The New Rules for Networking in the Pandemic

 Maraya Camazine, a third-year medical student at the University of Missouri, had long anticipated schmoozing with others at the big conference of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma held every September.

“Your third year is essentially your last chance to make good impressions on people,” says the 28-year-old. “All of these trauma surgeons go to the same conferences every year, and so as a med student your goal is to find a research mentor, go with them and then meet all of these doctors and be able to sit and discuss next steps in the field.”

But in June the association announced the conference that was to be held at the Hilton Waikoloa in Hawaii would take place online instead because of the pandemic. It wasn’t the same. “There’s something very easy about sliding into a conversation where you’re being introduced by someone who’s already accepted in the field,”  computer engineering careers says. “This was more of a stagnant chat room.”

As the coronavirus has forced many people to work from home, it’s also disrupted a fixture of career life: networking, a quasi-business, quasi-social activity that typically happened everywhere from conference halls to bars to corporate mixers and golf courses. With social distancing in effect for the foreseeable future, networking online—which some businesspeople were already doing pre-Covid as a secondary pursuit—has become the primary way to connect.