Find a few businesspeople with whom you would like to network. For this exercise, you can decide—based on your own career goals—what you would like to get out of the experience.

This could be a chance to meet with someone to see what it’s like to work for a company you admire, to gather more information about a field that interests you, or to find a summer internship. Just be realistic and avoid placing a burden on someone you don’t know.
To find people to contact, you might search your college’s alumni database, ask friends or family for recommendations, look at companies’ websites, or search online for people’s names and titles. Also look at your network’s connections on LinkedIn. The more people you include, the more likely you will get responses. Prepare a draft message. Then, tailor the message to each person on your list. Think about ways to connect with each person to encourage a positive response. Send at least ten messages. After two weeks, share the results with the class. How many people responded? If some of your classmates had better responses than others, analyze their approach, message content, writing style, or field of interest to understand why. Try to incorporate what you learn into your next ten messages to see whether your results improve.