In a few days, thousands of us who work in international education will make our way to NAFSA, the largest annual gathering of our field. Flights will land. Hotel lobbies will fill. Badges will hang from necks. Calendars will become puzzles. Old friends will embrace in corridors. New introductions will be squeezed between sessions, receptions, booth visits, coffees, dinners, and the relentless choreography of a conference week.
There is something genuinely beautiful about that.
For all its imperfections, international education is still one of the few professional communities built on the belief that human beings should not be trapped by the accident of where they were born. At its best, this field insists that learning should cross borders, that talent should find opportunity, that institutions should become more porous, that young people should encounter difference before they inherit suspicion, and that the world is made less fragile when more of us know each other beyond headlines, stereotypes, and national mythologies.
That belief is not small.
It is why conferences like NAFSA still matter. They gather people who, in different ways, are trying to keep open the possibility of a more connected world. They remind us that relationships cannot be fully automated, trust cannot be manufactured through a platform, and institutional partnerships cannot be built only through email threads and procurement forms. Sometimes the work still requires presence. Sometimes it requires sitting across from someone long enough to understand what they are actually trying to build, what constraints they are carrying, what they fear, and what they hope might still be possible.
So we network.
But at events like NAFSA, are we networking for the sake of networking or are we taking it more seriously?
Somewhere along the way, especially in fields like ours where relationship-building is treated as both currency and craft, we have allowed networking to become a substitute for the deeper work it is supposed to make possible. We have become highly practiced at gathering, greeting, exchanging, promising, and posting. We know how to fill a schedule. We know how to be seen in the right rooms. We know how to describe a conversation as meaningful before we have done the harder work of making it matter.
And I say this with some discomfort, because I am part of this world too.
I attend these conferences. I schedule the meetings. I reconnect with colleagues. I enjoy the hum of possibility that fills the room when people from different countries, institutions, and systems come together with overlapping hopes. Many of the relationships that have shaped my own work began in exactly these spaces, not through grand strategy, but through a hallway conversation, a shared meal, a thoughtful question, or the recognition that someone else was wrestling with the same problem from a different corner of the world.
That is real.
But to be honest, so is the other part.
The meeting that feels urgent in the moment and disappears a week later. The conversation that ends with “we should explore something together” but never moves beyond the phrase. The institutional visit that produces warm photographs but no durable pathway. The partnership language that arrives long before shared responsibility. The familiar conference ritual in which we leave with more contacts, more optimism, more follow-up emails to send, and very little clarity about what, if anything, will be different for students because we were there.
This is the reckoning I hope we carry into NAFSA.
Not cynicism. Not guilt. Not performative self-critique.
Responsibility.
The world around international education has changed, and it is still changing. Students are not making decisions in a stable environment. Families are weighing opportunity against cost, safety, immigration uncertainty, employability, political hostility, and trust. Universities are under pressure to diversify revenue, defend their value, manage risk, and respond to markets that no longer behave with the predictability they once did. Counselors are trying to guide students through systems that keep shifting beneath them. Governments are alternately welcoming and suspicious. Technology is reshaping how students search, apply, prepare, and present themselves. The old machinery of international education still exists, but the moral and practical conditions around it are not the same.
Which means our gatherings cannot be the same either.
A conference cannot simply be a place where the industry performs its own continuity. It cannot only be a reunion of familiar faces, familiar countries, familiar sessions, familiar talking points, and familiar promises of collaboration. It has to become something more deliberate. It has to become a place where we ask, with unusual honesty, what problems we are actually trying to solve and whether the way we spend our time reflects the seriousness of those problems.
This is where networking must be rescued from its shallowest version.
The point of networking is not to know more people. It is to understand more deeply where trust, capacity, need, and possibility might intersect. It is not the accumulation of names. It is the stewardship of relationships. It is not the art of being visible. It is the discipline of becoming useful. It is not the ability to move through a room with ease. It is the willingness to leave that room with obligations you intend to honor.
