When Mindy Baierl, adjunct faculty at the Weatherhead School of Management, spoke to her students about networking, she was surprised to learn that they primarily focused on one metric, and one metric alone: the number of connections they had. A higher number meant a 'better' network, and their efforts often stopped there. The size of one’s network is certainly important; however, it’s not the only quality that matters. After years of experience in industry and education, Mindy wanted to impress upon them that there are other dimensions of a healthy professional network—such as identifying weak and strong connections, understanding their importance, and authentically strengthening them—that are worth considering.

During her fellowship year at the IC, Mindy developed the application Net2Work, which extrapolates a spreadsheet into a holographic visualization.