A Circle of Colleagues Posted on December 3, 2007 Gary S. Sachs (bio) relates how technology has helped him establish and maintain professional relationships, including those with colleagues who live and work overseas.

The other thing I think that’s underappreciated about career paths are how important other colleagues are. And finding colleagues that you feel comfortable with and trust, and maintaining those relationships. I think early in my career the opportunities to do that were much more limited, because locality and communication were limiting factors.

But now with the Internet, with jet travel, the circle of colleagues that I’ve been able to maintain relationships with over the years has been a great source of support, and I think nurturing that circle of colleagues is something that is a whole lot easier to do, but a very important thing to have an eye out for.

Some of the colleagues that I interact with regularly, I see them in the course of a year, more than I see my very best friends from college or medical school, for instance. And I’ve gotten to know them and their families. That’s a real bonus.

But just in terms of professional relationships, being able to contact that statistician from France that I met or the geneticist who’s working in Singapore, those are things that I think have proven to be great benefits to me, and I hope to them as well, because you really get to know people. And those connections I think help you establish networks beyond that quite often.

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