Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Targeted Audience: Students, Recent Graduates

I already emphasized the importance of building a strong network in a previous post your network is your net worth. This suggestion is the next step of building a strong network. We not only need to build strong relationships but also long lasting relationships. Building a network is not about just connecting with numerous people. Its not about just increasing number of friends in your Orkut or MySpace network. I am talking about serious relationships in which you care for the other party.

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want. – Zig Ziglar

You need to develop trust in these relationships. My mentor says, there are only two types of relationships –

1. Long term.
2. Very long term.

The rest are not relationships, they are just casual transactions.

For example, building relationships with your friends, teaching assistants, professors can be a huge plus in the long term. You never know how one of these people will help you in your future professional dreams. But they will care for you in future only if you keep caring them.

When I graduated from the school, and started my professional career, I learned few challenges and interesting aspects of VLSI design about which I was not aware of when I was in school. But industry people thought that I would knew this because it must be taught in the school. I realized that my professor didn’t cover this topic in his course. As an action item, I not only suggested to include this topic in the course to my professor, but also provided relevant reading material, problems to solve, application notes to him. Of course he thanked me for my deed and assured me to ponder over it seriously.

After that, we keep going back and forth on some interesting topics. He helps me a lot in my decisions, and career moves, at the same time, I also try to add some value in his life.

We have to understand that relationships will only sustain when there is mutual value. Single sided relationships will end eventually. So we have to diligently work on building long lasting relationships when we are in school or in big company.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Beyond Intelligence