How to Get Opportunities as a Student

so as a student at University you might know one guy who's getting all the opportunities and they're flying to this conference they're going to that event they're like getting this really interesting inip or whatever that you've never heard about and you're just wondering to yourself like how the hell are they doing this and I think one component of this which I've noticed recently is many students are now sharing their experiences of posting on LinkedIn and Twitter these days so like on LinkedIn if you scroll through you'll find like a couple posts especially around results day where a-level students or even gcsc students are sharing their like experience or like their grades or like their learnings from whatever they've just done and I used to wonder like why are they doing this until one of my friends recently told me that after he finished his intention for Alton John who's a musician he posted about it on LinkedIn and like some of his learnings he shared a photo as well and that post went kind of viral by getting like two 3,000 likes and then he had like tons of comments and he had people dming him and then he had one guy who offered him to fly him to the Bahamas for free for like an event that they were doing and then he got to meet tons of more like interesting and uh people for that event as well so it's like you post one you get one opportunity and that leads onto other opportunities you post about them and it leads on more and it's like a cascading effect and one thing that I've seen recently actually a good example of this is this guy on Twitter um so this is a screenshot of a tweet he's saying being on Twitter is the single biggest networking hack if you're not an or already heavily established brand and this guy said I built my own pie torch which is like a popular machine learning library used by like thousands tens of thousands of labs and companies I built my own pie Torch from scratch over the last five months and see and modern pyin uh check it out and he links to the code on GitHub and then the co-founder and like one of the creators of pytorch the library themselves said cool if you end up wanting to work on pytorch DM me would love for you to join the course team and basically this guy like worked on his own project shared it online and then it got noticed by the person who invented the library or like the uh original project he was inspired by themselves and basically like the algorithms are kind of designed where it's trying to serve the best content to right people and you can play or like take advantage of this by like doing interesting things and then posting about those interesting things online and it can be related to whatever you're planning on doing in the future so for example from my perspective if I'm scrolling through Twitter and I see someone who like is designing YouTube thumbnails and they design like a before thumbnail and after thumbnail and I'm like man I really need a YouTube thumbnail designer it's like kind of on the back of my mind I'm not making an effort to like find one and then I come across one on Twitter and they seem pretty good because they're sharing before and after photos then I would just DM them and be like hey can you design me a couple thumbnails and it doesn't necessarily have to be like content creator kind of side of things for example like you can be a computer science student and like machine learning uh large language models are really popular these days so you could be doing like benchmarks on using large language models on like specific tasks and then sharing the results online on Twitter and then you'd get a bunch of people who interested in just reading your benchmarks or like seeing your benchmarks for new large language models that just came out and then there might be a startup who's specializing in these models and they want you to like do benchmarks for them and that can lead to like an internship or like a full-time job or something else instead because the algorithm has found your content and then served it to people who are relevant or like let's say one of your hobbies is design and illustration and you really want to work for like a video game design company in the future like one option is that you can be applying for like tons of jobs or internships or something or another option is like you can be sharing like photos or like redesigns that you've done so you have like a favorite video game character you redesign some of the Skins weapons and then you post online and then you like tag uh I don't know like the people who have worked on that particular game who are active on Twitter and they'll notice your Tweet and if they think it's cool they might even message you or just like your Tweet and then you can keep doing it and then you might get like offers from video game design companies being like hey can you work for us this summer or like we really like your designs can you come and do an interview with us or like as a different example is let's say you're like a physics student and you really want to be a scientific Communicator in the future and you want to like write books about physics and stuff like that so one thing you can do is like you can look for recent physics papers that are interesting and then write like Twitter friends about them because there are a lot of people interested in physics but have never actually studied physics at like a high level on Twitter and then that might get noticed by some journalist or like some scientific magazine and then they might offer you like a summer job or internship or like just get you to do like work for them on like a gig basis or something so basically my point is like there's a thing that you may want to do in the future or a thing that you enjoy doing like working for a video game design

company because you really like video games and there's a skill that you're good at and if you use your skill in some way towards that goal and then post about it online on LinkedIn or Twitter or other social media basically wherever people you're relevant to that goal hang out especially if it's like uh science and math related Twitter is probably a good bit but basically if you post online wherever they hang out the algorithm will serve your content to the right people and then that can lead to Opportunities coming your way and there like plenty of cases where I've seen this happen on Twitter organically but this is like one of the few times I actually bother to save the link and I know you're probably like man I have this degree to do I'm behind all this work like where the hell am I going to get time to work on like small projects and then post about it online and I think one important thing to consider that I saw recently on a website called mental model practices is the amount of serendipity that will occur in your life your loal surface area is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated it's a simple concept but extremely powerful one because what implies is you have direct you can directly control the amount of look you receive in other words you make your own look and you can see on the graph it's like look surface area and there's doing on the Y column and not telling enough and then there's telling on the X AIS and not doing enough and the ideal line is where you're doing a good amount of telling and doing because like if you basically just sit in your room and like you're like a lone genius or whatever and you never communicate your idea to the world or you never publish anything then like it's not beneficial to the world in any way and no one is going to know like what you've actually done and you may not even know if you're working on the right thing to begin with whereas like if you do some stuff and then you post about it online it gains some traction it leads to other stuff of opportunities or it connects you to interesting people then it can like give you uh more stuff to do and can kind of like nudge you in the right direction because you can receive mentorship or you can receive some kind of advice from people who have further along in that path than you so basically like I think the amount that you lose from posting online about some that you've done is like very small and it doesn't have to be like a YouTube video it can be like a few like a Twitter friend or like a LinkedIn post or something whereas amount that you can gain from doing this where it leads to one opportunity at like a game Design Studio that you wouldn't have otherwise had and that leads to like another opportunity or connects you to another person and so forth then like there's a lot to gain and it's tiny amount to lose and I personally noticed this with myself on my YouTube channel where I've had like journalists Reach Out to me because of videos that I made and like sponsors and I've been invited to some events and also like made some friends through Instagram and Twitter um and then also like I think I received an invitation to school at some point to like give a talk which I declined because I was too busy at the time and basically like there's not a lot that I had to lose but there was a whole lot that I really gained which is like friendships opportunities networking events and just being connected to useful people and one thing you kind of realize is like someone might have better grades when they graduated University but they might have fewer opportunities on their table because they spend all their time studying and not enough time like telling people about hey I exist this is the cool things that I do and by the time they graduate it's kind of too late and then they have to like play catchup whereas someone who spent like a bit of time every day doing cool stuff and then communicating it online and telling people the algorithm serve that content to like the relevant people like by the time they graduate they might already know like five or six people across different industries that if they don't have a job they can just like get FasTrack to interviews hosted and companies through those networks so basically like the point is there's not a lot to lose there's a whole lot to gain if you're a student do some interesting things in the fields that you're interested in post about it in places where people hang out that are also interested in the same thing especially if it's science and math I think Twitter is useful for other things maybe LinkedIn but you can do like multiple social media platforms and see which one it works well on and yeah just repeat that try for a couple weeks and then see what comes of it