Let’s get something out of the way right up front. There’s plenty of advice out there that says college is about one thing: studying. Hit the books, don’t get distracted, keep your GPA clean, and everything else will fall into place. And honestly, that advice isn’t wrong for everybody. Some people thrive that way. But here’s what nobody told me, and what I genuinely wish someone had sat me down and said before I ever set foot on a campus: the most successful people I’ve seen come out of college didn’t just study. They planned. They worked the room. They built something most people don’t even think about until they’re already ten years into a career and wondering why the doors aren’t opening the way they expected.
Building your network early isn’t a distraction from college. It might be the whole point.
I’m not saying this from some perfect track record. I’m saying it because I didn’t do most of this, and success took longer because of it. I learned to network late. Embarrassingly late. Even in my professional life, I spent years being good at my job without ever really understanding what it meant to put myself in rooms, build relationships across teams and industries, and connect with people above me before I needed something from them. They call that managing up. I didn’t learn it until I already needed it, and by then, the path was harder than it had to be.
So this isn’t advice from someone who did everything right. This is advice from someone who figured it out the hard way and wants to save you some time.
Here’s the first thing to understand about college: you’re not going there to get a career. You’re going there to build every condition that makes a career possible. That shift in thinking changes everything about how you spend your time, who you talk to, what you join, and what you actually walk away with when it’s over.
Most people don’t make that shift. They show up in September, get handed a list of classes, stress about their major by October, and spend the next four years trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. That’s understandable. It’s also a waste of one of the most unusual opportunities you’ll ever have. College is the only place in your life where you’re surrounded by hundreds of people your own age, plus faculty, plus alumni, plus guest speakers, all in one place, all more or less available, all sharing some version of the same experience. You can build a network there that most working professionals spend decades trying to put together from scratch.
And nobody tells you that. Or if they do, they say it so generically that it doesn’t land.
Your first year has one job, and it’s simpler than you think. Take the required courses, knock them out, get them done. The science, the math, the English composition, whatever your school mandates as the foundation. Get those out of the way early. Don’t put them off, don’t try to get cute with the schedule, and don’t convince yourself you’ll have more motivation junior year. You won’t. Clear the table now so you have room to cook later.
While you’re doing that, start meeting people. Not networking in the stiff, handshake-and-business-card way. Just actually talking to people. Introduce yourself. And then, this is the part that matters more than most people realize, stop talking and listen. Ask where they’re from. Ask what they care about. Ask what made them pick this school. People will tell you an enormous amount if you just give them space to do it. And remember what they say. Take notes in your phone if you have to. It sounds almost silly, but the people who are genuinely good with relationships are usually good at the simple act of remembering: your roommate’s sister is pre-med, the guy down the hall grew up in São Paulo, the woman in your English class interned at a production company last summer. None of that seems important in September. All of it becomes useful later.
Join something. Clubs, sports, debate, student government, intramural anything. It doesn’t matter what it is yet. What matters is that you show up in a room with people who aren’t your roommates, people you wouldn’t have met otherwise, and you do something alongside them. Shared activity is how real relationships form. Not a networking mixer. Not a “let’s exchange numbers” moment. Just showing up consistently, doing the thing, and being someone people recognize and like being around.
By years three and four, you should be doing more of everything, not less. More clubs, more sports, more showing up in rooms. If you played on the football team, pick up lacrosse. Join the swim club. Run for something. Not because you need to pad a resume with activities, but because every new group is a new set of people who don’t know you yet, which means a new chance to build relationships you didn’t have before.
But the real shift in years three and four is that you start paying attention to alumni.
This is where most students leave enormous value sitting on the table. Alumni exist in a category that almost nobody takes seriously until they’re already out in the workforce realizing they should have. These are people who went to your school, played your sports, sat in your classrooms, lived your campus, and are now doing the exact thing you’re trying to do. They remember what it felt like to be a student. They want to help. Most of them, if you reach out genuinely and treat them like real people and not just a shortcut to a job, will give you time.
Think about what that actually means. You spend two years building a real relationship with someone who’s now a senior manager at a company you care about. When you’re ready to intern, you don’t need to cold-apply and hope someone reads your resume. You reach out to someone who already knows your name, already knows you show up, already has a reason to make a call on your behalf. That’s not luck. That’s a plan. And the plan started in your first year when you introduced yourself to everyone and actually listened.
Here’s something I learned the hard way, years after I should have. At ViX, I made contacts. I did some of that right. But I stayed in my lane. I didn’t reach out to other teams. I didn’t make a point to introduce myself across departments or build relationships with people at other companies. I kept my world small without realizing that’s what I was doing. And when it came time to make a real career shift, it was harder than it needed to be. The doors I wanted to open were attached to people I hadn’t met yet, and building those relationships from nothing when you need something is a completely different experience than reaching out to someone who already knows you.
Managing up, which is exactly what it sounds like, building real relationships with people above you before you need anything from them, isn’t a manipulation tactic. It’s just good sense. The people above you are making decisions about teams, projects, and opportunities. If they know you, know your work, know how you think, those decisions look different. But you have to build that before you need it, not during. Nobody likes feeling like they’re only getting attention because someone wants something.
I suffered from imposter syndrome for longer than I should have. And here’s the strange thing about it: when I finally started putting myself in more rooms, people would tell me they’d heard about me, they knew my reputation, but they were glad to finally meet me in person. The myth existed before the relationship did. If I had understood earlier what it meant to build a persona deliberately, to introduce myself broadly, to show up consistently across different circles, that imposter syndrome would have had a much harder time taking hold. You don’t feel like a fraud when you actually know the people in the room. When you’ve been building relationships with them for years. When your presence there isn’t a surprise to anyone, including yourself.
