you definitely need a concrete idea of what you want to do, both immediately and where you want to take that long term. like another said GD is a very broad field nowadays.
People make fun of the stereotypical 15 year old indian 'graphic designer' that grinds out crappy $50 logos on fiverr, but in all honesty he's gaining a tremendous amount of experience through mileage, and he's learning to work with clients, learning to freelance, (sometimes) learning to handle taxes and the bookkeeping of his business, etc. These are all incredibly important long term.
So, IMO just starts. Hands on, dive right in cold turkey.
- Do good pieces
- Set up website, put your stuff on there with basic info etc
- Post your stuff on reddit, fb, instagram, etc
- Ask for feedback, but always present yourself as a GD (not student or aspiring)
- Interact with people online to generate exposure and traffic
- Bookmark a handful of websites where you could get gigs from (again reddit has good gigs ocassionally, but I'd imagine for GD it's a buyers market)
- create nice business cards and hand them out
- email potential clients and offer to rework their logo website (1% will reply, if at all but that's life son)
- Don't be indian (if you're indian, fake your name)
- offer to do free logos for indie gamedevs (who have no money either) in exchange for a shoutout on twitter
