Q&A: Recent graduate starting at MBB soon

Long response to follow but I'm sure this general guide will be helpful to more than just you.

Have to admit I might not be the best person to give advice about networking at a semi-target, but the best thing to do would be to email/LinkedIn message alumni at the office(s) of your choice and ask for a 15-20min chat. That's a good place to start and you can absolutely start now. Ask around other kids at your school who are looking at MBB and see if they have contacts. I found that most kids at my school were very helpful to one another despite the competitiveness of it all. For me, networking started spring of my junior year through organized recruiting/networking and I leveraged this to develop further networks at the firms.

For case prep, I was in a consulting club and so had some minor experience with it but did not really get into it until late summer. Be honest with yourself and think about how quickly you think you can get to the point where you are confident doing any case. My process was as follows:

1. Read thru Victor Cheng's book and skimmed Case in Point. Biggest pickups were good framework branches to have and structuring of communication. Also was fortunate enough to have LOMS program, and found it somewhat helpful (About 2 weeks of work here)
2. Practiced reading through cases and developing frameworks. Pretty much would read the prompt, think of what clarifying questions I'd ask, and then take 30s-1min to lay out a framework and practice going through the framework as if I were talking to an interviewer. (1 week work here). This got me ready to productively do actual cases.
3. Found case partners either from my friends, consulting club, or organized channels (i.e. Bain case chains). Did about 20-25 cases this way (giving and receiving) over the time from mid August to end September.
4. Did a few cases with MBB consultants in the week or two before interviews, with contacts I made or through formal 'case buddy' programs.
5. Before interviews, I would review major notes/tips from prior case practice and major framework ideas.

Through all this, I continued reading through and laying out frameworks for probably another 20-30 cases because having a good framework just makes the case go a whole lot better. I sort of developed my own framework that I used comfortably and would always try to inject personal experience into interviews to make things less robotic (ex. a recent piece of news related to the industry in the case). If you are not from a math background I'd also definitely recommend brushing up on quick mental math, math shortcuts like Rule of 72, approximations, and graph reading.

I also never did any cold calling because my school had formal recruitment channels that were more than sufficient.

Finally, do your best to get the FT offer because it'll take tons of pressure off your MBB recruiting and is a signaling tool to other firms that you are a capable consultant.

Since you are already at a T2, I'm going to assume you are pretty solid at casing to begin with, so work on fine-tuning things with custom frameworks, clear structuring and numbering in your communication (a la Victor Cheng), and injecting personal experience as I found these things to be the most helpful to me. In other words, talk about the case in the context of recent news or your experience with certain companies, industries, technologies, etc. with the interviewer before starting to dive into details. These tips could get you over the hump.