Now let’s talk about the degree. Go all the way. Get the MBA.
I didn’t. And I want to be honest about what that costs, because it’s not what most people think it is. It doesn’t mean you can’t do the work. I spent years after college reading, studying, digging into every leadership and strategy and entrepreneurship framework I could find. I learned the material. I can hold my own in any boardroom conversation about positioning, competitive strategy, organizational design, any of it. And once I’m in the room, none of that is a problem.
The paper is only missing when you’re trying to get in the room the first time.
That’s the honest truth about credentials. They’re not proof you know things. They’re proof you finished something hard. And finishing something hard tells people something about you that you never have to say out loud. Two people walk in for the same opportunity. Same ideas, same energy, same hustle. One has the MBA. The other doesn’t. There’s a real conversation that happens, and it matters more than it probably should. The degree signals that you planned, stayed the course, and completed it. Those three things are not small. They’re actually what most employers are trying to figure out when they hire someone senior.
So don’t skip it because it feels like too much. Do it. And while you’re doing it, focus less on picking the right industry and more on building the right skills. Entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, strategy, the ability to read a room and a balance sheet and a business problem with equal comfort. Those translate everywhere. Healthcare, finance, tech, media, real estate, none of it matters because the core skills move across all of it. The industry piece is what summers are for.
Use every summer strategically and differently. Pick an industry you’re curious about, reach out to the alumni network you’ve been building, and find a way in, an internship, a shadow, a project, anything that gets you actual experience in how that world works. Then do a different industry the next summer. Not because you need to be everywhere at once, but because you learn more about what you want by doing than by thinking. You might spend a summer in finance and realize you’d rather be outside in forty-degree weather than sit in a trading floor all day. That’s valuable information. You might spend a summer at a startup and discover that the chaos of building something from nothing actually energizes you. Also valuable.
And this is where all the socializing you did pays off in a very practical way. You’re not applying cold. You’re calling someone you played lacrosse with for two years, someone who knows how you think, someone who will pick up the phone when they see your name. That’s a different conversation.
On the technical side, coding, AI, tools like NotebookLM, don’t let that list intimidate you into thinking you need a four-year path to understand any of it. You don’t. A few focused weeks with the right tool and you have a working understanding of how these things function, what they’re used for, and how to talk about them in a professional context. That’s honestly all most roles require from most people. The people who will go deep on technical execution are a separate hire. What you need is fluency, enough to be in the conversation, enough to ask the right questions, enough to know when something is possible and when someone is blowing smoke at you.
The world is not going to stop producing new technical tools. You will spend your entire career encountering things that didn’t exist when you were in school. What matters is not knowing all of them. What matters is being the kind of person who isn’t afraid of a new tool, who sits down with it, figures out what it does, and puts it to use. That quality, the willingness to keep learning, is actually the most important technical skill you can develop, and no class teaches it. You either build the habit or you don’t.
Let’s talk about the single most underused thing college offers: a clean slate.
Nobody at your college knows who you were in high school. The version of you that sat in the back of class, or said the wrong thing sophomore year, or wasn’t sure where you fit, that person doesn’t follow you to campus. You get to decide who walks in. You can be louder, more curious, more willing to introduce yourself first, more comfortable in front of a group, more deliberate about the kind of reputation you’re building. That’s not fake. That’s growth. And college is one of the only places in life where you get to do it from a standing start, with no one around who expects you to be anything in particular.
Your persona is something you build. Not something that happens to you. The person who is described as dependable, the one people call when things need to get done, the one who shows up even when there’s no one watching to give them credit for it, that’s not a personality type you’re born with or without. That’s a set of choices made consistently over time. College is four years of chances to make those choices in front of a lot of people who will remember them.
And those people, your classmates, teammates, classmates-of-classmates, alumni you met at an event junior year, all of them become your professional network before you even graduate. They’re not just friends. They’re the people who will refer you for jobs, call you when their company has an opening, introduce you to someone who knows someone. The formal job market, applications and recruiters and HR portals, is not where most good opportunities actually come from. They come from people. They always have.
So build those relationships now. Not because you need something today. Because the version of you five years from now is going to be grateful that you did.
I’m not here to tell you the studying doesn’t matter, because it does. I’m not here to tell you the degree is just a piece of paper, because I already told you it’s not. But I am telling you that college done right is a four-year strategy, not a four-year attendance record. The courses are one piece. The clubs, the sports, the alumni relationships, the internships, the persona you build one conversation at a time, those are the other pieces. Leave any of them out, and you graduate with a degree and not much else.
I left some of them out. I learned that lesson slowly and sometimes painfully. You don’t have to.
Use college to plan how you’ll get a career, not as the career itself. Do the work, meet everyone, finish the degree, chase the summers, build the network before you need it, and walk out of there as someone who is genuinely ready, not just technically qualified. There’s a difference. The people who know that difference going in are the ones who make it look easy coming out.
I’d love to hear your take on this. Did you do college differently? Did it work? Is there something here that changed how you’re thinking about the next four years? Drop your thoughts in the comments, share this with someone who’s about to start their freshman year, and tag me on social media at @cesarmorenoai. And if you want more of this, more honest, no-fluff thinking on career, strategy, and how to actually get ahead, head over to cesarmoreno.ai and subscribe to the newsletter.