By Wanyi Lin
Last year, students in FirstGen Ahead’s inaugural cohort were lucky enough to have their Networking Reception at the Founder’s home. Due to the ongoing global health crisis, an in-person gathering of our second-year cohort would have been impossible. Instead, we had our networking event over Zoom.
On December 14th, FirstGen Ahead’s virtual networking event included 24 people – college students, coaches, and guests. Our guests had experience in areas of interest to our cohort of students — science, technology, data analytics, law, real estate, business, health care, sports, and education.
We kicked off the event with brief introductions that included one piece of helpful career advice we could give and or had received. The advice ranged from networking extensively to being open to serendipity to following your path to not knowing what you want to do until you try.
Introductions then led into two sets of intentional breakout rooms with about five people per room and with each group discussion lasting for 15-minutes. Students had the opportunity to speak with coaches and/or guests about their career interests and ask questions.
Near the end, the full group reconvened, and each person shared concluding words to describe how they felt. Some of the words were motivated, confident, impressed, happy, and determined.
Over the course of this hour-long event, we students obtained incredible knowledge on how to advance our careers and how to expand our networks. Our guests’ dedication in sharing their own experience and providing advice on how to move forward in a particular field is incredibly valuable to us.
