There is a lot you can do to prepare yourself for the MBA before it starts. Here are six things you should make sure to do before you enter the MBA program.

When I traveled to Barcelona to start my MBA, I brought with me a small pile of ‘todo’ items – things that I hadn’t gotten done before leaving. As I unpacked my things in the new flat, I put the todo items in a folder and told myself I’d get it done during the next few weeks.

The next time I opened that folder was two years later, as I packed up my flat after graduation. The fact is, once the MBA starts, you just don’t have time to get other things done. Here are six important things you should do before you enter the MBA.

1. Clarify your goals: What do you want out of your MBA?

Make a prioritized list of the things you want to achieve during your MBA (see some examples here). It is very important to clarify your goals before the programme starts. Once it starts, you will inevitably lose the mental perspective for a while. Also, it is difficult to reflect objectively on your priorities once you enter the Fishbowl.

2. Apply for scholarships

Scholarships and grants can be a great way of financing part of your MBA. But one thing is important: you should start applying for funds as soon as you have made the decision to APPLY to the MBA. Many funds and scholarships only accept applications once every year, and do not allow retroactive applications, meaning that you might miss out on some cash. So don’t wait until you have been accepted. Start sending applications now.

3. Improve your communication skills

From both an academic and a job hunting perspective, there is one thing that will help you do better in the MBA: your communication skills. Being able to communicate clearly and concisely in written and spoken English is, simply put, a major competitive advantage. Do what you can to master this before you start. Take language classes if needed, and join a Public Speaking club, so you can become comfortable speaking in front of classmates and professors.

4. Read a Finance 101 book

Financial accounting – the ability to read and understand a P&L and a Balance Sheet – is the cornerstone of many of the classes you will take. If you don’t quite know what debit and credit is and how these concepts are used in practice, you should pick up a primer on Financial Accounting, study it, and do some exercises until you feel comfortable with the basic concepts.

Importantly, you DON’T need to study the advanced stuff. The MBA curriculum is not overly complex in this regard. What you are really aiming for is a basic fluency in the beginner-level concepts.

5. Get your VISA and travel documents in order

Every year, a few students are forced to postpone their MBA for a year because they haven’t gotten their VISA and similar travel documents in time. Don’t be one of those guys – start this as soon as you can.

6. Prepare your friends for radio silence

Prepare your friends and family for the fact that you will drop off the grid for a while. The first part of the MBA in particular is very intense, and it can be hard to stay in touch with people back home. And if you are in a relationship, read this posting on how to make it survive the MBA.

~

This is from the blog of a fellow MBA student:

Today I officially got dumped. Over email. While I was in class, and just before I was supposed to give a little speech in front of my entire class. [...] Mine is the latest in a string of MBA relationships to fall apart. Several people in my class have returned home for a weekend to try to fix a relationship, only to come back single, or get a phone call and find out the other person doesn’t want to be with them anymore. I guess it’s a risk you take when you go away, but I know I’m not the only one who wasn’t expecting it at all and who had hoped theirs would be one of the ones that worked out.

If you start the MBA with a relationship, there are plenty of reasons to be worried. Many a promising long-term relationship has come to an end against the ragged, unforgiving shores of the MBA program. According to a Financial Times survey done in 2004, if you start the MBA with a girlfriend, there is a 50 percent chance that she will not be with you at graduation. Each break-up story is different in the details, but it all comes down to this: The MBA is a scaringly efficient relationship-killer.

There are, I suspect, many different reasons for this. The main ones are, in no particular order:

• No time and energy for each other. The MBA will take up all the time you let it take and then some, and it takes an extraordinary effort to make sure that you don’t neglect your relationship. Most days, an MBA student will come home late, gobble down dinner, and then immediately start preparing tomorrow’s homework until late in the night. On weekends, you will lose your partner not to school, but to sleep as he or she tries to catch up from the long nights during the week.
• MBAlienation. Time isn’t the only issue. The MBA experience is immersive, to say the least, and as a partner, you can quickly start feeling adrift on foreign seas, hearing only the unintelligible murmurings of MBAs talking to other MBAs about their MBA experiences. Maintaining a bond can be harder when you can’t laugh at the same jokes or rage over the same unfairnesses.
• People change during an MBA. Many people feel they develop during the MBA, not just professionally but also as persons. Not surprisingly, this means that many relationships fall apart as your partner sometimes does not develop along with you, or develops in a different direction.
• The MBA is a meat market. The MBA marketing brochures won’t tell you this, but especially for women, the MBA is a dating market filled with gifted, exotic and interesting people, several of whom are either single or soon-to-be single. (It has jokingly been said that MBA stands for ‘Married But Available’.) Unsurprisingly, some relationships fall apart because the partner in the MBA falls for a classmate.

