I did my PhD in clinical experimental therapeutics. I could design a clinical study, interpret a forest plot, present at a conference. But reaching out to someone at a biotech company for a 20-minute conversation? I had no idea where to start. Nobody in my program did.
My early coffee chats were bad. I would show up without a plan, run out of things to say ten minutes in, then drag the conversation out anyway because I didn't know how to wrap it up. I'd walk away thinking I just wasted that person's time. Half the time I probably did. It all felt fake.
I got better by doing more of them and being honest with myself about what went wrong. I read everything I could find. I paid attention to what worked and what didn't. Over a lot of reps, it started to click. I started going in with a plan, and that alone changed most of it.
I'm still not great at this. I still get nervous. But the gap between having no system and having one is bigger than I expected.
Now I'm on the other side of the table. I take coffee chats with students, and I see the same patterns I used to have. They show up unprepared. They ask questions they could have Googled. They don't know how to end the conversation. Nobody taught them either.
There are coaching programs out there that teach some of this. Some of them are fine. But the model is usually the same: give away just enough to get you interested, then push you toward a higher tier. The basics, the part that actually changes how you show up to a conversation, shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars. It's not that hard to teach. It just needs to exist somewhere free.
So the crash course is free. All 10 modules, no gate. If you never pay anything, you still learn everything: how coffee chats work, how to find people, how to reach out, what to say, how to follow up.
The paid tools save you time: a pitch builder that adapts to who you're meeting, a question bank, a prep workflow, a tracker. Things I wished I had when I was figuring this out myself. But the education comes first, and it's free because I think it should be.
If you're a student or recent grad trying to break into biotech, and networking sounds like something other people are good at, I get it. I'm still figuring it out too.