How to Network in University

everyone keeps telling you that at University you should be networking meeting new people making connections and all that stuff but no one exactly tells you how I studied at Cambridge for years and I think I figured out a thinger to about networking and I'm not talking about the networking you see on television where people are wearing like fancy suits and like going to events and having like fake Charisma and it being like a transactional relationship and saying someone's name like 50 times to make them like them I'm talking about like actual networking that leads to results for me and a bunch of my friends and that hopefully works for you as well

so in the first month of University I saw a bunch of networking events being advertised by like the finance Investment Banking societies and I was like you know people keep telling me to like do networking or whatever that means so I went to a few of these events and then I realized like hey this is really fake networking in the sense at these events firstly you'd have a few groups of people you'd have one person who would go around the room like adding everyone on LinkedIn and then they would like message everyone the same message afterwards you had someone else who would brag about how their like Uncle is a hedge fund manager who's going to give them an internship there Su you had other people who would come up to you like figure out what your background is and if you have a good background they'd start sucking up to you and if you didn't they'd just like end the conversation immediately leave and then he had awkward people like me who were just like kind of confused so after going to this event I felt it was like really fake and transactional and I didn't want to like Network or go to any more networking events again but I end up finding myself networking without realizing I was networking and I knew that I was doing that because I Define networking as being able to get opportunities or jobs or roles um or basically anything through connections or people that you've met and have like formed part of your network but my

approach to networking is more making friends with cool and interesting people rather than going to networking events where you find a hundred of people who have the exact same goal as you and the relationship feels very transactional one reason I prefer the this approach is because firstly it's fun to just be friends with people who are cool and interesting cuz you can always have fun conversations with them and secondly if your friends are more willing to help you in the future whether that be like how friends help each other when their car breaks down or something or whether that be with getting a certain job or like a client for your business or anything else really and when it comes to interesting things I mean people who are doing interesting things not just thinking about interesting things because a lot of people are thinking about interesting things especially related to the subject they're doing but I think there's a big difference between the thinkers and the doers in the world and chances are if you just surround yourself by interesting thinkers they'll just end up doing the same things that is everyone else around them but if you surround yourself with interesting doers then you will end up doing interesting things too and I think it's pretty hard for someone to go from being just a thinker into a doer it's not like a transformation that happens overnight so I'd like pay more attention or be friends with more the doers and at least if you're not yet a doer it inspire you to do more things yourself and of course interesting things could be anything from like a history student who starts a World War II podcast and like invites guests on every week or like an engineering student who builds model rockets and like roller coasters in their room or even someone who made a bunch of mobile apps whil they were in middle school or high school and they some of them went viral or something basically anyone who's done anything unusual that most of the people haven't done as for me I personally met a few people where when I went to a room like they had a bunch of lasers lying around their room and they would end up like presenting research papers joining their undergrad at conferences and like intending for defense companies and I thought that was really cool I met another guy who modded his car with an Xbox controller uh so he could drive it and not really sure if that's load road legal but yeah basically that I thought it was really cool and he's now doing like a startup himself got through an accelerator and there was even someone who I met who did a gap here before University and went to South America and like performed for circuses and even learned like how to Flame dance and I just thought to myself like wow like how did this even come to your mind even now one of my best friends she took a gap here during her time at Cambridge to start her own stationary merch like brand or whatever and I was like wow that's like really awesome like not many people are doing that so basically finding people who are doing interesting things which is like unusual things or things that most of people aren't doing and if you become friends with them then chances are they're going to carry on doing these cool and interesting things and you'll be along for the ride in way in the sense that in the future they might decide to start a company and like invite you as a friends to like join them in starting the company or be like an early employee or they might end up meeting a bunch of other interesting people and you started your own business and you want clients for your business and they could like refer clients to you or it could be anything really I generally think someone who's more serendipitous and is willing to like do more interesting and novel things is more likely to inspire you to firstly do interesting and novel things like connect you with other people in ways that you would not expect and thirdly just like fun to be friends with them because there's like an infinite number of things to talk about with these kind of people basically Anything could happen with this and I think it's much better than the alternative of going to like a Investment Banking networking event and then deciding like to be friends with 20 people from the event and networking and sure it might help you get like an investment banking internship but you got to think about the long term like it might not actually be the thing you want to do and I think if you're friends with like 10 20 other people who all doing interesting things on their own then whenever you catch up and you might realize things are a possibility that you didn't even realize that you wanted to do so for example like one of your friends could end up starting a board games company because they really enjoy board games and you might decide like wow like if they can do that I can like basically do anything but now you got to consider the vand like these people also want to be friends with interesting people who are doing things themselves so you got to become one of the doers I think this TW tweet by Cody sanchezz who is a YouTuber as well and started a bunch of businesses puts it really well she said terrible advice be a networker you want to build a network build something cool and watch how quickly a network comes to you I would slightly add on to this that you want to make people aware that you've done these cool things so it's like do cool things and then you can become a really great networker or you your network will grow really quickly because you'll start attracting a bunch of other like-minded people to yourself but the problem is it kind of becomes hard to know what interesting things do you've done yourself for example like with this YouTube channel or like when I started programming at the age of eight and making video games from that age I felt that was like kind of boring and like didn't really matter but whenever I mentioned it to other people they thought that was really interesting and at least for the interesting people they wanted to continue chatting and for the not so interesting people they felt kind of out of their depth and they just like stayed or move themselves away so it's kind of like self filtering in a way in the sense that interesting people will be drawn towards you if you mentioned the fact you've done interesting things whether that be now or in the past and the not so interesting people will be like moved away from you and if you really can't think of any interesting things you've done yourself it really could be anything like making drones like making makeup or like if you really enjoyed making perfume or something when you were young if you really can't think of anything just like ask friends and family to think of it for you and if you don't know anything at all then like just get started on some cool and interesting things yourself so far we've established that it's better to be friends with cool and interesting people because they more likely to help you in the future as friends and the relationship feels less transactional and it feels good and it's different from going to networking events where you meet a 100 people who all have the same goal and you don't really stand out from anyone else in sense but now it's a

