Step 2: Alumni

Although I could have taken a breather after the first step, I was pumped and ready to find connections. 15 minutes on the world's greatest professional networking site later, I had my answers:

Key Insights: Although I could have used my schools' alumni sites, I found that LinkedIn data is much more up-to-date. After all, who wants to update their ever-changing resume on a dozen different sites when just about everybody uses LI? And for me, being able to search multiple alumni bases at once (Company = Swarthmore OR "University of Michigan") meant that I could breeze through 78 companies in no time. Finally, because just about every company had a Wolverine on staff at some point, I stuck to firms that currently have an alum onboard to generate better discriminating power.

Time Savings: Networking around in the companies to get this info (when my alumni databases were out-of-date) would easily have taken me 20 hours.

Stress Reduction: Knowing that a veritable army of alumni is out there and (potentially) willing to help is better sleep medicine than NyQuil. I'm resting easy, down 10 mm Hg!