I would say I was late to the LinkedIn train, creating my account in the second semester of my freshman year which is quite behind in Berkeley terms. I couldn’t believe how other students had 500+ connections basically straight out of high school. Slightly discouraged from everyone’s impressive list of achievements and large network bases, I started building my profile with the little qualifications I had to offer.
My profile started off as a collection of all my old high school achievements and listing the only makeshift jobs I’d had of being camp counselor at multiple different sites. Going into my sophomore year, as I completed an internship and worked at a real job, my profile started to shift. Joining a multitude of clubs on campus geared towards my career gave me real-world experience I could write about on my page. My LinkedIn really had turned into one that had no connections to my past high school experience, just present ones.
From that point on, I literally became obsessed, but not in a super serious way. I just found the app to be super fun. If you ask anyone I’m close with, they can attest to my constant use of it. I almost created a little game for myself around it to try and get more and more connections. I connected with any person I even remotely knew, including many I didn’t. In a span of a month, I had over 500 connections making my next goal a 1000, which I’ve now made it to.
I’ve since calmed down from my sophomore year LinkedIn hiatus, and, after being so fixated on it, I found that it really doesn’t matter all too much. This summer I applied for over 30 internships and didn’t use my LinkedIn for a single one of them. I do think it’s important in our current job climate to get working on perfecting a nice profile, however, I truly think it’s not as important as people may think. As students today, I think we can all take a step back and realize that maybe, just maybe, LinkedIn may not live up to the hype we all think it does. And on that note everyone, add me on LinkedIn, all jokes!