600 cold emails, 80 phone calls: How a 23-yr-old landed a World Bank job

He would be graduating from his dream college but there wouldn't be a dream job waiting.

This was the situation that faced Vatsal Nahata in 2020, when he was about to graduate from Yale University, but the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and uncertainty over Donald Trump's immigration policies meant US companies were not going to risk hiring him. How he then went on to land a job with World Bank makes a fascinating story which he has shared on LinkedIn.

"I did not have a job at hand and I was going to graduate in 2 months. And I was a student at Yale," Nahata, who was 23 then, wrote in a recent post.


But Nahata, who went to Yale after graduating from Delhi's Sri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), was determined he was not going back to India immediately and that his first paycheck would be in dollars.

So he went all out on networking. In the next two months, he sent over 1,500 connection requests, wrote 600 cold-emails, and made 80 odd cold-calls to different people in search of a job.

He said he faced the highest number of rejections he'd ever gone through. "I developed thick skin by necessity. And I was getting nowhere." Nahata wrote.

But then all that hardwork and perseverance he put in finally paid off.

"I ended up with 4 job offers by the first week of May and chose the World Bank. They were willing to sponsor my Visa after my OPT and my manager offered me co-authorship on a Machine Learning paper with the World Bank's current Director of Research (something unheard of for a 23-year-old)," he wrote.

Three years after that ordeal, Nahata thought of putting down his story to encourage people never to give up.

"If you're going through something similar where the world seems to be collapsing on you: carry on - do not go gentle into that good night. Better days will come if you're learning from your mistakes and if you knock on enough doors," he wrote in conclusion.