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Tuesday, Apr 23, 2024

Tedx Talks — Getting Here From There

Sunny Bates is all about networking. Adrift after college, with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Energy Economics but, perhaps counterintuitively, no desire to work “for an oil company in Saudi Arabia,” Bates found herself in a series of jobs that yielded no apparent career advancement. Except for one fact: she had built a network. Every job she had, Bates realized she was building connections. What’s more, she found that she enjoyed putting people together. She had seen how ideas had come from unlikely sources in her life, and wanted to connect people in her life in the same way.

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“Don’t make divisions over where things are going to come from,” Bates said, “because you don’t know.”

Bates found that there was a “give and a get” in every encounter, and that everyone benefitted from increased connectivity. Her advice to college students and graduates was to start building their networks, and to take chances.

She ended with, “Just get started. Just do it.”


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