In this week’s blog, Beth Price shares her advice on how to network as a postgraduate or early-career researcher, and how to make meaningful connections outside of your department. 

Mention the word “networking” within hearing distance of a group of postgraduate students, and they will either shudder or suddenly become fascinated by the nearest inanimate object. Like it or not, networking is an increasingly important part of being a successful researcher, and is a skill which we can all develop.

Go to conferences and make the most of them 

It’s easy to see conferences as another box to tick on the path to your viva, or to treat the open bar at the final night dinner as a challenge. For better or worse, conferences are a cornerstone of academic networking and a great opportunity to make connections outside of your department. 

Although some of the bigger conferences are field-specific and expensive to attend, there are plenty of ways to make connections with researchers outside of your specialism. Smaller conferences, sometimes organised by your fellow postgraduate researchers, are often thematic or explicitly interdisciplinary. Even if you don’t have a paper ready to present, consider attending the less high-profile conferences, particularly if they are being hosted by a different department in your university. Listening to research from different fields, and then sticking around to ask questions and chat over a cup of coffee is one of the easiest ways to start building networks that go beyond your faculty. 

Create and curate a digital presence 

Since the world went online-only in 2020 and hybrid events became normal, having an up-to-date digital presence is more important than ever for researchers early on in their career. This doesn’t have to mean splashing out on a bespoke website and a graphic designer, there are plenty of free options which you can use to curate your digital presence. 

Your university will probably ask you to put together a profile for their PhD researcher pages. It may seem like a bit of a pointless chore, but this is one of the easiest options to get your name associated with your research. If you’re affiliated with another academic organisation, like SGSAH for example, then linking your profiles together will start to build a digital footprint that reaches well beyond your department.

Setting up a basic website is well worth doing, especially if you do anything outside of academic publishing like writing for an excellent blog (submission info here) or if your research is featured somewhere like the SGSAH research showcase. Building your own website using paid services like Squarespace can be a good investment, but there are plenty of free options still on offer. WordPress has free options for blogs where you can share your research and link to anywhere else it’s featured, or look at clippings.me to create a portfolio of your work. 

Use social media wisely

Social media marketing can be a minefield for academics, although it does have some serious advantages. Popular blogs or social media profiles can become the basis of turning your research into a book, like Dr. Eleanor Janega’s blog “Going Medieval”. If you’re not camera shy, then video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels & YouTube can be brilliant ways of not only making your research more accessible, but making connections with people outside of academia, let alone your department. 

Old-school social media like Facebook/Meta is full of groups sharing information about funding, LinkedIn is a great (and free) place to start collating your publications and experience, and platforms like X/Twitter and TikTok are designed around making connections with people you would never expect. You might be surprised to discover what you have in common with people from completely different fields and institutions.

That said, social media can be fickle and anyone using it is beholden to the rules and algorithms of each platform. My own research on nudity in Chinese media isn’t going to go down well on platforms where nipples are banned, and sharing socially or politically sensitive research can get you banned. It is better to use social media as one tool to build connections or share your work, rather than relying on it. 

Join societies and attend events

Finally, you can’t beat meeting people face-to-face. There are learned societies and associations for almost every field, many of which have membership discounts and opportunities for PhD students and ECRs. Some of them have journals directly associated and can provide publication support. Many have really active early career communities which is a great way to connect with people at a similar stage.

It isn’t enough to just sign up for things. Attending events, whether they’re organised by an academic society or another department in your university, is the best way to make connections with people outside of your field. Don’t just delete the mailing list emails you inevitably receive from other departments! The university calendar is full of free events and speakers, and it is well worth making the effort to attend. Training events and workshops are also great ways to not only develop your own skills, but to meet like-minded people from different academic areas.

Networking shouldn’t just be an added task that gets tacked onto the bottom of our to-do list. Without networking and building connections with people outside of our academic niche, we would miss out on amazing collaboration opportunities, we wouldn’t learn from other people’s expertise, and we would all be a lot lonelier. 

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