During my time at GW, I’ve come to realize just how much success depends on who you know. Instead of prioritizing hard work, students tend to rely on pre-existing connections to score prestigious internships. Those lacking these connections ahead of college build them from scratch, often spending more time on networking than classes. Universities like GW place a heavy emphasis on networking for professional development, with counselors claiming the job market will reward those who can practice this effectively. But this mindset causes issues when students begin seeing all relationships as transactional, viewing them not as a place for growth, learning or comfort but rather calculating gain.
In 2016, LinkedIn reported that 70 percent of people hired had some form of a pre-existing personal connection at their respective companies. It is therefore unsurprising that so many of the conversations GW students have tend to center on internships and building professional relationships. Networking is inevitably important for career success, but can result in students thinking of connections as a form of currency, leading them to collect as many as they can without actually reaching out to any in meaningful ways. This leads to students applying the wrong logic when forming any personal relationship.
With society equating money and success to connections, the rise of transactional relationships is inevitable. At GW, networking has moved beyond a valuable skill and transformed into something entirely different. Even student organizations run the same way, with the path to most of them being to have existing relations with those in them. It has begun to change the way that students are interacting and forming relationships and is primarily a product of the blurred line between friendship and benefit — mirroring the broader D.C. climate.
When we were growing up, the question that everyone asked was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At GW, our main question is this: “Who do you know that will help you achieve it?” The answer to this question lies in the concept of social capital, the idea that our value comes from who we know and that our social connections are typically valuable because they provide economic benefits. Given we are in the heart of the most powerful political capital in the world, this tainted philosophy hits harder than if we were students at any other institution.
But we forget that our value tends to come from so much more than resume lines and the number of LinkedIn connections we have. The skills and lessons that we learn from forming genuine and personal connections are the ones that contribute the most to our personal growth and development. The system of forming transactional and unauthentic connections is also extremely emotionally taxing, with students learning to masterfully fake authenticity in order to build these faux relationships in the first place. Connections based on inauthenticity are almost always fleeting. In the end, all it leads to is social exhaustion. Unfortunately, such “friendships” result from the fact that we’ve started seeing relationships in a completely wrong light, drawing from our transactional and professional bonds and mimicking those same experiences for all our relationships.
These are the human consequences of us operating on market logic, which rewards gains more than an individual’s growth and well-being. We have normalized seeing networking opportunities as nothing more than a chance to snatch up an internship or a new LinkedIn connection rather than a place for personal growth or a chance to learn new things, and we regularly see students mistaking strategic socializing for genuine connection, later questioning if they’ve even formed any genuine friendships.
I am not critiquing networking — it is an essential practice, especially at GW, in the heart of a city that runs on politics. But every relationship should not be a means to an end and strategy shouldn’t be mistaken for sincerity because that is precisely how we lose out on the art of genuine human interaction altogether.
Minahil Umar, a sophomore studying economics and business, is an opinions writer.
