BusinessWeek interviewed many former successful B-school graduates and came up with the following survival kit: Alumni cannot stress enough how important colleagues are to the MBA experience.
Heather Zorn, a 2005 graduate of the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business created a network of people all over the world whom she can contact for everything from travel advice to job opportunities. And one of the women she met during the first week of school she later recruited to work at her current company, Amazon.com, where Zorn is a senior manager. Your colleagues at school could easily be, and quite often are, co-workers and business partners after graduation, Zorn says.
Nate Challen, a 2008 MBA graduate of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, suggests asking what your classmates were doing before school, because their past experiences could influence your present experience at school. Challen, now a brand manager for Johnson & Johnson, had a good friend who chose Kenan-Flagler specifically to pursue a job in strategy consulting. But after discussing another student's Wall Street career, Challen's friend shifted his focus to sales and trading. If he didn't have that conversation, he might not have attended a banking presentation and would have never been exposed to the career path that made him happiest, Challen said.
Knowing your fellow classmates is also important when it's time to form groups for projects, which at some schools is done on the very first day. "We were told by professors to choose wisely," remembers Mimi Cheng, a 2005 graduate of the part-time MBA program at the University of Southern California. She advises students to think about personality types and to aim for a well-rounded group. "Have someone from accounting, one from finance, marketing, IT, operations," she says. "Once I met a group of only engineers. They suffered through many sleepless nights because they only had one area of expertise."
Most MBA programs recognize that B-school students don't give up one to two years of income and shell out a small fortune in tuition without expecting to make some return on their investment. So they offer career services from day one. Alumni suggest that new students take seriously the résumé review, the interview prep, and the one-on-one coaching many schools offer, attend company presentations, and talk to second-year's who just completed their summer internships.
Finally, Kenan-Flagler alumna Nicole van Tongeren suggests carrying around one notebook solely for jotting down inspirational or insightful comments that you'll hear over the next two years from professors, fellow students, and guest speakers. "I had a classmate who would collect bits of wisdom this way," says van Tongeren, who is currently an associate marketing manager at corporate headquarters for Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas. "He shared one from his notebook that he took from Anson Dorance, the head coach of the UNC women's soccer program: 'Things that are fun aren't always the things that make you happy. It's good to have both in our life - just make sure you're spending more of your time on the things that make you happy.'" (September 9th, 2010)
Source: BusinessWeek
