In this episode of Business Casual, the hosts delve into essential advice for new MBA students. As campuses welcome new arrivals, the importance of early career planning and networking is emphasized, particularly for one-year programs like INSEAD’s. Students update resumes and scout potential employers ahead of the rapid recruitment cycles.

The hosts highlight the necessity of balancing academic and career efforts from the start, noting the quick shift from academic orientation to job searches that often surprises new students. Practical strategies for managing overwhelming opportunities, engaging with coursework, connecting with peers, and building relationships with professors are discussed, providing a roadmap to transform the MBA experience into a successful career path.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.370] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wich Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. This is the time of the year when new MBA students begin arriving on campus to start their journey into mainly the two-year residential full-time MBA programs that we often talk about and are common place in the US, less so in Europe, although many of the European programs, which are shorter, also start around this time. We thought it’d be a good idea to dispense some advice for these newly arrived students on how to best take advantage of their MBA program. How do you get off to a quick start? How do you put your best foot forward? How do you get the most out of the experience? Let’s talk a little about that. Caroline, what’s your advice?

[00:01:02.470] – Caroline

Yeah, well, I think one thing is preparing your career search, your post-MBA job search. I know it seems a bit crazy to be thinking about this when you’re just starting an MBA, but it’s really helpful, I think, if you do prepare the ground before you start. So get your resume up to date, start looking at companies that you might be interested in targeting, and have some initial discussions. If you can start to network. If you’re on a two-year program, then recruitment will start fairly soon for internships. So it’s good to be well-prepared for that. Of course, I worked at INSEAD, which is a one-year program. So you really are thrown in at the deep end straight away as regards your career plans and job search, because the recruitment can start pretty quickly. So for example, if you’re starting the January intake, recruitment will start straight away for some internships. So for for investment banking, so you need to be prepared for that. For some candidates, it’s worth spending a bit of extra time clarifying your career goals. So for most MBA applications, of course, you have to state what are your career plans post MBA.

[00:02:16.090] – Caroline

Some of them, it’s just very high level. You might have had to discuss it a bit more in detail at the interview stage, but you might have some candidates come to business with quite a vague career plan. It’s really worth investing some time ahead of joining the program on clarifying your goals. What is it that you want to do immediately when you graduate, and how do you see your career evolving over time? And think about plan A and a plan B, because not everything works out the way you want it to, depending on many things, including the economic cycle. So it’s worth preparing that ground because you will get pulled in many different directions when you’re on the MBA program. And in some ways, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. It’s an incredibly intense experience. There are so many opportunities that you can take advantage of, which is wonderful, but you can’t do everything. And there are things that you can do to prepare the ground for your job search. And so if you can do some of that work beforehand, then you’ll be saving yourself some time. And so you’ll be well-prepared for the program that the school has planned for you.

[00:03:20.670] – Caroline

So they will have a program set up with workshops and counseling and coaching and so on to guide you on what you need to be doing and when. But if you have prepared the ground a bit yourself, then you’ll be well positioned to take advantage of those opportunities.

[00:03:38.040] – John

Now, Caroline, I’m thinking that some of our listeners may be shocked because you immediately went into job search mode. Here they’re just arriving on campus. But yet, broadly enough, they should be thinking about the end result, even though their journey is just beginning. That’s because soon enough, recruiters will be coming on campus and basically entertaining students at different events. And soon enough, they’ll be interviewing for internships. And it’s always a shock to newly arrived MBA students to see how quickly the focus shifts from academics to, Okay, what am I going to do? How am I going to get my internship? Do I want to convert that internship into a full-time job offer if in fact, I really like the company and I like the offer that they make to me? But it is shocking, isn’t it? Because you’re entering an academic program and instantly you have to think about the end result as opposed to the beginning.

