Growing your network in Finland

Bad news: you need to connect with a lot of people to help you succeed in your studies and future career

Good news: I'm here to show you how to start growing your network (in Finland) from high school.

1. Posting in Facebook groups

I know posting in Facebook groups is very awkward and embarrassing, but trust me it works. Studying abroad is always filled with uncertainties, questions, and surprises that you cannot deal with just on your own. 

A week before arriving in Finland for the first time, I still had no idea where I would be staying or doing in Helsinki. The flight ticket was already so expensive that I didn’t want to spend extra money on a hotel room. Desperate, I decided to do something that I never planned on doing in my life: asking for help in a Facebook group with 30k members.  Knowing that I was still very young, many people commented and offered to help. Some continue to be my closest friends in Finland up until now. 

I’m still not very comfortable with posting in big groups. However, it is still the fastest and easiest way to reach people in the community. For sure, Facebook is not the safest place on earth to meet strangers. I’ve seen so many dramas surrounding scams among Vietnamese Facebook groups. Therefore, you need to stay alert and learn how to identify which types of people are trustworthy. (Do they have a profile pic of their face? How many posts do they have? Are they active in the Facebook group?)

2. Cold email

Cold email is the type of email that you send to people who have absolutely no idea who you are. You will most likely be ignored, but even 1 reply out of 100 sent is worth the shot. As I was interested in shadowing someone who works in the field of psychology, I cold emailed a lot of university professors and researchers in Finland. To be honest, I didn’t know how a high school student like me could be valuable to a university professor. Out of over 30 emails sent, about 5 got replied (pretty high rate). Most expressed their gladness that a young student like me was being active but said they didn’t have any opportunity to offer. One researcher from Aalto University did agree to review my research paper and told me to contact them again when I start university. Although I didn’t get a chance to shadow anyone, it was not a waste of time because I still left a very good impression on the people who could potentially help me in my future career. 

A cold email should be short and sweet. This is an example of what I included in my cold email to a university professor:

• Name + year + school

• Why are you contacting this person/what interests you most about their work?

• What experience do you have related to their field?

• In what ways can you help them?

• Remember to use formal language and thank them in advance. 

Finland is such a small country that you can just google someone’s name and find their email on the internet. To look for emails of university researchers/professors, go to their university’s research portal. For example, psychology researchers at the University of Helsinki.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is like Facebook but for professionals. There, you can see other people’s education, job positions, projects, and volunteering experience. Most students create a LinkedIn account in university, but you should start building your LinkedIn account in high school. 

I have a pretty small amount of connections on LinkedIn (<100) because many people on this platform have well over thousands of connections. I don’t think it’s necessary to try to have as many connections as possible if you’re still in high school. It’s more important what you do with the connections you have.

One way to use LinkedIn in high school is to connect with university students who are studying the major you like or in the university that you want to study. Then, you can see what they did in high school and what they are doing now in university. Don’t be shy and send them a text to ask more. That will create an even more personal and deeper connection! At first, the thought “why would they care about a high school student” once again made me so scared about sending messages. I did it anyway and many people replied, including CEOs and even a millionaire. That leads to my second point: you can connect with people in higher positions and ask for opportunities to participate in their project/company. This will have a lower reply rate, but who knows, just try.

Disclaimer: LinkedIn will give you a lot of peer pressure. I have seen people who found a company in high school, people with a trillion experiences in multiple projects, and people who study at the top of the best universities in the world. I felt discouraged at first but decided to just take them as inspirations and stop comparing.

I got to interview Mikko-Pekka Hanski (entrepreneur) by sending him a message on LinkedIn

Being a high school student is such a valuable tool that you must definitely make use of and mention when you contact people. People love seeing young students being active. I got ignored and rejected so much, but I also got a lot from being just a little bit out of my comfort zone.