question of like how exactly do you meet these interesting people and I think University is like a great time in your life because you have people from all around the world and all over the country who are Gather in one spot and I think there are few times in your life where you'll actually have this kind of environment so for me personally I can talk about what worked for me is I went to a bunch of society events and I usually wanted to figure out whether this Society was worth like engaging with or not engaging with so I went to like the Pakistani society and realized oh like I don't actually like going to Pakistan Society because people just talk about their favorite food all the time and it was like very dull like surface level conversations and then I went to a few other societies where people really like enjoyed thinking and debating and then I sort of focused more energy into making friends with the people who were actually also doing stuff rather than just thinking about stuff but of course it's hard to meet the doers and I'll use an example like there was a startup society and I went to one of the startup Society events and I thought to myself like why is everyone here like not actually working on the startup themselves and it's because Society attracts people who like their idea of thinking about startups and the people who are actually doing startups are busy in their room working on that startup not attending startup soci soet events so because of that you can't always meet people through Society events but you can probably meet them through other related events such as like hackathons that might happen in your University if you're really enjoying programming or even on some like Discord channels that might be within your University you might see someone who like is doing their own Drop Shipping business in University or like is going to a conference in some other country and just be like hey like what end up happening or like how did you come across this or even starting a YouTube channel because for me at University I made a bunch of friends just with people who were doing YouTube channels and they also did interesting things outside of their YouTube channel and outside of that degree but there's no like one standard answer of hey you should go to this society and you will meet interesting people you can meet interesting people in your lecture you might not go to any societies because they like don't have time for that or they're too busy for that and it's more of a case to like asking questions to know whether they're like an interesting person who is like worth being friends with it could be something more like what they did last night or what projects they were working on or something and if they usually have an answer of like no projects or they only do their degree and they like hang out with friends then chances are they're just going to do the same thing as everyone else in their subject is doing or it could even be like there's a fellowship or like there's like a Language Center at your University and you decide to go to a Language Center and then ask people why they're like studying that particular language if you enroll in say Japanese classes and then you meet people being like Oh I like I want to visit there for like X Y and Z but yeah there's like no one clear answer but it's worth focusing on questions that would help you identify whether this person is like an interesting person or whether like your conversations with them are like a very surface level and you just end up talking about your like favorite food and favorite color and all that stuff so

