Very true and a good social circle consisting of people with ambitions and aspirations helps too. I remember back when we were in college, freshman year we formed a circle of some sort and moved to apartments next to each other for the sophomore year. My roommate in this setup out of the blue got an internship at a big company in the Bay Area, surprised all of us in this group. He was getting paid a really large amount per hour and at that point we didn't even know this was possible. That made us all realize that this is a thing and the job fairs from that point on weren't going to be bullshit like other events before. People were coming in with actual intent to hire, and were ready to pay interns a lot of money. And we saw once these people made friends in these internships and demonstrated themselves, they got hired through internal priority queues. We did the same, applied to places, interviewed, got flown for in person interviews. Got internships, and then those turned into full time offers. Everyone in my friend group had an internship from a well known company and had offers by the time they were graduating.

And then there was the other kind. It's not like we didn't enjoy our college days or go out to party more than we should. It's not like we studied extra. It was just this one guy in our friend group that did what he did, we saw what he did and got the message it was time and anything after that would be unnecessarily risking it.