For most professions, networking has one and only one goal: finding a better job than the one you already have. While that might be a primary goal for graduate students and postdocs, anyone with a tenured position has other priorities. "Your peers are not just going to hire you later, they're also going to review your papers and your grant proposals," explains Donald Burke, a biochemist at the University of Indiana.
That means that scientists don't have to just keep up with what others in their field are doing, they have to build relationships with each other. Sometimes it requires picking up the phone and calling a peer when there's really no pressing news or request needed. And that's the part that some researchers don't like to do. Often their work schedule is so crowded that the concept of calling another scientist just to chat seems preposterous. Yet it can ...
