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Updated June 8, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Admitted by Soundarya Balasubramani. Written by an Ivy League graduate from India, this is the proven guide for students worldwide looking to pursue undergraduate or graduate study abroad in the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Purchase for instant access to the guide and other exclusive resources—including sample SOPs, sample resumes, scholarship lists, and a private community with other readers.
We created a Networking tab for you in your Dream Tracker. Since you will be speaking to dozens of people every month, or even every week once you begin your graduate studies, internalizing the action of taking notes and following up after a call is crucial.
actionEvery time you know you are bound to have a call with someone, set a reminder on your phone to beep exactly 30 minutes after the call is scheduled to happen. That way, as soon as you get off the call, or a few minutes later, you will hear a ding that will prompt you to note down their names and details in the tracking sheet. If you condition yourself to do this enough times, you will begin to note it down even without the ding.
Now, during this downtime, when you are laying the groundwork, you can set up the tools you need, such as a tracking sheet and a reminder app, to do this effortlessly later on. While we do not suggest reaching out to alumni and current students for job opportunities, we do recommend making that initial contact and following up with tailored questions.
With that, we’ve reached the end of the section on networking 101. Let’s look at the third and final vertical of preparation before you leave your home country.
We live in an era where you have access to the most brilliant minds around the world through the virtue of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have an interesting history, by having two histories. It was almost as if there were two separate trains, one that began in 2008 and the other in 2011, both running down close parallel tracks to democratize education but through different philosophies.