Claim Alumni Ties at Both Your Schools
You transferred, so you sit inside two alumni networks, not one. Most transfer students only search the school on their diploma and leave half their warm paths untouched.
Find Insiders at Both Schools →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
You are an alum of both schools, not just the one on your diploma
Enrollment, not graduation, is what most people mean by shared school ties. If you did a year at a state school before transferring to a private one, alumni at both places will recognize the connection, because plenty of them transferred too or know someone who did.
The mistake is treating your old school as a footnote on your resume. It is actually a second, fully separate pool of people who will open your message because they recognize the name. Ignoring it is throwing away half your warm reach for no reason.
How to claim each tie honestly
The rule is simple: name the real overlap and never inflate it. A recruiter can smell a stretched claim, and a warm intro built on a half-truth dies the moment someone checks.
- Say when you were there. Open with 'I spent my first two years at State before transferring to Private' so the person knows exactly how you connect and never feels misled.
- Find the sharper overlap inside each school. Same major, same lab, same a cappella group, or same transfer program beats a bare school name every time and gives the reader a reason to reply.
- Use the network that matches the person. Message old-school alumni through the old school's framing and new-school alumni through the new one. Do not blend them into one vague pitch.
- Skip ties you cannot back up. A summer program or a single online course is not alumni status. Claim only what you would happily explain in the reply.
Finding people at both schools without doing it twice
The tedious part is running the same target company against two alumni lists and then ranking who is actually worth messaging. FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step for you: you give it the company and both schools, and it surfaces the real people you share a tie with, ranked by how reachable they are, with a warm intro already drafted.
That turns a second search you would probably skip into a few extra names for the cost of one click, which is usually where the transfer advantage actually pays off.