I always thought it wouldn't need much networking, but more and more I'm thinking it's perhaps as important (if not more important) as talent.
How important is networking in academia?
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It can be difficult to orthoganalize the two, most people aren't going to network with you unless you bring something to the table. In fact I would say that academic networking is the most talent driven kind of networking.
Yeah, but if you are lazy or shy and don't go to conferences, meet, and talk to new people, that can be a dimension orthogonal to talent.
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Is this directed at a particular person?
I am going to miss the birth of my child to go to a conference. Maybe some great networking. My wife would a) kill me, and b) divorce me when she recovers.
People have reasons not to play with you even though your life is wide open, you have very little teaching, and going to conferences is what you do.
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It matters for borderline cases. Good networking could be the career-decider for a decent-but-not-brilliant researcher. It could also be a career-decider for a very below average DEI case (cough PH cough).
On the extreme cases (where you're extremely talented, or clearly untalented and lack any DEI stuff) it makes no difference.
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The job market is extremely competitive, and there are 500+ applicants for any given academic position. If you think that somehow the quality of your papers will shine above the rest in such a competitive pool, you are simply naive.
In the vast vast majority of cases, the person hired has some kind of network connection with the search committee or school that hires them. For new PhDs, that connection might come through an advisor, and for seasoned JMCs they have to personally know people. But it is exceedingly rare for someone with absolutely no ties whatsoever to be successfully hired.
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It matters most at the top of the profession. To get a paper in the top 5, it helps a lot for the editor and referees to have seen the paper and given their comments before. To get a job at HRM, someone needs to have told them to look for you on the market.
For ordinary grunts, it matters less. The editors of mid-tier journals don't know very many of the people whose papers they accept. The referees won't typically know the authors. Top 100 departments don't have connections with the people they hire because there is such a huge pool of potential applicants.
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Networking is very important. You need to get to know people. You need job offers and that requires letter writers from others in the profession.
Above all, you NEED CO-AUTHORS!
You cannot sole author papers at the level of top 5 econ journals or top 3 finance journals on any regular basis, no matter how talented you are.