LPT: Get to know your professors early on. In your later years, good relationships with professors can lead to recommendations and research and job opportunities.

Let me tell you a story. During my second year in college dean of my faculty changed. I started to joke around, ask him bunch of questions about our faculty, college and studies, helped him with projects and what not. He noticed me. If we'd do a project outside of college and it would last, he'd buy me lunch. Then he started to invite me to seminars by really interesting people and if they were far from me or really early in the morning, he'd give me a lift. Later I'd even go to bars with him and other professors and interesting people, I'd get free drinks and whatnot. But the best was that he'd help me out if I'd get in trouble with other professors or thought and managed to show him that my idea or way was better than the one professor would try to imply. I'd get perks that other students didn't. If someone thought of something that needed a signature from the higher ups and I liked it, I'd go around everyone else, straight to the dean and ask him to sign on that.

I think I was a student with the most power in my faculty (or even whole college, though I had no power over other faculties). I'd only have had more power if I befriended headmistress (though she was and still is my most hated person in that place, she shouldn't be allowed to control anything) of my sector or the headmaster of the whole college.

Of course when I started to ask questions and help him I didn't have a slightest idea that it would go this way, only later I started to call in favors, from time to time.

/r/LifeProTips Thread