Of course, knowing that the MBA presents a risk to your relationship, it is tempting to adopt a fatalistic approach to the situation: “If my relationship doesn’t hold, it probably wasn’t meant to be anyway.” This way of thinking may give you a certain measure of consolation after the break-up. But there is a danger in adopting this kind of thinking before the MBA, as it may lead you and your partner to ignore the problem. My guess is that some of the couples that fell apart probably were ‘meant to be’ (whatever that means), only the MBA came between them.

The good news is, there are things you can do to increase the chances of making it. Here’s four suggestions.

1. Clarify expectations in advance

The most important part is that you are both clear about what the MBA entails for the relationship. In terms of spending quality time together, an MBA is about as far from a honeymoon as you can get. Make sure your partner understands and accepts this, and that he or she does not habour unrealistic expectations about how much quality time you will spend together. Have this conversation as early as possible, and don’t fall for the temptation to downplay the problem. It is far better to be pleasantly surprised by the occasional windfall than to be sorely and repeatedly disappointed by a hopeful promise that never materialised.

2. Make sure your partner is as busy as you are

You are going to be seriously busy during your MBA, no matter which type it is. It is tempting to think that your relationship will do better if your partner has lots of free time. According to my observations, though, this is not the case; having a busy partner working in a challenging job is a good thing. If you are both busy, you may have trouble getting the household to function – but frankly, the occasional messy sink or the overreliance on fast food is far less dangerous to your relationship than a partner who sits around all day with nothing to do.

3. Involve your partner in the MBA

Your partner should try to attend as many MBA activities as possible – team evenings, ski trips, sitting in on classes, joining the Theater Club, starting a soccer team and so forth – even if it sometimes means going on her/his own. (In some of the couples I knew, the partner started working with a professor on a research project or a case study.) As a partner, the more you can become part of the MBA experience yourself, the smaller the risk of mutual alienation – and, you get to make some friends of your own, instead of just being a sidecar to your partner.

4. Systematically set aside time for each other

It is pretty basic, but hard to do in practice: make sure to set aside a fixed time every week to do things together. For instance, you can decide to make every Saturday your relationship day. Or if your partner will live in a different country during the MBA, you can plan and budget for taking regular mini-vacations together. It only works, though, if you truly defend this time with your life, not letting other priorities take over no matter how pressing they may seem in the moment. Also, remember to inform your MBA team about your ‘relationship time’ from the very beginning, so they don’t get surprised when you refuse to attend all-weekend work sessions (yes, these will occur regularly.)

The reality is, prioritizing your relationship WILL mean compromising on other areas – say, accepting that you won’t make the Dean’s List grade-wise, or that you will make fewer friends because you opt out of many of the social events. It can work if you are willing to make some hard choices. If you are NOT willing to compromise, though, thinking that it’ll all work out, be prepared to run into a very hard brick wall as the world starts prioritizing for you.

For more on this, see my advice on prioritizing your time, Rule no. 1: Know your priorities.

~

One day, my American classmate Edward Owen received a call from Morgan Stanley: “We are not impressed with your level of commitment.”

Obviously, Edward panicked a bit. He had interviewed with Morgan Stanley for a summer internship position, and had just received an offer from them a few days ago. Technically, he had another week and a half to decide, but the bank was clearly not satisfied with his tardiness in signing the contract.

The problem was that the Morgan Stanley position was not Edward’s preferred option. It was a great job, all things considered, but he was also speaking to Goldman Sachs about an internship position where he would get to try a whole range of different tasks. With the recently arrived Morgan Stanley offer, though, it looked like he had good cards on his hands. The same Friday, he had a meeting with Goldman Sachs in New York. Edward planned to tell them about the Morgan Stanley offer, hoping that this would induce Goldman Sachs to give him a counteroffer at once. (Banks take it as a sign of quality when their rivals want to hire you, so his chances of getting the Goldman Sachs position looked good.)