[00:04:35.010] – Caroline

Yeah, it is quite a surprise often. And so you really have to manage both in parallel. And one of the challenges of business school is juggling everything. And obviously, you need to be fully engaged academically, but you do need to be carving out time regularly for networking and attending employer presentations and all of those things. And if you have a bit of clarity ahead of time about which direction you want to go in, even if you’ve got a few different paths in mind. And many people change their goals, right, during the MBA program. It is, by its nature, a transformative experience. But what I’ve seen at business school, at least at INSEAD, is that the students who come in with some clarity about what they want to do and what they get out of it, even if that completely changes, right? They get exposed to things that they’ve never thought about, and they have a complete change of heart. And that’s very common, right? That people end up doing something that bears no relationship at all to what they said in their MBA application they’re going to do. But if they have clarity and they’ve thought about their goals and they have a plan, even if that completely changes and they throw that out of the window, those students are often able to recalibrate and reformulate a plan and get focused again much better, in my experience, than students who come in who are all over the place and have no clue what they want to do and are attracted by everything and running in lots of different directions, and their attention is very fragmented.

[00:06:07.460] – Caroline

And those people can really struggle to hone in and focus during the program. And of course, later on, when you are interviewing for your post-MBA job, then it’s a competitive process. So if you are pursuing 10 different avenues, you’re not going to be particularly well-prepared for any of them. Whereas the student who you’re competing with who is absolutely got the heart set on going into venture capital or going into investment banking and has really prepared the ground for that. They’re going to do better at the interview stage if they’ve been more focused. So I think it’s okay. You need to be open to transformation, but just try to focus yourself. And if you do have a change of heart, then think about how you can reformulate your plans.

[00:06:54.590] – John

Yeah. I mean, years ago, I remember writing a story about UVA Darden, which discovered that students who came in with a plan who had some direction in mind were the most satisfied students when they graduated. The least satisfied students were those who were the so-called explorers who came in thinking that they would not really know what they wanted to do. So they would sample this and it would sample that. And it made it more difficult for them to get an internship. And then it made it more difficult for them to land a lambda job and even take the right elective courses in the second year, and they tended to be the most dissatisfied people to graduate without question. Now, Maria, Caroline mentioned something that I think affects every incoming MBA student, FOMO. You enter a program, and my God, there are so many clubs and organizations, there’s so many new people to meet. Meantime, you’re in the core curriculum, which is the real grind of an MBA program where the professors are assigning so much work that it’s impossible to it all. The lesson there is you have to learn quickly how to prioritize what’s in front of you.

[00:08:06.450] – John

How do you deal with FOMO? How do you deal with that initial onslaught of case readings and classes and professors who want to overload you on purpose?

[00:08:17.330] – Maria

I think what Caroline was saying about careers also applies to anything outside of the job hunt. The clearer you are with what you want to get out of business school, the more you’ll be able to avoid FOMO Because when you see other people running in different directions, you’ll say, Well, that’s great for them, but that’s not the direction that I want to go in. In terms of clubs, totally building on what Caroline just said, your first priority should be to identify the professionally related club or clubs that are as closely related to your intended career as possible. You might even want to reach out to these clubs over the summer before you enroll. Now, admittedly, they will all be off doing their internship, so they may not be able to respond. Or if you’re enrolling with a career vision that may not be standard, you might to reach out to Career Services before you show up on campus and just give them a heads up. I actually know that more and more MBA programs have started doing summer programming for entering students to prepare them for the job hunt. Because as Caroline said, you don’t get a ton of time for navel-gazing.

[00:09:18.090] – Maria

You need to prioritize. Maybe what might be beneficial for you on that front is to somewhere on a Google Doc or a piece of paper somewhere that you can refer back to, make a little list for yourself of why am I doing this? What are the main things I want to get out of it? Is it a career switch? Is it I want to get really good at a specific area of business? Then you can refer back to that as your true north. In terms of how do you prioritize with the academic side of things and the social side of things. The professors are not going to be happy with me for this, but honestly, I would not prioritize the academic part at first, only because you can always, to the extent that it might a semester long course or a quarter long course, you can always try to make up the grade later. Obviously, if it’s in a topic, if you want to get an internship in investment banking and you don’t have a lot of finance experience, then obviously you’re going to prioritize paying attention in your finance class. But to the extent that the academics are important, but the academic part of it is not quite as important as the job hunting component, if you have that marginal hour available to spend and you’re trying to choose between the two, I would the job hunt.

[00:10:31.590] – Maria

Then also, don’t forget that you should, at some point, start to balance things out, too, with maybe joining a couple of fun or recreational clubs or clubs that are not necessarily professionally related, but where you’re more likely to find your social tribe other people who are interested in the same sorts of things you are. The professional clubs are the obvious and most clear way to do that, but there are all kinds of other clubs from, I don’t know, mountain biking to wine tasting to everything in between. Do that, too, because really the networking is what you take with you. The job hunt is what you get immediately after you graduate, but the network is what you take with you for decades afterwards. I would prioritize both of those things.

