Befriending College Staff

If you are a PhD student, your success in the program will depend on your school's staff as much as it depends on your own effort and support from your professors. Trust me, there will be at least one occasion in your career where things will depend on nothing but a decision of one of your school's clerks.

Make sure you are friends with people like:

• IT support staff (if you are nice to them you can always get hardware and software you need)
• Cleaning staff (they can help you to get access to building if you lost your keys)
• Secretaries (they will give you insider knowledge about some of the things that are going in the department; won't report you if you violate some of the department policies)
• Records people (they will help you if you miss registration deadlines for example or fail to submit some needed papers)

Make sure you are nice to those people. It will certainly pay off. I've seen quite a few PhD students who look down on staff, thinking those guys are not at their intellectual level.

I didn't have a problem with building relationships with staff - I think I'm a very friendly and down to earth person. I did make a mistake though. At one point our IT folks just drove me nuts with their screw-ups and incompetence. We were like enemies. But then I took time to apologize and do some damage control. The result - I got a bunch of software by putting it on the department's tab as opposed to paying for it myself.