For those of you with weak gag reflexes, be prepared for your first couple of months at Full Sail because they will be jamming the idea of networking down your throat. Honestly, I don’t know why I said, “be prepared” because how the heck can you prepare for something like this? Maybe shove a sausage down your throat every day and shove it down a centimeter more each time? I’m not sure. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears. I would’ve loved this advice before my time at Full Sail.

Anyways, what is this thing called networking? Well, Full Sail’s definition is to meet as many people as you can at Full Sail because, you never know, you might be able to work with them in the future or use them in a way that is beneficial to your career.

The reason I have beef with this idea is that it practically means to make “friends” with people, so you can benefit off of them in the future. Yeah, that’s right; I just quoted friends. Why would I do such a thing you might ask? Because the way Full Sail describes networking makes it seem like we should use the people we meet like they are cards in a trading card game: we don’t have a connection with these cards; instead, we’re just adding them to our deck because they could help us win the next game.

That’s not what a friend is meant for. Friends are meant for talking with and having fun with. They’re not meant to get you a job at a company they’re currently working for. This is what Full Sail makes it feel like though.

They’ll tell you about the tales of people whose friends have managed to get jobs at a company, and those friends managed to hook them up with a job at that company. And they tell us that if we don’t network, we won’t do that well in the industry.

I remembered this was a big focus during the orientation week before my first month of school at Full Sail. And I also remember that during this week, I was talking with two people I met, both who were going into the Game Art degree. While we were chatting it up, this one random guy, who I noticed was watching us talk, just nonchalantly walked into our circle and started talking with us. He invited us to join a project he and some friends were going to work on and then got our numbers. He said over the past couple of days that he had gotten over 50 numbers. It’s no surprise I never received a text from him.

Now, it’s offensive that the reason he went up to us was just because we were potential objects he could use to his fancy, but he wasn’t completely useless: when we trading our numbers with him, I also got the number of a Game Art person who seemed really cool. He ended up texting me the next day about Hyper Light Drifter, and we were chatting it up. We eventually played some Rocket League with each other, and my girlfriend and I played it with him and his girlfriend as well. Although we haven’t hanged out as much as we would’ve liked given our schedules are just pretty hectic, we still keep in touch. And we decided to work on a little personal project with each other.

So the moral of the story: when you meet someone at Full Sail, don’t ask yourself, “How much can me being friends with them benefit my career?” Instead, you should ask yourself, “Do I like them?” Please don’t be that whore who befriends someone just so their career can benefit.