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"Networking" is to "Nepotism" as "Lobbying" is to "Bribery". A functional meritocracy should have fully anonymized hiring and promotion tracks for basically everything,

”it's not about what you know, it's about who you know.”

Boomers will say this and unironically also believe capitalism is meritocratic

And the worst part to me is that it isn't even about "who you know" and just having friends help each other and support each other, instead it's "who you know who can be a useful resource for you." it's all about commodifying relationships with others and making them transactional.

networking is just the white collar jargon for nepotism. It is literally just nepotism

Me when I'm setting up my vpn

i really suffered and still suffer from this, because a. you get to the end of your masters and realize you are two years behind your peers, your resume is empty and now even taking a gap year won't help because you're no longer a grad student and no one gives a fuck about you 2. no one is able to or willing to help you with this.

all this time people were asking stupid questions in class, emailing the professors or bothering the professors during office hours, or going to meetings and social gatherings (none of which you were even aware of because it's a word of mouth thing and you really don't know anybody), and you were completely clueless that you should've done these things because it's networking. grad school is just such a shit show of unwritten rules and no one really tells you about them. job market sucks but academia sucks in a special way.

I have high charisma stats but I cant network. My charm comes from the fact that I'm really funny, but also that i'm a straight shooter, i'm quite open and I dont mince words. This is usually what mean people say as an excuse and much younger me was for sure doing that, but really I was holding back on saying nice things. This means I lose most of this if im interacting with people I dont like at all, and people you need to network with to get money are people I dont like at all. Dudebros sometimes fall into that category and cant tell the difference between open hostility and Sick Burns, so sometimes my vicious mockery has been mistaken for a toxic masculine bonding thing. I went to a real ass Six Sigma holiday party on acid with my friend who worked at a bank and i'm pretty sure I could have landed a six figure job despite telling these people to their faces that I want them to drop dead.

Tldr: its not really a bad thing to not be able to socialize well with awful people.

really makes you wanna

If you put all your points in to luck and charisma you can just network instead of having a job. There's broke as fuck, empty pocketed coke heads getting high as fuck more days than they don't just because they know the right places to sit and the correct moments to make eye contact. More advanced forms of the same hustle playing out around you every day to bypass making an honest living. Sometimes it's vampiric, sometimes they scratch some emotional or magical itch and are valued for things other than their labor.

Speaking as some type of weird waify elf creature I've gotten a lot further in life being generally likeable and associated with rare experiences rather than focusing on professional or academic achievements.

I simply can't network and it screws me over hard. The joys of having autism I guess

By no means am I enjoying the process of trying to uproot everything to go anywhere with anybody to pursue this passion I have for a career. But networking is my favorite part of the process. I say it as someone who drags their feet and pleads to God for a sore throat so I don't have to drive an hour each way to grip and grin.

But holy shit my family and friends are anti-intellectual and couldn't give two shits. I'll never meet PhD candidates unless it's at a networking event. But once I'm there I get catered food, people are dressed nicely, they're open to connecting, they want to share cool things they're doing, and they want to be helpful to others generally & professionally.

Yeah, I have to talk about what I do and what my focus is >100 times, ask for their L*nkedIn 100+ times, and sometimes their ideas are shallow, but that's showbiz, baby.

When someone IRL wants to talk about this thing that I identify with in a way that could make money+serve a niche+not drown oneself in work it's an exciting prospect. If I have a problem (finding it hard to get accepted into a PhD program?) I have a group of people with their "this is how I solved that"s and "this is what I would have done"s and "I had a similar problem"s.

When I went to a government hiring event and I sat around waiting for batches of people to go through into a classroom to listen to a regional manager give the same speech over and over regarding information you could generally summarize in a pamphlet it was so miserable in comparison. Maybe Marx is disappointed in me but I'd much rather network into something than be algorithmically assigned into a cubicle. Their optimism is infectious to me.

I completely understand where you're coming from, especially the whole 'no body warned me' thing.

The entirety of the human experience in society is built on a neurotypical concept of tribalism, of which networking is an essential facet.