[00:11:10.610] – John

To underline the notion that you should seek out a professional club first, if you know exactly what industry you’re going to enter, is a really good one because, okay, if you want to be a consultant, for example, you need to be coached on how to do a case interview. That’s a unique Week interview experience. Usually, it’s the folks in the consulting club who’ve been through it on an internship level and who have contact with alums. The second year is often drill the first year in consulting clubs on case interviews to help you prepare for them, and that’s essential. Likewise, you want to be a program manager at a tech company, join the tech club because you’re going to meet people who not only interned at these institutions and can come back and give you very recent on what it’s like to work at a Google or a Microsoft, or God help you, Elon Musk, Tesla. It will be really helpful for you to know who to contact, how to act when you’re with them, what alumni are already working there that you could also reach out to. The club thing as related to your intended employer is a really good and important issue.

[00:12:28.960] – Maria

Even if you’re You’ve narrowed it down to two or three things, then join those two or three clubs because even just talking to people who have done this for a living might very quickly be a way for you to get a sense. If you’re like, I’m not really sure if I want to do tech or consulting, do both, join both clubs, and then just talk to people who have done that for a job. Then that might also help give you a sense of like, Oh, actually, maybe tech isn’t quite what I thought it was. Maybe consulting isn’t quite what I thought it was. Maybe consulting is better than I thought it was. Because so many people have done these things prior business school. So talking to those folks, you’ll be able to get that firsthand information that might help you narrow down your priorities even more.

[00:13:06.820] – John

Now, when I think about mentorship, I’m very caught up on creating relationships with professors who can motivate you, who can inspire you, who can make connections for you. I wonder if either of you have advice on selecting certain faculty members who might be really instrumental to you, not not only through your MBA journey, but even well beyond it. And how do you create a relationship like that when you hit the campus? Caroline, what do you think?

[00:13:39.890] – Caroline

Well, I would focus more on picking the classes that are the right fit for you rather than selecting your classes based on who is teaching them. But certainly you’re right that there are opportunities to build relationships with professors, and in some cases, that can be very useful. And a lot of students do stay in touch with professors that they build a relationship with. So if you have that opportunity, then get involved in the class. To build that relationship, see what you can do to be helpful to the professor. They may have some research that you can help out with. See what you can do to support them. And take advantage of office hours, meet them for lunch. Some faculty are very social as well and appreciate being invited along to some of the student events. And that can be a great way of building a social bond with them and taking it beyond just a formal classroom context. So definitely don’t be intimidated by the faculty. They love having building the relationships with students. That’s why they’re there. They thrive on having these young, bright, diverse students coming in who have different perspectives from them and who can challenge them.

[00:14:59.870] – Caroline

And and discuss and bring their experience that is completely fresh to the classroom. And that’s a big part of why the faculty are there in the first place. So do be open to that. And I think sometimes students are a little intimidated by the professors. And I think also some students initially, at least, suffer a bit from imposter syndrome and think, well, I got in here by the skin of my teeth and everyone else is absolutely brilliant and way ahead of me and everything. And probably everyone is thinking the same thing, or there are a lot of students who are. So don’t let that hold you back, both in your interactions with faculty, but also in your interaction with the broader school community. Because if you’re there, then the admissions team have selected you for a reason. And they saw your potential of adding to the classroom and adding to the community experience. So don’t shy away from taking advantage of those opportunities to interact, to build relationships with faculty.

[00:16:03.130] – John

Maria, any advice there? I mean, if I go to Harvard, do I want to immediately go over and see Michael Porter? If I go to Wharton, do I want to go and see Adam Grant? Or at Stanford, do I want to go and see Jeff Pfeffer immediately?

