Spring into Action: Helping Students Grow their Network Using Informational Interviewing

Lauren R. Barrett

Some of the most valuable networking resources for students are rooted in their family, friends and community connections. These are aunts and uncles, neighbors, members of religious and community organizations, and colleagues of family members. To help students bridge networking connections, family members will often facilitate introductions, pass along resumes, and make calls on the behalf of students; however, one of the best ways to help your student build a stronger, more influential network is by encouraging them to grow their informational interviewing skills.

These transferable skills help students grow as more confident communicators and enable them to articulate their strengths and goals to others, which is an essential skill for the “big” interview! Practicing interviewing skills within their network can help students polish their delivery, and as family members, you can help your student to gain this valuable skill.

Step One: helping students identify networking connections within the community. Your family, friends and colleagues can all be career resources, and part of this is teaching students to identify these individuals. Drawing on connections related to industry and skill set, you can help your student map their most valuable resources and focus their attention on building these networking connections. Remember, meaningful network connections have relationships built on something in common – a field of study, a passion for a topic, or a shared skill set. Encourage your students to seek out UMBC alumni in their career field, or come to the Career Center to gain networking skills through one of our events. The wider a student’s network, the more potential opportunities exist.

Step Two: allowing your student to do the talking! Family members are eager to help students make these connections, but the students are best served by taking the connection and building their own relationship through informational interviewing. The best informational interviewing is not based on job seeking; rather, it’s based on having an open mind and a willingness to listen and learn from a professional in the field, and asking questions that will spark conversations and build rapport. Encourage students to set up a separate meeting time in a professional environment so that they can gain perspective about the work environment while having some of their questions answered. Some sample informational interviewing questions are:

·         What skills and characteristics are most important to do well in this type of work?

·         What might I expect in a typical day working in this job?

·         As a student, what do you recommend that I do prior to graduation to make myself a marketable candidate for this work?

·         Are you a member of any professional organizations related to this field, or can you recommend any for students?

Step Three: encouraging students to foster their network. Often, we make wonderful networking connections in passing moments at events or through shared connections; however, without continuing these conversations and following up, these connections fizzle out, so the art of following up is essential. Encourage your students to write thank you notes, reach out with career updates, and make time for using LinkedIn and other networking platforms to keep these connections thriving. These seedlings may blossom into opportunities in the big picture!

Residential Students, Let your voice be heard!

UMBC Dining is conducting a focus group for residential students and wants to hear from YOU!

UMBC Dining is continually striving to enhance and improve our services on campus. One of the best ways to do this is to hear directly from you! By attending a focus group you can share your opinions, suggestions, and likes so that we can ensure your experience in our dining locations is positive. 

Our focus groups are informal, fun, and informative. If you’ve wondered why something is a particular way, this is a great opportunity to find out, though we always look forward to your feedback. And we enjoy hearing from the community, even if you do not visit the campus dining locations often (we want to know why!) We encourage you to ask your colleagues for their feedback and bring their thoughts and comments with you to our focus group. Each participant gets $50 Free UMBC Reward Dollars added to their UMBC Red Card!

We will be hosting  targeted focus group sessions for residential students on Tuesday 4/4, Wednesday 4/5 and Thursday 4/6.  The session will last approximately 60-75 minutes.  The discussion is for research purposes only to better learn how we can meet your dining needs in both the short and long term.  At no time will anyone try to sell you anything.  You will be given $50 FREE UMBC REWARD DOLLARS TO BE USED AT ANY DINING LOCATION for your participation.

Spaces are limited, so can we count on your participation?  Upon completing the screening questionnaire, we will send you a confirmation email with the exact date and time and give you a reminder call closer to the focus group date.  Please fill out the questionnaire https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/umbcdining

Meet Stephanie,

She is a double major student working on her degrees in Computer Science and Psychology. She is a member of the Honors College, the Vice President of the Computer Science Education club, a member of the Retriever Robotics Club, a CWIT affiliate, and the Curriculum Development Coordinator for the Creative Coders Program. She is also a Research Assistant for CS Matters in Maryland and a Research Assistant for the Multi-Agent Planning and Learning (MAPLE) lab. Previously, she was the Secretary of QUMBC. Her future ambitions are to continue researching Artificial Intelligence or a related field and to continue with outreach in computer science education.

Stephanie's research will explore a recently developed method of hierarchical planning: a hierarchy of abstract Markov decision processes (AMDPs). AMDPs seek to address the immensely challenging problems that decision-making agents face when operating in large environments to solve complex tasks. A hierarchy of AMDPs provides a framework for decomposing such problems into distinct, related subtasks. Her previous tasks for research in this area were to design an AMDP hierarchy for a house-building domain and to collaborate with her lab members to research and write a paper combining the R-MAX algorithm with AMDPs. Currently, she is working with her lab members to research and write a paper on constructing and reasoning over composite objects.

Read more about her research here…