now hopefully you've met a bunch of these people yourself whether that be through Societies or lectures or even like in your dining like hall room in your University and you kind of concluded that hey they were interesting people in a way because they were doing like this crazy thing that you've never heard of it's a case of how do you stay in contact with them or how do you become friends with them so usually at my University everyone added each of on Facebook and like you could use Messenger to message someone and when it comes to making friends I realized the like most effective strategy or like best approach is to hang out with someone in many social contexts so for example if you've met someone in the dining hall and the only time you see each other is in the dining hall when you both graduate then you're not really going to be friends because you're only meeting under one social context when I consider who and my closest friends it's often people who I've spent many social contacts with whether that be like we met in the dining hall we went on a trip together we went to get coffee together we like end up stranded somewhere else together like I've done many different things of them in many different locations so if you're stuck doing one thing which is like eating food in one location which is the dining hall or you only chat with them in like the lecture hall then you should make an effort to ask them hey do you want to like grab dinner later today or get a coffee sometime I don't know do this like go to this event over the weekend or something basically try and do different things with them in different social contexts and of course like carry on your interest in conversations is normal or you might even ask them to show you like the project that they're working on in their room or something basically try and do many different things with them in many social contexts and eventually you'll find yourself being really good friends with them and of course once you're good friends then as friends you both help each other out so it might be the case that you really need help of your CP for are playing for a certain role and it's a role related to something they've done before and they're able to help you out in that sense but of course outside of that it should not be like a totally transactional relationship you should still help each other out as friends like if their car breaks down or if they're feeling down then like you can go fix it or with them or you can like cheer them up or something and just generally do stuff that makes you a good

friend and I think the advantage of this approach is that by the time University finishes you have a bunch of interesting friends who all doing interesting things you're also close friends with them because you spent like many social contacts together whether that be like oneon-one going to like an event or like one in a group because you hosted a party or something and then in the future they can help you like transfer jobs if you they're working in a related field or they might decide to offer you a place to crash whenever you're visiting a particular City or something or during your conversations you might just get ideas from them whether that be like your friend attended a conference and then met a bunch of like interesting people and then they like tell you about the people that they met and that gives you some idea for like starting your own business or like and pursuing one particular career path because you heard about it for them basically the way I think about it is like you have some amount of surface area yourself uh where you'll like interact with the world and if you have all these friends who are all in like oppositely like related areas you have like surface area of hair you have ha hair and that like broadens your understanding of the world at least every time like you chat with them whereas if you decide to go to like Finance networking events you have your Sur area over here you have like 10 friends that you know from finance and they all have their Sur area over here so at least we're meeting interesting people who like doing things chances are they're like all interested in different things and every time you chat with them you're like understanding of the world and like things you could be doing yourself in the future uh improves and you can also ask them for help in many related areas so even though you might decide hey I want to do Finance for the rest of my life like 2 years into it you might realize hey this isn't what you want to do but then all your friends from University are Finance friends because you met them at Finance networking events and then you have no idea what to do and then there's no one else to help you because all your friends are Finance friends and as a

final point I think it's useful to help people without expecting anything in return because chances are you will get something in return and if you always think about where you should help someone before and whether they can give something in return to you then like I think it's wrong way of going about it so for example one of the friends that I made in my f year university is a videographer and I made him as a friend because I went to event and he was filming the event and I was really into cameras and drones and then I started chatting about cameras and drones with him afterwards and then like we added each other on Instagram and I messaged him afterwards if he wants to hang out and then we hang hung out for a day and like flew drones and stuff and then he needed some camera equipment that he didn't have that I had for an event so I let him borrow some of this camera equipment and he like remembered it as a good gesture and sometimes there have been events that he's been invited to as a videographer and he's brought me along as an assistant where I only have to do like an hour or so of work at the event and then I get to enjoy the rest of the event and that saves me like a few hundred and like tickets every time because these are like really expensive events or sometimes because as a videographer he's meeting a lot of people around the world for all these events he's often met like a businessman in this particular country and if I'm visiting that country then he knows someone who he can like put me in contact with so yeah generally people who are doing interesting things will be meeting other interesting people and they can put you in contact with them as well so that's just like one complete example of like how I networked which was literally I saw a guy with a camera and like hey I like cameras too and then we became friends for that so yeah hopefully that video makes a little bit

of sense so in conclusion I think the best approach to networking is firstly finding cool and interesting people to become friends with becoming friends with those people by hanging out in different social contexts then maintaining that friendship by generally being a good friend and also having your fun conversations with them and then just relying on the fact that because of an interesting person and that you're an interesting person that you can both help each other out whenever it needs be so yeah hopefully that video was useful in a way and do let me know your thoughts in the comments below i' love for there to be more of a discussion about what good networking actually looks like and your experience of like bad networking uh if you've been to bad networking events