[00:16:15.280] – Maria

My hope would be that you have the self-awareness to realize that the very famous professors are in very high demand, and they are probably going to prioritize meeting with students who are in their class. But as As Caroline mentioned, if you have something really compelling to share with a Michael Porter or an Adam Grant, let’s say you did an undergraduate research paper on how to thrive in the workforce, or you have your own, your sixth force that Porter should add to his five forces. But I wouldn’t just show up to office hours and be like, Hi, I’m here. Help me. That would be pretty cringey. I do think that it’s easiest if it is a professor that you have a class with. If that is a famous professor and they normally teach in the second year elective curriculum, you might need to wait a bit. Don’t let that necessarily stop you. Like I said, if you have something of value or that might be of interest to share with them, you might be able to go to them and say, Hey, look, I noticed that you do a lot of your research on the media industry.

[00:17:16.830] – Maria

I used to work in media. Let me tell you what the nuances are between the Taiwanese pay TV market and the Indian pay TV market. Something like that, where at least there’s a level of… It won’t be a pure reciprocity, but at least you’re offering something of interest to them. But yeah, aside from that, check out their office hours or sometimes just email them directly, or if they have an assistant, email the assistant to try to set up a quick meeting. But I would advise, if you’re not in the class, then don’t just show up empty-handed to the meeting.

[00:17:48.130] – John

I’m thinking, if I’m going to Wharton, I’m going to read every book Adam Grant has written, and I’m going to walk in there, and under my arms will be all of those books, and I’ll be prepared to discuss that with him in a provocative way so he’ll remember me.

[00:18:06.580] – Maria

Am I crazy? I would hope at least you’ve read his books. That would be even worse. You just show up here like, Who are you? But I think reading the books is a good start. But yeah, at least maybe have something, I don’t know, like you would with any networking or business relationship. I’m not saying if you got nothing to offer, then don’t even try, but just realize that you might get deprioritized. Understandably, put yourself in their shoes. Imagine that someone wants to come work at your company and they want a job in your division, but you also have someone working for you who needs guidance. You’re going to prioritize the person who’s working for you more than the random stranger saying, What’s it like to work at Mattel? I think just use your judgment in that way or see if they’re speaking at a conference or something, you can try to go up to them at the cocktail hour and start chatting with them that way. It It’s certainly doable, but it’s a lot easier if you do end up either taking their class or having something related to their field of interest that would be compelling for them to warrant meeting you.

[00:19:12.380] – John

Now, Caroline, you earlier used a phrase I’ve heard a lot from MBA students. The first year is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you deal with being overwhelmed? If you go to Harvard, you’re going to read over 500 case studies all the time you’re there, and many of them will be in the first year core curriculum. At INSEAD, as you pointed out, it’s a 10-month program. It’s so accelerated. It’s so intense. The stress levels are high. What advice do you have to deal with how overwhelmed people may feel?

[00:19:45.210] – Caroline

Well, first of all, get plenty of sleep before you start. And then look, you will probably want to invest yourself more in certain classes than others. I think that prioritization and focus that we’ve talked about and out what it is that you really want to get out of the program and which of the classes are going to be most valuable to you, that helps. Sometimes you might need to skim read a case, and maybe it’s not your top priority class, but other classes where you really want to… You know it’s going to be valuable to you in the future and you want to get a lot out of that particular class, then you’re going to spend a bit more time preparing. So I think you have to be realistic about what you can do and and just adjust your efforts a little bit according to what your priorities are and just be realistic about what you can do. I think it’s very common for students coming in to sign up for every club and want to attend every social event, and you quickly realize that it’s not realistic. So the faster you figure that out, the better.

[00:20:52.460] – John

Yeah. You don’t want to burn yourself out, which is easy to do.

[00:20:55.530] – Maria

Yeah.

[00:20:56.270] – Caroline

And then I would also say, sometimes students get overwhelmed by the academics, and so they focus on… So they really dedicate themselves to the academics, and they carve out time for their career such, but then they neglect the social activities. And that’s a shame, right? Because that’s a big part of how you build relationships with people. The networking is not just about getting to know people in the classroom and in the professional clubs. It’s also the parties and the trips and those those long lunches that you might take and the conversations that you have along the way. So do give yourself the grace of having some time for that because that will probably pay as many dividends, quite frankly, as the time you spend in the classroom and the time that you spend preparing for all those classroom discussions.

[00:21:52.040] – John

Maria, your advice on dealing with how overwhelming it may feel in the beginning?

