Growing Up Comm

Lara Schreurs 0:02
ICA Presents. Welcome to Growing Up Comm, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. In this series, we talk about topics primarily relevant to students and early career scholars. I’m your host, Lara Schreurs. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the School for Mass Communication Research at the KU Leuven in Belgium. In today’s episode, I will talk with communication scholar Dr. Mesfin Bekalu about building strong professional connections through networking. And he’ll share some useful tips for early career scholars looking to build their careers internationally and interculturally.

So, Dr. Bekalu, welcome here. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you today. But can I please first ask you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your research trajectory.

Mesfin Bekalu 1:04
Thank you, Lara, for this opportunity. My name is Mesfin, and I am a research scientist here at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. I got my PhD from Leuven. My research focus is on health communication in general. I am interested in looking at the intended and unintended effects of media and communication on health-related outcomes on knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. In general, that is the area I'm working on.

Lara Schreurs 1:38
Which positions did you hold after you obtained your PhD in Leuven? Did you immediately go to Harvard?

Mesfin Bekalu 1:44
When I completed my PhD in Leuven in 2014, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in Leuven for one year, and then I came to Harvard. I also had a brief stay in Ethiopia for six months, as I'm originally from Ethiopia. So I went there and I served in a university as an assistant professor there for six months.

Lara Schreurs 2:12
For a student and early career researcher such as myself, that sounds like a very impressive international trajectory. So do you think networking played a role in that?

Mesfin Bekalu 2:23
I would say yeah. Like I said, I am originally from Ethiopia. That's where I grew up and did my undergrad. So I had to take these proactive efforts to reach out to people in my field in order to advance my studies. So it was not through meeting people at conferences as such, but I had to send cold emails, unsolicited emails to professors in my field, looking for opportunities to network with them and to advance my career. So yeah, I would say networking played a role in my career advancement.

Lara Schreurs 3:01
How would you define networking? Is it just reaching out to people, or how should we see the concept of networking? Because it's really a buzzword for us in academia, you have to network. But what is it actually, or how should we see it?

Mesfin Bekalu 3:15
It's basically reaching out to people, creating new connections, creating new relationships, and also maintaining that relationship. That's the most important thing. Maintaining our connections, our relationships is also critical.

Lara Schreurs 3:32
And do you have specific tips for networking at conferences?

Mesfin Bekalu 3:35
Networking is very important for any professional at any stage of his or her career. But it's particularly very important for students and early-career, early-stage investigators or scholars, because students and early-stage scholars can use networking as an important tool for advancing their career goals. This is something I learned from my mentors. Whenever you go to a conference, I think networking needs to be one of your main objectives. Our main goal going to conference is to present our paper, get feedback on it, and learn from others. But networking should also be an objective. So perhaps one of the things that we need to do is having a shortlist of the people whom we want to meet and network with, and perhaps reaching out to them before the conference and see if we can set up a meeting to talk about our work and stuff. Having networking as one of our objectives, having a plan, in short, would be very helpful.

Lara Schreurs 4:47
Yeah, I really can relate to that, because the first time I went to ICA, it was super overwhelming. There were more than 3,000 people there. And you see all these big names that you always are referring to their work, and I just didn't dare to reach out to them. So the tip that you now give to actually reach out before the conference so it's an easier step to have a conversation with them there, I think that's actually very valuable because I never thought about doing that. It was just see what happens at the conference. But doing it before, I think that might help a lot in really meeting these people.

Mesfin Bekalu 5:22
I would think so, yeah. All of us are busy, and especially our seniors in the field are busy. There may be many people who want to meet with them and have some time with them. So if it's possible, reaching out to them, telling them about our work, and asking them about the possibility to set up a brief meeting, I think that would be helpful.

Lara Schreurs 5:46
And as you are our more senior scholar, would you react to all emails you get from junior scholars that now will use this strategy? Isn't it overwhelming their mailbox, or would they really take the time for doing that? Or how do you see it as a more senior scholar?

Mesfin Bekalu 6:02
I think that's a real problem. We may not get a response, or our emails may not be read at all. But I think it goes back to the way we craft our email, the subject line, etc. If we are very careful in those things, our emails may have a better chance of being read. But I think if we try that, at the conference, we have the opportunity to meet and greet and then to ask them if they have some time to talk with us about their work and our work.

Lara Schreurs 6:34
So we just need to be considerate about people's time also. Because if we have these senior scholars and we're taking all of their time, they probably won't like you maybe that much anymore. But if you just think about it a little bit when we are having this conversation and be just polite, and run the conversation quickly enough, I would think that can help.

