Hillman Student Recognizes the Value of Networking

By Antony Canales
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On Tuesday, December 5, 2017, in the morning I had the honor to attend the annual Commercial Broker Breakfast networking event. The event was sponsored by Rockville Economic Development, Inc. and held from 8:00 am to 10:00 am at ASB Real Estate Investment as the host sponsor. This annual event  encourages local architects, attorneys, contractors, and engineers to gather for one day and network. Gustavo Ramirez and I represented the Hillman Entrepreneurs Program. 
The event was mostly networking. At the event, Gustavo and I met Jim Toy who has his own newsletter company in Montgomery County. Mr. Toy told us that he attends every networking and trade show event in the Maryland area and he writes about them. To have access to his newspaper, people must register online. We also met a representative from Metro Engineering Services. He told us that the company started in 2005 in Rockville with only six civil engineers. The company mostly works with developers to work on projects. We also met representatives from Human Scale. They explained to us that the company mainly focuses high-performance tools that support healthy, more active way of working. They showed us some products such as monitors arms, sit/stand, and lighting. We were amazed by the products this company offers just to improve a healthy work environment. Lastly, we met a representative from the City of Rockville. She was there to promote rentable community centers for start-up companies. She was impressed by the courage we had to attend this fantastic event. She told us that it was a great way to participate in activities like this for us to lose the fear of networking. Four sure we were terrified because we were the only students there, but we stayed there the whole time until the event finished.
I was impressed by the number of people who attended this event. Most of them were engineers and contractors. In the future, I am looking forward to visiting more events like this because I can find someone who has the same vision as me and probably form a partnership. I was skeptical before attending this event. But I left satisfied because each of the professionals that we met treated us as future businessmen and understood that we were students learning how to network. Attending more networking will help to grow more professionally and develop my communication skills.