[00:21:56.400] – Maria

I mean, aside from trying to keep reminding yourself what your priorities are, I just think, realize that everyone’s gone through this. It’s like those first early days of having a newborn child in your house where you’re like, Wow, everything is… This is really a lot. Just tell yourself, Okay, they’re literally not In the case of MBAs, it’s not billions of people, but there are billions of humans who have been through this process before. There are several hundreds of thousands of MBA graduates who have been through this process before. Everyone’s going to feel overwhelmed. It’s perfectly natural. I just need to grit my teeth and get through this first month, these first couple of months, and then things should even out by then. Just hang in there and don’t get discouraged.

[00:22:41.520] – John

Most people are sorted into teams, and you lean on your team members. If you’re overwhelmed with the amount of reading you have to do, people in the teams are assigned different readings so that everyone on the team doesn’t have to do everything. If you are a poet, you lean on your quants in the team, and if you’re a quant, you lean on your poets. I think depending on your classmates is a big part of getting through this. I also will say the positive part of feeling overwhelmed is that you will feel like you are in a boot camp, and there’s nothing better than a boot camp to bond people to each other and to form enduring lasting bonds that will last a lifetime because you’ll both, when you get through this, you’ll remember that experience and the fact that you survived it all together. That’s a really special thing. Now, let me ask each of you, what one thing do you wish you had known before you entered your MBA program that you soon discovered. Now, you’re going to reach back into the memory bank because I know we’re not all recent grads here. But, Caroline, is there one thing that you wish you had known before you went through the INSEAD MBA program?

[00:24:01.190] – Caroline

 I think many students, when they start, you feel like you’re in an environment where everyone has different experience, but there are a lot of people who are quite brilliant in that area. You’re in a finance class, you’re in a finance class or an accounting class, and it could be quite intimidating to be there with people who are superstars in that area. And so I think at the beginning, perhaps I was a bit intimidated by some of those other students, and it took me a while to feel confident about speaking up in class and sharing my experience. And so I think I would encourage people to just get stuck in straight away and not feel concerned that they don’t have enough to bring to a specific class, right? Those classes are designed to be able to bring everyone up to a certain level regardless of your background. And of course, at INSEAD, it’s an incredibly diverse group of people, not just professional, diverse diversity, but people from all over the world. Actually, a lot of the learning, in fact, probably more of the learning occurs peer to peer rather than from the faculty to the student.

[00:25:11.050] – Caroline

I would encourage students, from my experience, to get stuck in and not to feel that they have less to share than other students in the classroom.

[00:25:24.920] – John

So jump right in. Don’t be intimidated. Give it all you got right from the All right. Absolutely. Maria?

[00:25:32.490] – Maria

I think in addition to the advice to meet more with professors, I did not make enough use of that resource. And 20 years later, I’m still kicking myself for it. I should have done more on that front. I think, yeah, the idea that when you get there, there are going to be people who are very good at a few of these core curriculum subjects, but everyone’s going to have their strengths and everyone’s going to have their weaknesses. This idea that as Caroline was saying, if you’re like, Oh, I’m not really sure, what am I going to contribute? No, trust me, you’ll see. It might not be immediately visible in that first one or two weeks where you’re learning what is a balanced sheet and how do I record debits and credits in accounting or whatever, that very technical introduction work might be in the core. But trust me, soon enough, especially as the conversations start to go more into things like management and leadership, you’ll realize that you do bring a lot to the table. So similar with the from the fire hose effect, just to hang in there. If at first you’re not immediately feeling comfortable, just have faith that it will come and that some of the other people who are maybe the finance geniuses, maybe they break a cold sweat in marketing class and they’re just not showing it.

[00:26:45.620] – Maria

Just hang in there.

[00:26:47.950] – John

Yeah, that’s all good advice. I’ll just say, look, many people enter MBA programs from narrow specialty areas. It could be accounting, it could be finance. If you’re a consultant, big deal. If you’re What you’re doing is crank out numbers in the back room as an analyst. Believe me, there’s no one who’s in your room who doesn’t need to learn a lot. They may know more than you about some tiny little subject matter big deal. They don’t know a whole lot more. Feel free to get in there, get in the Scrum, and make it happen. For all of you out there who are about to start on this incredible journey, good luck to you. We hope we offered some good advice for you to get a really good, fast start and to make the most of the experience. You’ve been listening to business casual. This is John Byrne with Poets of Quants.