Go to company parties. Skipping them hurts. At the intern level, the most important thing you can do is build firm relationships with the people that are immed

Go to company parties. Skipping them hurts. At the intern level, the most important thing you can do is build firm relationships with the people that are immediately associated with your work. Focus on impressing a substantial subset of them. In engineering, you'll lose credibility by looking too "businessy" and requesting lunch meetings with everyone and their dog. Practice talking to people. Practice meeting new people. Go somewhere where you introduce yourself to strangers. Do this over and over and over again until you're good at breaking the ice and feel fine in a room full of new faces. That's really all you need. The people requesting lunches from random people are not doing it because they're extroverted. Meeting new people/establishing new relationships is a high-energy thing and it's not likely they're excited about it either. They're doing it because they are consciously trying to expand their network. Your network is critically important, but you don't have to go breadth-first. I'd suggest depth-first is better. Build stronger relationships with fewer people who are localized to your target expertise for now.