However, the investment banks are old hands at the signing game, and the recruiters at Morgan Stanley were no exception. They know that all applicants, regardless of their true preferences, will say that their bank is their first priority. That’s how the game is played. But when one of their offers is not signed at once, they know that the applicant is likely holding out for something better. This is bad for the recruiters. Similar to the MBA Admissions offices, the performance of corporate recruiters is often measured by how many applicants sign their contracts once the offer is given – a measure that is sometimes called the yield. Also, losing an applicant means that they have to start all over again with their recruitment efforts.

This is when they give a call to the applicant, as they did with Edward. “You told us that working with us was your dream job. Why haven’t you signed the contract yet? You are really not sending a good signal about your dedication to Morgan Stanley.” In subtle or not so subtle ways, they let you know that anything less than an instantaneous acceptance will hurt your chances of future employment with the bank. And that the managing partners have taken offense at your lack of commitment. Managing partners have been known to make life unpleasant for interns who weren’t really committed.

During their conversation, Edward felt forced to tell Morgan Stanley about the Goldman Sachs interview Friday.

“So, you are flying into New York on Friday morning. What time is the Goldman Sachs interview?”
“At four in the afternoon.”
“Great. Why don’t you come by the Morgan Stanley office before that? We’d like to talk you to about your decision. How does noon sound?”

Of course, this wasn’t just a conversation. It was a signing meeting. Morgan Stanley knew they were about to be robbed of a candidate they wanted, so they had a copy of the contract ready for signing when Edward arrived at their offices. Edward, as most MBA students, was not a trained negotiator. Recruiters, however, do this kind of thing for a living, and the investment banks tend to hire the best there is.

An hour later, three hours before he knew if he would receive an offer from Goldman Sachs, Edward had signed the contract.

~

Edward had, it should be mentioned, a good summer working at Morgan Stanley, and ended up getting a job with them after the MBA.

Edward’s real name has been disguised.

~

There is something very powerful and lasting about initial impressions. The first impression you get of a person can often stay with you for a long time.

For that reason, it is perhaps not so strange that in the first few weeks of the MBA, a lot of us practised the art of impression management, trying to make a good impression on each other from the beginning. For most of us, this translated into an increased awareness of our appearance on others, and perhaps a tendency to be less spontaneous. This is probably as natural as it is unavoidable.

But in several instances, it degenerated into blatant self-promotion. We would be sitting in a small group of people, enjoying the sun and chatting about nothing, taking the first cautious steps towards getting to know each other. And then, it would come from somebody with all the subtlety of a pig on ice: “Yeah, I really like this city. I also got accepted at INSEAD and London Business School, but the weather here is much nicer, right?” Smooth, buddy, smooth; we almost didn’t notice your namedropping there. Others would consistently try to steer the conversation in the direction of the GMAT, desperately hoping for an opportunity to tell people about their 770 point score. In one extreme case, I even met a guy who mentioned his high GMAT score as part of his general self-introduction routine. Needless to say, this said a lot more about him than he may have wished for.

Impression management goes on whenever people meet each other for the first time. But it somehow seemed worse in the MBA. I think there is a bit of a vicious circle going on. You know that your fellow students are supposed to be really clever people; the schools, doing their own bit of impression management, do nothing but trumpet that only the best and the brightest are allowed access to the sacred grounds of their campus. You are concerned that people will think you are not as bright as them, so you start, well, bluffing a bit. This in turn makes your listeners feel insecure, so now they start bluffing a bit as well, and before you know it, everybody walks around in a constant state of anxiety, feeling like impostors about to be defrauded.

To make it worse, those illustrious stories you wrote about yourself in the MBA application essays can suddenly take on a life of their own. Perhaps you told the school that you founded a company, when in reality you only co-founded it together with four other people. Perhaps that flashy external consulting project you wrote about was really more of a six-week unpaid student internship. And perhaps that ’100 percent growth in sales’ you effected happened mostly when your mother convinced your father to buy something from you as well. But when your fellow students ask about your past endeavours, you don’t immediately share the down-to-earth version. Instead, you try to live up to your application essays, presenting yourself as that really amazing and mostly fictional person you managed to sell to the school. And so it happens that five minutes into your first meeting with your future friends, you start lying to them.

In our case, what broke this dismal spell of bluffing and counterbluffing was people like John Smithson. Formerly a captain in the British Army, John was a completely down-to-earth guy, a Scotsman with an easy laugh and a refreshingly self-deprecating manner. He didn’t give a damn about impression management. He would happily say to people that he was clueless about something. He joked about not being sure why they let him in, considering that his greatest accomplishment was the semi-illegal beer distribution network he set up while doing a tour of duty in Iraq. During the first weeks in the MBA, the relaxed openness of John and a few others like him was the welcome needle of relief that burst the balloon of ever-inflating impression management. It shone light on an essential truth: that ignorance was okay, that we were here because we didn’t know everything. After all, why go to business school if you know it all already?

