Short answer: everyone with a strong professional network built it from zero at some point — usually through a handful of small, deliberate first moves, not a natural gift for networking. Alumni, professors, and people one step removed from your existing circle are almost always more reachable than they seem, and that's where the first real conversations come from.
Why "networking" feels impossible when you're starting from nothing
Most networking advice assumes you already have some network to leverage — a former colleague, an old boss, a friend of a friend. If you're a student, a recent graduate, or switching into a field where you know literally no one, that advice is close to useless. The actual starting point is different: it's not about activating existing relationships, it's about creating new ones with people who have a built-in, legitimate reason to respond to a stranger.
Where the first connections actually come from
- College alumni — a shared school is one of the strongest "reason to reply" signals that exists between two strangers, and it works even for alumni from years ago you've never met.
- Professors and teaching staff, especially in fields with active industry ties — they often know people directly and are used to helping students make introductions.
- People who post publicly about the exact work you want to do — commenting thoughtfully on their posts before ever messaging them builds a small amount of familiarity for free.
- Online communities specific to your target field (not generic "networking" groups) — the people most active there are often the easiest to strike up a real conversation with.
- Anyone in your target role at a company you admire, approached as a genuine informational-interview request, not a disguised job ask.
The informational interview is the actual unlock
A message that asks for 15 minutes to learn about someone's path into a field — with zero mention of a job — gets accepted far more often than a job-focused cold message, because it asks for something small and flattering instead of something that puts the recipient on the hook. Those conversations are also where referrals and introductions to other people actually happen naturally, once you're a real person to them instead of a stranger with an ask.
Example: cold message to an alumni for an informational chat
"Hi Devika — I'm a final-year student at [School] and saw you made the jump from finance into product management at [Company]. I'm considering something similar and would love to hear a bit about how that transition went, if you have 15 minutes sometime. No agenda beyond that — just trying to learn from someone who's actually done it."
The compounding part most people miss
The first ten cold conversations are the hardest and slowest. The eleventh through fiftieth get easier, because each one can reasonably reference the last ("a few people in this space have mentioned..."), and because you start showing up in more of the same rooms and threads. The network isn't built in one message — it's built by consistently having the same kind of low-pressure, specific conversation with new people, which is exactly the volume problem that's hard to sustain by hand and is what AutoReached AI — an outreach tool that finds the right people at your target companies and drafts personalized messages for each one — exists to make manageable — finding the next relevant person and drafting the next message doesn't get less deliberate, it just stops being the bottleneck.