Agreed with your whole comment except this:
> try to be likable
You can't do that. But showing genuine interest in what people think and do, being a listener and not only a talker, is what gets many people to like you. And that's not something that's easy to fake. You have to be genuinely curious about other people's perspective and context.
I didn't specify how exactly you should be achieving that so I'm assuming you assumed that I was assuming that networking is all about drawing attention.
Anyway I originally went entirely against your advice here and it worked for me. Mostly because my fellow computer science students hated initiating smalltalk and enjoyed a good story, so lifting this burden off them was good.
I guess what it shows is that neither of our approaches are guaranteed to work.
Networking.
I didn't fail linear algebra because a friend explained one important concept to me twenty minutes before the exam.
I got my first(not related to my education) job because I helped a friend with calculus(his father was a manager in a company and hired me shortly after his son passed his exams).
I got my first paid internship because I bumped into my friend while I was visiting some other friends in their dorm(apparently the said friend's manager was looking to spend his budget - or so it seemed given that the hiring process was a formality really).
I got my first "real" job because a friend of mine ran a company and was in need of devs.
I could go on and on. Basically connections were the thing that jump-started my career.
So my advice would be: try to be likable and hang out with people with grit.