A practical curriculum for students who hate networking. And start anyway.
Designed for career centers, student affairs teams, and alumni offices, Values-Based Networking™ turns “networking” from vague advice into a teachable skill, giving students the language, habits, and structure to reach out, follow up, and build real relationships before they need them.
This is gold.
If you have ever thought, “I should probably be taking networking more seriously, but I don’t know how to do that without feeling like a slimeball”, this will be a great event for you. It reframed how I thought about networking and is full of actionable advice.
An introduction to Values-Based Networking™.
How to strengthen a relationship by making others feel like they matter.
Adam Newman hated networking.
Not in a “this is a little awkward” way. In a “this feels wrong and I leave worse than I arrived” way. Career fairs. Mixers. Forced small talk with strangers he’d never see again. None of it worked. None of it felt like him.
What did feel like him: caring about the work. Wanting to fix things. Spending a career in campaigns, government, and nonprofits because the mission actually mattered.
That’s where it clicked. When he stopped treating networking as a performance and started treating it as an extension of his values, it stopped draining him. It gave him energy. People with a world-saving instinct, it turns out, are very good at building real relationships. They just need a framework that plays to that instead of asking them to be someone else.
Values-Based Networking™ is what he built from that.
Since 2017, Adam has worked directly with students at Notre Dame, giving informal lectures and taking one-on-one meetings with hundreds of students, particularly liberal arts majors navigating a job market that rewards relationships over applications. He wasn’t affiliated with the career center. Students found him on their own.
After a layoff in 2025, he took everything he had learned across those years and built it into a practical, teachable framework. He has since delivered Values-Based Networking™ to students at Notre Dame and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
His career covered Illinois politics, state and local government, and the nonprofit sector. That’s a lot of job transitions. A lot of figuring out how to build relationships in rooms where he wasn’t the loudest person. That experience is the backbone of the framework. It wasn’t built from theory.
Adam grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame and holds an MBA from Booth, where he was an Edwardson Civic Scholar. He is an Eagle Scout, volunteers on Eagle Scout merit badge work, and interviews candidates at the Youth Job Center in Evanston. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and their two cats, Maisy and Macaroni, who are aware of where they rank and have complicated feelings about it.