A field like ours can easily confuse movement with momentum. We travel so much. We meet so often. We speak in the language of partnership so fluently that the words begin to sound like outcomes. Global engagement. Student success. Access. Equity. Mobility. Employability. Future readiness. Transformation. These are powerful words, but they can also become hiding places if we do not attach them to actual work.
What does access mean if the same students remain excluded?
What does partnership mean if no student can describe what changed?
What does global learning mean if it remains available mostly to those who already have the means, confidence, passport privilege, and institutional support to pursue it?
What does student-centeredness mean if the student is invoked constantly but rarely allowed to shape the system being built in their name?
These are uncomfortable questions, but they are not hostile ones. They are questions that come from believing the field still matters enough to be challenged.
And that is what I hope attendees bring to NAFSA this year, not just ambition, not just institutional priorities, not just a meeting calendar engineered to maximize exposure, but a more deliberate sense of responsibility. Before walking into a conversation, maybe we should ask ourselves what we are really seeking. Are we trying to sell, to learn, to repair, to understand, to build, to listen, to recruit, to expand, to influence, to support, to extract, or to serve? Some of those motives can coexist, but they should not be allowed to hide from us.
A more honest conference begins before the first meeting.
It begins when we ask what we are prepared to contribute beyond our institutional self-interest. It begins when we stop treating every country as a market and start treating it as a context. It begins when we enter conversations curious about local realities instead of armed only with prepackaged solutions. It begins when we recognize that a counselor from a school in India, a university leader from Japan, an agent from Vietnam, a government official from Africa, a community college representative from the United States, and a student mobility officer from Europe may all be using the same words while describing very different realities.
Real networking requires that kind of humility.
It asks us to slow down inside a fast-moving week. It asks us to listen past the introduction. It asks us to notice who is always at the table and who is always being discussed from a distance. It asks us to separate genuine alignment from convenient overlap. It asks us to resist the temptation to turn every exchange into a transaction, while also refusing to let every exchange dissolve into vague goodwill.
That is not easy.
But easy is not what this moment requires.
The students we claim to serve are being asked to prove themselves with increasing intensity. They must produce transcripts, essays, test scores, financial documents, portfolios, visa files, resumes, recommendations, interviews, and evidence of readiness for a future that even adults struggle to define. We tell them to be intentional. We tell them to prepare. We tell them to show evidence. We tell them that aspiration is not enough.
Perhaps we should hold ourselves to the same standard.
Not in a punitive way. Not with spreadsheets pretending to measure every human relationship. Not by reducing every conversation to a transactional output. Some of the most meaningful relationships take time. Some of the best ideas emerge slowly. Trust cannot always be placed on a ninety-day dashboard.
But intention can.
Follow-through can.
Clarity can.
If a meeting matters, we should know why. If a partnership is worth pursuing, we should know who it is meant to serve. If a conversation is promising, we should be willing to name the next responsible step. If a relationship is important, we should care enough to steward it after the reception lights go out and the conference app becomes irrelevant.
That is the difference between networking and work.
Networking creates the opening. Work honors it.
Networking introduces the possibility. Work carries the responsibility.
Networking allows us to find one another. Work determines whether finding one another mattered.
This is the appeal I want to make to everyone heading to NAFSA, including myself. Go fully. Be present. Meet people. Reconnect with the colleagues who have become friends. Welcome the first-time attendees who may feel overwhelmed by the scale of it all. Attend the sessions that stretch you, not only the ones that affirm what you already believe. Walk into meetings with clarity, but not arrogance. Ask better questions. Resist the easy pitch. Notice who is missing. Make fewer promises if you must, but honor more of them.
And when you take the photo, as many of us will, let it not be the proof that something happened.
Let it be the reminder that something now has to.
Because the network is not the work.
It is the beginning of a responsibility.
And in a world where students are carrying more uncertainty, institutions are facing more pressure, and trust is becoming harder to earn, our field cannot afford to keep mistaking proximity for progress.
The future of international education will not be shaped merely by who gathered, who spoke, who sponsored, who attended, or who was seen.
It will be shaped by what we had the courage, discipline, and humility to build after we found one another.
Happy NAFSA!
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