~

In essence: don’t bluff, and don’t be afraid to share some of your weaknesses as well as your success stories. Go get drunk in small groups, and suggest, after a few beers, that you swap stories about the worst blunders you have made. It all helps counter the effects of excessive impression management.

…

It will happen sooner or later: you will be sitting in the classroom, slightly drowsy and nursing your morning coffee, when you suddenly hear the professor call out your name: “So… Mike! Could you please walk us through your analysis of today’s case?” What follows is either A) a chance to show your intellectual prowess because you prepared well, or more often B) a painful and protracted interrogation flaunting your ignorance in front of all of your friends and classmates.

This is the practice known as ‘cold calling’, and most professors use it with varying degrees of glee. So why does it exist? According to one book on how business schools work, the point of cold calling is “to prepare you for the frequent real-world scenarios when you’ll be put on the spot and forced to answer unanticipated questions about a project”. This answer is very MBA-like in that it sounds fancy and profound, yet entirely misses the point.

The real purpose of cold calling is to terrorize you into preparing for class. Professors know that you will not have time to prepare well for all classes, and hence will do their utmost to ensure that you are prepared for their class. And from a student perspective, cold calling is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with a 60-chamber gun and one live bullet, only you pull the trigger several times per day. You know that sooner or later you’re gonna get it, which has a rather wonderful way of focusing your attention.

There are several ways of dealing with cold calling. You can, of course,

1. Give a good answer

However, in many cases the good answer – or any reasonable approximation thereof – will completely elude you. Maybe you didn’t understand the question. Maybe you didn’t understand the case. Maybe you didn’t even read it. In that case, there are several options. You can, for instance:

2. Bullshit

If you have been a management consultant, you know what I am talking about. Bullshitting takes many forms, but a frequently used version is to ramble on for a long time, preferably using long drawn-out sentences with lots of fancy buzzwords in them. Hopefully, when you bullshit, the professor will hear a key word somewhere in your ramblings and chose to build on that, perhaps even moving on to another victim.

Of course, not all questions can be answered by bullshit statements, and some of the more experienced professors are adept at calling out bullshitters. (Also, an accounting class question like “What should it say on the debit side?” is kind of hard to bullshit your way around.) What you can do, however, is to:

3. Ask a counterquestion

One approach is to ask the professor to specify the initial question, giving you a moment to think about what to say. A better way is to ask some specific question that elaborates on the previous discussion: “Sorry, Professor, but I am in doubt as to how you would account for, say, intellectual property rights under the framework you just showed us.” If the question makes sense, the professor will sometimes pick up on your question and forget the initial cold call.

Should this not work, however, you can:

4. Answer a different question

This technique is being used by professional politicians all the time. The best ones completely ignore the question they are actually being posed, and just launch directly into their pre-prepared answer to another question.

This works in class as well. The thing to remember about professors is, they have a lot on their mind when they are teaching a class. They need to keep track of the session, they need to focus it on where they want the discussion to go, and they also need to listen carefully to every single statement that the students make. If your answer makes sense in the context of the case, they will often shift their focus.

An important detail here is that you shouldn’t start your sentence by saying “I wanted to answer another question, namely…”, as this gives the professor a chance to stop you. Rather, you should launch directly into your statement: “I actually see the problem as being the marketing strategy of the firm. When they use direct marketing, blah blah…” If executed well, only the most adept of professors will manage to catch you.

Of course, you can only go so far by bluffing. On occasion, your best option is simply to:

5. Make a joke

If cold called, try this: point at another student and say “Why, that question is so simple that I will defer it to my assistant, Paul.” Or find some way of making a funny comment. However lame the joke, if it makes the class laugh, you are likely to get away unscathed. It is, of course, just a humorous way of telling the professor that you don’t have an answer, but surprisingly often it can get you off the hook.

Wit is an elusive thing, though, and you may not be capable of dreaming up a funny answer in time. Should all else fail, your best option may simply be to:

6. Say you don’t know the answer

Simply admit that you don’t have a clue, or that you haven’t read the case or done the exercise. The professor may grill you a bit for passing the buck, but unless it becomes a habit, your grades will probably not suffer significantly. You can always come back strong in the next class.

