The speed networking project co-led by Karen Leung, a biotechnology faculty member at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), has developed guidelines for speed networking events that encompass multiple 12-to-15 minute casual conversations between community college biotechnology students and industry representatives.

Karen Leung and her co-principal investigators developed speed networking guidelines that can be used with students in any discipline.

With data from more than 24 networking events encapsulating more than 1,000 direct student-industry interactions, Leung reports that speed networking benefits not only students, but the companies whose employees participate and the two-year college programs that organize the online networking sessions.

Speed networking “helps industry understand who our students are ... [and] how amazing our students are,” she said.

And, the three community college biotechnology programs engaged in the Increasing Student Retention and Recruitment through Alumni Programs, Speed Networking, and Industry Engagement project, which is funded with an Advanced Technological Education grant (Award 2202011), have retained more students and grown their rosters of industry partners.

“The immediate impact seems very positive,” Leung said. Her advice to faculty who want to begin offering speed networking is: “Keep it as simple as possible.”

Project Tests Methods for Helping Community College Students Build Professional Networks

Leung’s initial goal for speed networking when she started offering it as part of a biotechnology career exploration course in 2017 was to help students become comfortable talking with biotechnicians and scientists and build their professional networks.

“In the United States, networking is extraordinarily important, that is how most people find jobs and if our students didn't have that capacity, that was going to really limit them,” she said.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the speed networking sessions that she and her colleague Golnar Afshar organized at CCSF were held once a semester and in-person for students to talk one-on-one with alumni or other industry representatives.

When in-person instruction was paused during the Covid-19 pandemic, they continued to offer speed networking via Zoom. The virtual meeting technology worked so well that is the format they continue to use and is also used by the biotech programs at Austin Community College and Johnston Community College, which are partners on the ATE project.

During the project’s speed networking sessions, students meet one or two at a time with an industry representative in Zoom breakout rooms. During a typical two-hour event with 20 students, each student talks with five or six different people from industry.

Leung said the two-hour virtual sessions are more sustainable than in-person meetings because no one has to travel to campus. She acknowledges that some of the dynamics of in-person meetings are lost, but costs are lower because she no longer serves food to participants, no longer needs to arrange room reservations, or parking — and there is no set-up or clean-up after. Most importantly the sessions fit more easily into people’s schedules.

Speed networking events at recent ATE Principal Investigators’ Conferences have utilized information from the Increasing Student Retention and Recruitment project. (Photo source: AACC/EPNAC.com) 

“We're just lowering the activation energy,” she said of the project’s effort to keep things simple and eliminate participation barriers.

During a typical session about 20% of the industry representatives are repeat participants. Leung said the positive experiences at networking sessions have led many industry representatives to volunteer to conduct mock interviews and review resumes, which are two of the other ways the CCSF biotech program asks industry partners to help the department.

Guidelines for Hosting Speed Networking Events for Community College Students

The guidelines that Leung and her co-principal investigators have developed with ATE grant support include a timeline for organizing and coordinating speed networking events, advice and template flyers for recruiting industry participants and maintaining contact with alumni, strategies for helping students prepare for the events, including development of a one-minute “elevator pitch,” and tips for starting and sustaining networking initiatives.

The project has also developed assessment tools to measure the immediate impacts of these events.

In 2024 the project reported that 100% of the 161 alumni and industry representatives who completed surveys after speed networking reported the events were rewarding experiences for them. 

The project’s data from 258 students’ survey responses to speed networking include the following:

• More than 96% agreed that speed networking sessions influenced their confidence that they could succeed in a biotech career, gave them a better understanding of the variety of biotech jobs, and provided connections for future job searches.
• 93% reported the sessions influenced their desire to pursue a bioscience-biotech career.
• 92% reported the sessions influenced their desired to take more bioscience-biotech courses at their local community college.

Speed Networking Responds to Need Leung Noticed as a Student

Since she was a community college student herself, Leung said she’s been aware that community college students lack connections with employers, and she is driven to do what she can to provide them.

Leung attended Santa Rosa Junior College for three years. Her initial postsecondary education plan was to major in English, but her first college biology course caused a big career shift. She switched education paths and went on to transfer to the University of California, Davis, where she completed a bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in genetics.

Leung mentioned that many of her Santa Rosa Junior STEM courses were superior to her upper division training. “We had these amazing teachers and these amazing programs, which quite frankly, in many ways were better than my upper division training at UC, but we didn't have connections to the rest of the scientific community,” she said.

This, she explained, is what made her recognize the need for greater networking opportunities for community college students: “When you think about ‘Why do people go to Stanford or Harvard or Yale?’ ...  [its] the alumni networks, those things that are built out of the Ivy League schools. That's where people are prospering.

“And I want that for all of our community college students. They all deserve that.”