It has come to my attention that students at prestigious universities are referring to the practice of cold-emailing alums of their school and asking for Zoom calls to discuss possible summer internships as “networking.”

No! It is not!

“Networking” is called networking because it involves a network: the collection of strong and loose ties of various kinds between pairs of people. When an older friend from your prestigious college, who has graduated and now works at presitigious corporation X, puts in a word for you with her boss, that is networking; you’re connected to your friend, your friend is connected to her boss, you are in the same connected component of and indeed at rather short distance in the network. “Networking” means making use of the (hopefully) rich neighborhood of iterated ties that is supposed to develop organically when you move among other ambitious people who are going places, some of them places you also want to go.

A list of other alumni of your prestigious college is not a network. It is just a set. Totally different mathematical object. More precisely, it is a granfalloon. (Vonnegut specifically names “Cornell alumni” as an example!) Granfallooning is not networking.