There are, in fact, only two cardinal sins in cold calling, namely silence and guilt. A three-second silence as you gather your thoughts is normal. But at the four-second mark and onwards, your silence becomes loaded with heavy and dreadful significance, making it clear to everybody that your panicked search for an answer is coming up empty-handed. Passing on a question immediately is way, way better than passing after 10 long seconds of stony ‘deer caught in headlights’-type silence.

The other cardinal sin is to show excessive guilt over not having an answer. You won’t leave much of a bad impression if you make a simple and sincere matter-of-fact statement like “I’m sorry, but I didn’t manage to read the case yesterday – our two-year old was throwing a tantrum” (or “we had to finish a submission for the Marketing class” or whatever). Most professors privately accept that students cannot be well prepared for every single class; we’re all adults, after all, and adults are sometimes just too busy to do everything. No biggie there.

But the same statement, soaked in guilt and wrapped in near-tearful excuses, leaves an entirely different impression. It’s like catching a four-year old with his hands deep in the cookie jar. If the boy looks terrified and guilty, you know that he knows better. But if the kid pretends that, why, having my hand in the cookie jar is perfectly normal and could happen to everybody with short arms, stubby legs and an unsated desire for cookies – those are the kids who somehow tend to get away with it. In class, as in life and cookie jars, a little bit of panache can go a long way.

…

Every Breath Bernanke Takes
Columbia Business School has a great tradition for producing videos as part of their Follies show – the music video below is particularly brilliant:

…

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:

1. Look through the list of goals above, and add your own if necessary
2. List them in order of priority, from first to last, according to what is most important to you
3. Stick the list on your fridge and consult it regularly, so you can take action in case you start drifting off course

…

In the career choices of MBA students, those strange attractors are consulting and – to a lesser extent after the crisis – investment banking. It is an open secret that a big part of the people who enter business school do not really know what they want to do with their career, irrespective of the elaborate fiction they may have crafted in their application. If this describes you, you should be aware that you are likely to end up in either banking or consulting, even if these two industries are not on your initial list of considerations. It is like an inverse version of the butterfly effect: you can flap your little wings as much as you like, but in the end, it probably won’t make a difference.

This is more or less how it goes.

First, your attempts to clarify your own goals during the MBA run headlong into the Pressure Principle. Defining career goals is not the kind of exercise you can successfully complete in the fifteen-minute increments between classes, or in the last half hour before you go to bed. It takes a certain measure of time spent in quiet contemplation, preferably on a day where you are feeling mentally balanced, and where a swiftly approaching deadline does not threaten to rob you of your focus.

But then, the reality is that it’s seven thirty in the evening before the team meeting is over, you are mentally and physically exhausted, and honestly, there’s really no time this week. Too many cases. You reluctantly open your calender on the next week and write, “THINK ABOUT CAREER! What do I want to do with my life??” But of course, next week turns out to be even worse, and your career goals remain undefined.

Simultaneously, the Fishbowl Effect starts to affect your thinking. You keep encountering classmates who believe that a consulting job with McKinsey is the best thing that can happen to a person short of eternal life. (Of course, some former McKinseyites will tell you that eternal life working for McKinsey could equally be considered a good definition of hell.) Faced with the admirably clear career plans of your peers, it sounds a little lame to admit that you still don’t have a clue what you want to do. Soon, you find yourself telling people that you, too, are considering a career in consulting, which earns you approving nods all around.

Little by little, it grows on you. The idea starts to take on a life of its own, and your replies become more detailed. “Bain, you say? Well, maybe. I don’t know. Rumor has it they are bit heavy on implementation, not enough strategy. McKinsey? Yeah, sure, I’m thinking of it. Great place.”

Several weeks later you still don’t know what you really want, and now, you begin to stress about it. You decide to apply for a few consulting firms, just as a backup, before it is too late. It’s not really what you are passionate about, but the thought of not finding an internship fills your heart with a disproportionate amount of dread. Besides, there’s that inner Fishbowl voice telling you it is the right thing to go for, everybody wants it, so it must be good.

Next thing you know, you have an offer from Boston Consulting Group. It turns out that during the interview, your barely disguised lack of interest came across as calm maturity. You are surprised at the wave of relief that washes over you. You are still not crazy about it – but you have an offer. and there is something very flattering about a top-tier consultancy saying ‘We Want You’. The fact that they turned down several of your otherwise gifted classmates somehow also counts for something.

You look at the money. It looks good, better than you could hope to do elsewhere.

