Breaking the Ice: How Are You Connecting with Senior Researchers & Other Units?
APHRC has so many specialized units, projects, and regional offices. How do you approach reaching out to colleagues outside your immediate project team? Drop your tips or share who/which unit you’d love to learn more from before your internship ends.
@Rhoda Nakhosi Thanks for sharing these, Rhoda I completely agree that leading with curiosity and offering a specific, low-friction entry point like 15 minutes for virtual coffee makes outreach feel much more natural and actionable.
Building on your points about cross-unit learning, I'd personally love to connect more with the Policy Engagement and Research Methods teams before my internship wraps up especially to see how advanced methodologies and evidence-based findings are structured into impactful policy briefs. Looking forward to putting these tips into practice.
- Tea/lunch chats - sitting with random colleagues and just asking what they are working on.
- Attending meetings in various units has also helped me get to know people and be able to interact with them efficiently when we meet in the corridors.
- Team building - like our RRCS/PEC/IP synergy at Heri Heights, where you connect beyond tasks.
- Being pushed out of my comfort zone - My supervisor has been amazing in giving me presentations and letting me attend stakeholder meetings on my own, where I have to speak up and represent the office.
@Shamim Kowa Talla, great addition and refreshingly honest about the introvert part. The tea/lunch chats tip is underrated: sitting with random colleagues and asking what they're working on removes the pressure of a formal ask, and it's often where you learn most about how the organisation actually works.
@Shamim Kowa Talla This is such a great perspective! I love your point about using casual spaces like tea and lunch chats it really takes the pressure off networking, especially as an introvert. Having a supervisor who pushes you into stakeholder meetings and presentations is such a huge growth accelerator, too.
It’s awesome that your role in Government Relations lets you see the whole picture across units. Connecting with CSI and ICS before your time ends sounds like a great next step to see how that institutional synergy comes together.
One approach that works for me is being intentional about learning more about APHRC beyond my immediate project. As I research the organization, I often come across colleagues whose work interests me. Before meetings, I also like to review the participants list to identify people I might want to learn from. This helps me identify potential connections on LinkedIn and engage with their work by asking thoughtful, well-researched questions.
Before my internship ends, I’d particularly love to learn more about the Data Science Programs unit and its AI-related initiatives. As an AI enthusiast, I’m interested not only in the technical side of AI but also in how institutions adopt, integrate, and govern AI in their work. I’d welcome the opportunity to learn from colleagues working in this space and better understand how these initiatives translate into institutional practice.