writing should be "freely shared," meaning that he should be able to take someone else's work, change it to suit his needs, and present it as his own. To me it smacked of plaigarism, and as a creative writer, highly unoriginal. Later he blogged about those "creative writing types" and how wrong we were, and called us some names to boot. The blog was quickly sent to me by a fellow colleague who had noticed it, and I was steamed. I no longer hold that fellow student in high regard; I don't feel he can have an academic exchange of differing ideas without taking it personally.

The interesting section of this article, to me, was how to approach someone you want to be a professional contact. I very much want Peter Elbow, whose work I much admire, to be an outside reader of my dissertation when that comes due in a couple of years. But how to approach such a prolific scholar? Well, this article gave me some tips, including not to approach him until I have more publications of my own, which prompted me to get off my tush and send out an article I've been meaning to shop around to a popular culture journal today.