Whilst we were in one of our portfolio workshops with Chris and Emma, Steph called out to the class saying she had a spare ticket for a networking event for that evening. Without any hesitation, I immediately agreed to it across the room before anyone else had the chance to snatch it up, but also because Steph is super sweet. I had wanted to go to these young creatives networking events before, but they seem to be quite popular and sell out very fast.
Networking for me will be super important as I was never super involved with my university peers and I am not well connected, which I know for a fact will create a possible barrier for my career. Starting off university, I didn’t want to live in halls, and starting off in the middle of a pandemic left me quite disconnected from my peers who seemed to have already established friendships amongst each other. Apart from that, I am not a super outgoing social person so my ‘network’ is non-existent, so I jumped at the chance of this event.
I always knew that with any given career it’s best to be well connected, but I was never too bothered about it as it isn’t really in my nature and thought I’d get by anyway. It wasn’t until a session we had with Chris and Emma where they talked about the importance of networking that it was brought into perspective how beneficial it could be for me to connect myself better. It was made even more apparent how much I was lacking in this department when we were shown videos of work from previous years and how many people collaborated on different projects. I started feeling quite envious because I think some of the girls in our class are absolutely brilliant at what they do and have amazing vision that I would love to work with. It’s made me feel like I’ve missed out on a lot of opportunity as our university time is coming to an end. So I could not pass up the opportunity of this networking event with Steph.
Even though once I got to the networking event, Steph and I were both a little… intimidated to walk up to complete strangers and start up conversations ( despite the canned G&T we had before entering ), we spotted a few other girls from the fashion comms course and stayed to talk with them. And although I didn’t meet anyone new, this networking event helped me build a better connection with some of the fantastic girls from our course and got to learn more about their work. So hopefully I wouldnt be leaving university without knowing anybody.