Interviews - Email
This was something of a trick I learned early in my studies and its a great device to get relationships in the industry while still in college or building your portfolio.
First, write down a few questions related to the industry or its hiring process; I find that 4-5 questions suffice. Try to make the questions as litirate as possible and sound proffessional. They should be about topics that you are genuinely wondering about, but it also helps to choose questions that can't be answered with one or two words because otherwise the conversation will be stale and dismissive. When writing out your questions, you should avoid philisophical questions though, because if it requires 3 paragraphs to answer, chances are, that the person you are emailing won't spend the effort (they are busy after all)
Next, search for some emails of people working in your industry (be it game, animation, etc.) and try to find as many as possible. I found that surfing the company's website(s) is the easiest way of finding the emails of their employees and with an hour's worth of work, you should have 20-30 emails.
One thing you can do is to Categorize the email recipients into their job descriptions and have a set of questions for each "job-type". The is handy for a few reasons, for example: Would you want a recruiter to get a bunch of questions about how to render a 3D model a certain way, or Management to get questions about dealing with Management? The fact is, that the person reading your email will just delete it as spam without a second thought. You should always try to make your questions as relative as possible to avoid awkward situations like this.
Another good idea is to have some response questions, although it's better to read through each email sent back and make new questions that are more customized, it can become extremely tedious when you recieve 20 replies and you'd like to ask similar response questions. If you respond with custom questions or cookie cutter ones, the important part is to ALLWAYS respond. Even if your response is a simple thank you, you must allways let that person know that you have paid attention to them; this should be common sense!
This tool works wonders for spreading your network because people in the industry, at least to the best of my knowledge, enjoy helping students and answering questions students may have. Don't be afraid to make the first move and do so repeatedly! Take this knowledge and bring it out every month or two, it works more than once!
Next Networking Article: Linked In - Social Networking
List of 3D Student: Networking advice topics so far
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