Cold-emailed three people from my program who work where I wanted in, one replied, and that's the whole story

Found them through the alumni directory, kept the email to four sentences: who I am, the overlap, one specific question about the team, no ask for a job anywhere in it. Two never responded, which stung less than I expected.

The third replied within a day, we did a fifteen-minute call that was mostly her telling me what the actual day-to-day was like, and near the end she offered to flag my application herself without me asking. Got a first-round screen about two weeks later.

Not a guaranteed pipeline to anything, but it's the only cold outreach out of maybe fifteen I've sent this year that turned into an actual conversation instead of silence.