You look at the company’s name – Boston Consulting Group. No denying that it would look nice on your CV.

You look at your alternatives. They are fuzzy, uncertain.

You think of the inner peace it would bring to get the internship nailed down. To be capable of telling people, “Yeah, I got it. BCG.”

Finally, you turn your thoughs inward. You question yourself one last time, scanning the distant horizon for signs that the cavalry will finally come to the rescue, barging out of your subconsciousness with the long-awaited tidings of your true career goals.

Nothing moves.

The summer still threatens.

You accept the offer.

…

The point? Consulting in particular can be a good career choice if you don’t know what else to do. But if you know that you want to do something else, don’t even start down the consulting/banking route, lest they draw you in before you have had time to find your dream job.

…

Most of these sessions were fairly informative, if predictably glib and polished. Some of the presentations were marred by the extreme arrogance of the speakers, as they swaggered around asking people if they really felt worthy enough to work in banking. Others were so alike it was uncanny; some of the consultancies in particular could almost have used the same set of slides. And a few presentations were remarkably poor. You had the feeling that the hapless speakers had been tasked with a last-minute assignment: “Hey, Michael turned in sick today. Could you help us do a company presentation at a business school? It’s in 20 minutes. Yeah, HR has some old generic slides you can use. Go dazzle them, boy. Oh, and don’t mention that you only started working here last week.”

Some of the company presentations became unintentionally humorous. My favorite example was Deutsche Bank’s. Near the end of their presentation, the speaker said that they would now show a new video that conveyed the spirit of Deutsche Bank. However, while the bank’s HR people were beaming with corporate spirit, the bankers that accompagnied them had a slightly wary look on their faces.

Then, the video started, showing a close-up shot of something black that scurried around. More than one; there were lots of them. They were busy. The sound went ‘taca-taca-taca-taca-taca’. Gradually, the camera zoomed out, and you saw what the black things were.

They were ants.

Little, scurrying, insignificant, completely identical ants.

Forming the letters ‘Deutsche Bank’.

It was outright bizarre; nobody knew how to react when it ended. Somebody started a half-hearted round of clapping as people exchanged incredulous looks. The bankers were stonefaced, fidgeting with their pens or staring meticulously into the distance. HR was one big smile of clueless pride.

The great thing was, you could vividly imagine the warm glow that must have been spreading in the room when the video was first presented to the top management at Deutsche Bank. Words like ‘unity’, ‘dedication’, and ‘together we’re strong’ spinning through the air. Eyes brimming with corporate pathos. Much nodding of heads, possible promotion in line for the project manager. Yet to everybody else, the video said, in no uncertain terms, “We see you as expendable little worker drones. Resistance is futile; now come join us.”

I’m not sure how many applications Deutsche Bank received that year.

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The surprising thing is how often we forget this. In my MBA, people had a natural tendency to think that job hunting was something you did with people outside the school. On the class mailing list, we would not hesitate to spam each other asking for advice on where to buy a good bicycle, but it was quite rare that people sent out a mass email asking if someone was familiar with this or that industry or field.

The truth of this really hit me during one of our entrepreneurship classes, where the professor had invited a business angel into the class. At some point during his presentation, we talked about elevator pitches – making a coherent 30-second presentation of your business idea. He asked, “So, is there anybody in here who can try to explain me their business idea?”

We were maybe 35 people in the class. One of our classmates, Jeremy, volunteered and did a decent job of it. He had an idea about making educational toys for preschoolers. First, the presenter gave Jeremy some brief feedback on his pitch. Then, he said, “Now, I’m gonna ask something interesting. Is there anybody in this classroom who knows anything about the toy industry?”

At that point, the guy who sat right next to Jeremy put up his hand and said, “Well, yes, my parents own a toy manufacturing company. I could probably help you get a prototype built.”

We looked at each other with wide eyes. Jeremy hadn’t known this, and if it hadn’t been for the presentation, he would probably never have found out. The guest speaker had made his point: if you are looking for something, you often don’t need to look any further than the person sitting next to you.

The learning point is this: don’t eat lunch with the same crew every day. Instead, get to know your classmates. Don’t always talk about yesterday’s accounting class. Tell people about your dreams and desires, and ask them about theirs. Get into the habit of asking yourself, can I help this person to reach his goals? Surprisingly often, you can; maybe it is just a question of making the connection to another student with the same interests. Make a habit of talking to new people on occasion. It is amazing what will happen if you do.

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