Mesfin Bekalu 6:56
We should consider the fact that especially senior people, they're very much hard-pressed for time, especially at conferences. They have a lot of things to do, a lot of people to meet. Being sensitive to the fact that they are busy, I think that's a great point.

Lara Schreurs 7:11
Indeed. And can you tell us some personal stories about your first experiences as an academic in networking, going to your first conference? How was that for you?

Mesfin Bekalu 7:20
Yeah, my first conference was in 2012. It was to the International AIDS Association Conference, because my doctoral research was on HIV/AIDS behavior change communication. I indeed went to ICA, but my first conference was to the International AIDS Conference in Washington DC. I now know that I should have a list of people that I'm going to meet at the conference. But then, I didn't do the homework. I was not well prepared. So I didn't do well in my first conference. But then, with the advice and the tips I got from my mentors, I made sure that I'm going to meet XYZ at this conference. So my first one was not successful, I would say.

Lara Schreurs 8:12
And did you grow in the later conferences you went to?

Mesfin Bekalu 8:15
Yes. I took the lesson. And then before the conference, I do some homework, I do some research and see who is there, who is participating in this and that session, and how am I going to meet him. Mainly, I use that opportunity to meet people whom I know. But like I said, networking is mainly for creating, for building relationships. And perhaps I may not have done enough in that regard.

Lara Schreurs 8:43
Yeah, but that's also the most scary part, I think. I now go to the ICA conference, I've met some people the year before, and it's easy to just go on the opening reception and talk with them again and catch up a bit on what you've done. So I think the most difficult thing is actually to meet new people. Especially when you know some, you stay in your circle. So that's what I struggle often with myself in the networking events.

Mesfin Bekalu 9:10
It's obviously intimidating to talk to new people, to talk to people that we know through their work, through their publications. But when we happen to meet them in person for the first time, it will not be an easy encounter. If our goal is to create, to build the relationship, the network, we need to work out that intimidating situation.

Lara Schreurs 9:35
Here in Belgium and in the Netherlands, we have a local conference, and once a professor said to me there, it's not important to attend the sessions, it's more important to attend the drink after the sessions. What do you think of that?

Mesfin Bekalu 9:49
The main idea here is the informal interaction, the informal communication that we have with our colleagues is more important than the formal sessions that we attend in seminar rooms. I think that's true. And for networking, I think that's very important. We need to meet people in the informal context, in the hangout session. That's where we can have some private, some personal interactions. And we'll be able to get the opportunity to talk about our projects, our illustrations, our plans. I definitely agree, that's more important than the formal sessions. Because the formal presentations, you will be able to see the recorded sessions, and you will be able to read the paper once it is published. But you will not be able to get that informal interaction, that informal session, once it's gone.

Lara Schreurs 10:46
So next ICA, there will be no one in the session rooms except for the presenters, and everyone will be at the restaurant, or in the bar, or in the lobby?

Mesfin Bekalu 10:55
Yeah.

Lara Schreurs 10:56
You were saying before that, for you, coming from Ethiopia, you were emailing people, not even at conferences, just to reach out and find opportunities like that. So for me, networking was always really bound to conferences. Throughout the year, I don't think I really network with people. So do you think that this is also important, to try to keep connections or build connections outside conferences, and how should we do that?

Mesfin Bekalu 11:22
We are transitioning from entirely in-person kind of doing conferences to hybrid, to a virtual mode. So we should be able to do that, to do networking in virtual context and reaching out to people via email or other means of communication. Like I said, when I first reached out to my professors in Norway–by the way, that's where I did my master's degree–there wasn't even email. There was email, there was internet, I’m not that old. We did not have access to internet, most of us there. So the first thing I did was I sent mail, through postal services. And then I received a response. And I was able to learn about the opportunities to do my master's degree in Norway. And I got a scholarship. I went there. And I still keep in touch with those people. I think that that's what I said earlier, maintaining our connections, maintaining our relationship. I send out an email at least once a year. I send a Merry Christmas email to all my professors in Norway. That's one way of maintaining my connection. So anytime I need anything from them, a recommendation letter or whatever, I'm still fresh in their memory. So if I don't do that, they may forget me. I was just one of their students.

Lara Schreurs 12:54
And you do that because you try to maintain all these connections, because you never know when you might still need one of them?

