In the closing weeks of the BIP, our outstanding group of young professionals hosted a networking lunch with other individuals who worked or were interning in the Crawfordsville-Montgomery County area. Employees from local staples, including Lakeside Publishing and Hoosier Heartland State Bank, among others, were kind enough to grace us with their presence and give our group insights into their respective industries.
We were tasked with making the space we were given presentable to our guests and assigning roles to everyone in our group. People delegated themselves into different roles, including greeting people in the elevator, making introductions, and showing people to the buffet. We learned valuable lessons in our minor escapade in event planning. To that point, we were all blissfully unaware of the actual work and strategy that went into making people feel welcome and comfortable in a networking situation. Small things that we had never taken the time to think about, like the way the room was set up, were among our main focuses at the start. We had yet to learn how the way tables were set up in the space could affect people’s comfort to roam and have conversations. Our primary goal was to ensure that everyone in attendance people, who were almost all strangers to one another, felt entirely comfortable being able to approach and discuss their careers with our group.
We also had to focus on the human interaction element of a networking event. It was natural and easy to want to walk into the room, approach people, and immediately begin talking about yourself, as every intern in that space was eager to talk about what we had dipped our toes into. However, one of the first rules of networking that we were instructed in was to “be interested and not interesting.” This meant that to make people feel comfortable and willing to talk, you had to show genuine interest in what they were doing, be ready to dive deeper into whatever topic they were discussing and ask questions that could be expanded upon. In all, the event was an outstanding success as every person there was able to interact with people in industries that they otherwise may have never considered, along with building new connections in the community in which they will be living for the next three years.
