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In Chamber of Secrets, we learned that the chamber was opened 50 years ago. At that time, Tom Riddle was still in school at Hogwarts.

From the perspective of Chamber of Secrets, Voldemort lost his body 12 years ago while attempting to kill baby Harry (Harry was 12 at that time). I don’t have exact date of when Voldemort started his hustle for power, so I am guessing it to be 2-3 years before Voldemort lost his body.

Extrapolating from the above data, I don’t have any information about his 35 years of life after he finished his school.

35 years is a whopping big period. What did Tom Riddle do during that time? Did he pursue completely different stuff before turning to the dark side. Or, was he busy creating horcruxes and followers since the beginning? Anything from the canon?

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    It seemed to me that HBP went into great detail about this — which is that, excepting a few things that Dumbledore was able to uncover, nobody knows. Commented Nov 12 at 17:23
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    Given that Wizards live longer than Muggles 35 years may not be the whopping big period you'd expect - for a Muggle, they're starting their decline; for a Wizard, perhaps they're entering the prime of their life. Commented Nov 13 at 0:20
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    Once he got his MBA things really went evil… Commented Nov 13 at 19:34

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Pursuing Horcruxes and Doing Dark Stuff from Day 1

We know a little from The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows . Initially he wanted to stay at Hogwarts post-graduation, but Armando Dippet, the headmaster at the time, told him that he needed more experience before he could be considered for a teaching position. He then worked for a few years at Borgin and Burkes, the Nocturne Alley shop specializing in rare (read: dark) artifacts. The assumption Dumbledore (and the reader) make is he both tried to remain at Hogwarts and took the B&B job in order to acquire powerful founders' artifacts, presumably to turn into Horcruxes.

He vanished after murdering a woman who bought and sold things to B&B and stealing two founders' artifacts from her. (At the time he was not a suspect in her murder and it was apparently quite a while until people realized the artifacts were missing.) After that he did... things. We don't quite know what, but they were enough to deeply trouble Dumbledore who claimed he "would be sorry to believe half" of what Riddle had been up to. Riddle also attempted to get a job at Hogwarts as the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor, but was rebuffed by Dumbledore. After he failed to get the professor job the timeline gets hazy (at least in the books) until he reappears as Voldemort trying for Wizarding domination.

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    When they discuss the history of family Black there's also a mention of an intermediary period where Voldemort had reappeared and was known as a pure-blood supremacist but wasn't yet widely known as a bloodthirsty dark wizard. Commented Nov 13 at 9:39

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