Mesfin Bekalu 12:56
Exactly. And I also owe them something. I learned a lot of things from them. There were very helpful once upon a time in my career, in my studentship. So I consider it as one way of expressing my gratitude. I’m still connected. I still think of you. That's one of the messages I want to communicate. From a more career-related point of view, I also feel that I might need something from them one day, like recommendation letters, or some kind of support or witness. So yeah, it's really good to maintain your connections, even if you may not meet them at a conference in a regular way.

Lara Schreurs 13:40
And because we are talking about it, we will have to network virtually, especially now. Also, virtual conferences have become the new normal with the COVID-19 pandemic. We were very lucky this year with ICA that we had the in-person component, but there was also a big online component, because we had a hybrid conference. And I also don't think that they will quickly move again to full in-person conferences, because there are many advantages from the hybrid part that people from all over the world can participate without having to travel to far places. So, for us, as the Students and Early Career Advisory Committee, we always organize an in-person reception. And we tried this year to have the online reception thing going on. But it's always difficult to really have the networking experience there or for students to meet each other. Do you have some tips for this online environment, how we can improve meeting each other and networking in a more informal way?

Mesfin Bekalu 14:35
Right. I think that's the inherent problem associated with virtual conferences. We cannot have all the flavors of in-person conferences in a virtual city. But depending on the technology of the platform, there may be some ways to have a private connection, and like you say, participating in a virtual hangout.

Lara Schreurs 15:00
It's really some barrier we have to overcome if we want to make the hybrid format work. Because otherwise, it's just a problem, again, of the privileged people that can travel and have the in-person component, and the less privileged people with less funding who live farther away, in countries that just don't have the means to travel. They miss out on the most important part of conferences, what we discussed, and that is networking. So I really struggle with this, how we should approach this.

Mesfin Bekalu 15:28
Yeah. It's really a very important thing to address. Like you said, it's likely to bring about some problems, like creating inequalities. If possible, I would go for the in-person one for all the reasons we say. But like you said, from the conference organizers’ point of view, it may be cost effective to do it part virtual, part in person. So I would say doing it part virtual, part in person might be helpful.

Lara Schreurs 15:58
And then on a different note, do you have specific advice for how to network internationally, or maybe I have to say, interculturally. How should we approach people from different cultures? Because we are really used to our own style of communicating. And I know that in different cultures, it's not always the same way how we do research, how we approach people. So how should we be sensitive for these things, or how do we build an intercultural network?

Mesfin Bekalu 16:24
Given globalization, I personally do not think cultural differences would be a big problem. Like you said, people in different parts of the world, people in different disciplines, in different universities, in different organizations, so we need to be aware of those differences that we work in different contexts.

You reminded me of what I observed in Norway, and what my colleague from Italy is telling me. Norway is an egalitarian society. Everybody speaks on equal terms. Everyone is on first-name basis. You don't address a senior professor by surname, you just call him by his first name. But in Italy, that's totally different. You need to be respectful, you need to address your professor, your mentor, by his last name, using his title, etc. So, during our communication, via email or in person, I think we need to be cognizant of those differences.

Lara Schreurs 17:30
I think it's really important to take into account, because if I would send an email to a professor here in Belgium, I would also tend to use the first name, because we always do that in our interactions. But even, as you said, in European countries it can differ so vastly. I didn't know that about Italy actually. Do you have more specific advice for very introverted students and early career scholars, how they navigate the ICA big conference, for instance? It's quite intimidating, especially for people that are not very at ease in big groups. How can we get the best experience in terms of networking out of conference?

Mesfin Bekalu 18:10
It's not easy to talk to new people, and especially for students and early-stage scholars, that might be even more intimidating. It all depends on practice and experience. You may not do well in your first or second try. But the more you work on it, the better you will get. So I would say no matter what your communication style is, whether you are introverted or extroverted, whether you are shy, if you have that goal of connecting with people for different reasons, you need to do it. And you need to practice. You should not give up.

Lara Schreurs 18:51
Great advice. I already got some tips for myself for the next conferences. I would like to thank you. I think that our students and early career members that will listen to this podcast episode will learn a lot from hearing your insights on networking. So thank you for having this conversation with us. And I really hope we get the opportunity to meet each other in person soon.

Mesfin Bekalu 19:12
I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. In our next ICA, probably. Thank you, Lara, for this opportunity.

Lara Schreurs 19:22
Growing Up Comm is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. Our producer is Kate In. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by William Van De Crommert. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests, and Growing Up Comm overall. Thanks for listening.