Rule #1: Know your priorities
The single most useful advice for MBA students is this: write down your priorities on a piece of paper, and stick it on your fridge. The question you must know the answer to is: what do YOU want out of the MBA?
People take an MBA for many different reasons, and with many different goals. These are some of the goals that I encountered among my fellow students:
- Getting the dream job in Company X or Country Y
- Finding out what you want to do with your (professional) life
- Changing careers (say, escaping the IT industry)
- Making the Dean’s List by getting an A in every class
- Learning as much as possible
- Building a network (or, if you prefer the less MBA-jaded vernacular: making new friends and getting to know lots of interesting people)
- Starting your own business
- Learning a new language (preferably beyond the present tense)
- Exploring new sides of yourself (i.e. personal rather than professional development)
- Having fun and new experiences
- Taking a two-year break from work
In their marketing brochures, business schools understandably trumpet all of the benefits above, presenting the MBA as a veritable smorgasbord of opportunities. But the grim reality is that you can’t do it all; you will have to chose, to prioritize your time and attention.
The need to prioritize manifests itself in the simplest of ways: on any given afternoon, you will have some hours to spend on what you chose. Do you study for tomorrow’s classes, going for top grades or new learning? Do you go to a career workshop or a company presentation? Do you go have a beer with some classmates, prioritizing your social life? Do you play sports? Hit the beach? Check out museums? Write the business plan for your startup? Or do you simply choose to prepare a nice dinner for your partner back home, labouring to keep your relationship alive, healthy and free of divorce lawyers? When you pick your elective courses, do you pick the subjects that you know little about (maximizing learning) or the subjects that you know you have a talent for (maximizing your chances of good grades)?
The MBA is full of tradeoffs – and while you have to make them, it can help a lot to know your priorities, so you can at least make these tradeoffs consistently.
The Pressure Principle
Knowing your priorities becomes even more important because the MBA is decidedly not a neutral environment when it comes to the different goals; in various ways, the business school actively imposes specific priorities on you. This is what I call The Pressure Principle. Students who want to maximise studying will find it easy. Particularly in the first year, the school exerts heavy pressure to make you prepare for classes. But students who aim to explore new, perhaps niche industries in order to find their professional calling may find it a lot harder to invest the necessary time in this, given that the daily academic workload tend to crowd out other activities. And more or less all the top schools have some kind of relative grading system in place that actively suppresses your inclinations, however personally legitimate, to take a break.
Using a metaphor from one of our professors, Mike Rosenberg, the MBA can be thought of as a raging river that you jump into. Once you enter it, you will be swept along by the currents, mostly trying to just keep your head above water. And with no time to think about the bigger picture, you may risk being carried to wherever the river takes you, whether or not that’s where you wanted to end up. It is when you stand on the brink of the river, before immersing yourself in it, that you should take the time to think about where you want to go.
For this reason, I recommend a simple exercise:
- Look through the list of goals above, and add your own if necessary
- List them in order of priority, from first to last, according to what is most important to you
- Stick the list on your fridge and consult it regularly, so you can take action in case you start drifting off course
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