From the July 2013 edition of Readers Digest (www.readersdigest.com) comes this excellent example of “networking”, which probably is a fancy way of saying, “just have a conversation with the people you interact with”.

In summary, a cab driver in New York saw a man flag him down as the man came out of the hospital steps.  The man needed to go to LaGuardia Airport.  The passenger started a conversation by asking about the life of driving a cab.  Through the trip, the cab driver learned that the passenger worked in the neurology department at New York Hospital.  The cab driver had a 15 year old son who was doing well in school but needed a summer job, which he mentioned to his passenger.

The passenger said that the medical students had a summer research project and perhaps he could help them out.  He wrote down his name and contact information and gave it to the cab driver.  Under paternal duress, the cab driver’s son wrote to the doctor.  Two weeks later he got an interview and then was given a job for the summer, which led to a job the following summer.  The physician passenger later wrote a recommendation for the cab driver’s son upon his graduation from high school.  The cab driver’s son was accepted at Brown University and continued to work at the hospital during college.  The cab-driver’s son was accepted into medical school with a recommendation from his dad’s cab fare from 7 years earlier. The cab driver and the doctor never saw each other since that day.  The son of a taxi driver went on to become the OB-GYN chief resident at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.  That son’s children went on to become a cardiologist, endocrinologist and attorney; quite possibly all because of a conversation held in a taxi cab many years earlier.