If you do not have a close network of individuals you regularly participate in social outings and hang outs with, you will be out of luck at some point no matter how smart you are, no matter how good at a thing you are, no matter if you're the world's only expert at something. If you are not actively and constantly creating and maintaining a frankly exhaustively large social network you are screwed. This is exponentially more true the closer you are to the imperial core of capital, wherein hyper-competitive individualism runs things so the natural contradiction of the human psychological need for close connection creates this caricature of tribalism itself presenting in these weird semi-professional networks of trust that are not based on ability or even the potential for self-gain, but purely vibes.

Best of luck finding an in to any of the in-groups you've missed out on in your under graduate years. It sucks and once you start getting into those groups it just never stops being an extra 10-30 hours of work per week to maintain those connections so you have the right to study or work.

as someone prone to introversion, i love not going to social functions.

basically, my professional success is due to the fact that i found something to be obsessive/fanatical about.

"do you want to meet up for drinks?"
"no, i've got my sweatpants on and it's getting dark."
"there's a guest lecture in the gross auditorium with that dork who wrote that one article."
"i'll be there in 20 minutes."

i always want to talk about or hear about a certain topic and its related fields, and i will talk about it with anyone for as long as they want. that means i never turn off and continue reading/communicating/marinating on this shit. it drove my friends-from-before absolutely bonkers. they did not care and would get annoyed when i spent a whole gathering talking to the one other person who showed that was interested.

this discovery didn't happen until my late 20s and at that point i was a college drop out, so after some idealistic self-exploitation for a few years in the field learning hands on, i went back to school for it and it was completely different than my first time. i didn't care about going to social events unless they were with people in the same orbit of the discipline or potentially had a lens of critical thinking about it. dork confabs, student organizations, symposia, sign me up. i would spend all day on campus going to shit and slithering into conferences. i met other people like me with the same problem and they became my people.

the thing is, there's a functionality to it: nobody can know everything despite their best effort. being able to connect with a lot of people means you have a wide pool of people to ask when you want to bounce an idea around or just get a gut check from someone you trust. the people i met who are similarly afflicted love a rando question out of the blue after months of silence, even though we now live hundreds of miles apart and they have kids and are dealing with a divorce or whatever.

the only effort it takes to maintain these relationships is that they know when they reach out with their own left-field b.s., i will be super into it. i won't gatekeep, i'll be honest about gaps in knowledge and when i'm speculating.

there was a moment when it seemed like "the internet" could replace this, and it is still the first stop for any of us. but we're seeing how rapidly it is becoming filled with slop, hallucinations, and just plain unreliable bullshitting. the academic papers are often paywalled and are too deep/specific to certain conditions so we still need each other to cut through the noise and point out the footholds and dead ends.

when i went back for my undergrad and later for grad school, i understood plainly that as critical as the knowledge i could gain would be and as excited as i was to receive it, that wasn't what i was there for. anyone with an internet connection and time could become highly knowledgeable about almost anything. i was there for the social capital of the credential and the affiliation/community of my cohort and the connections facilitated by my institutional affiliation. school is as much about being inducted into the shared language as it is about the knowledge of the discipline.

anyway, all this to say, i think the only way networking becomes less of a chore is if you look for and pursue knowledge of the things that ignited your interest. in that way, networking becomes an additional source of knowledge. the academy itself is a total shitshow and its super easy to get through it without building a professional network, but the infrastructure is there to build something potentially massive and far reaching. the other thing is, network building is cumulative. at first you know nobody or only have a few weak connections and it sucks, but as you find others and become known as a generally agreeable but passionate person, those connections build on each other and interweave until it takes less and less effort to keep it growing.

so if you end up going into the academy again, surrender to your innermost nerd. also, if there are international students in your field to meet, they can be awesome to connect with. they are always at the conferences. many have so deeply embraced their academic interest, they've come across the world to a weird-ass culture. that is a hardcore nerd move. likely the research discipline and jargon will be the only thing you have in common. the ones i met had these incredible experiences and very novel (to me) interests/perspective in the field, yet they were mostly isolated from the campus community, sadly. if you make a cool friend, that has the potential to open your professional development network to a completely different geographic context. major game changer.

the most galling to me is seeing posts like "networking is just making friends! it can be fun!" and other toxic positivity bs. just unwitting beneficiaries of this one violent aspect of the whole rotten system working to uphold it without realising. don't see it on here but it's a genre of post on tumblr that grinds my fuckin gears