The Naked MBA

One of the things I loved about business school was meeting people from so many different countries. I made some great international friends, all of whom were extremely intelligent and competent. But this didn’t necessarily help all (or even most) of them in their job search. The problem was that on top of cramming for their classes and keeping up with the hectic social schedule, they also had to learn the American way of looking for a job.

Networking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. But at least we’re aware that it’s a crucial part of getting a job. I know a lot of international students who felt like attending networking events was akin to landing on Mars. That’s just not how it worked for them at home. So it took them a while to catch on to the recruiting game, and they suffered because of it. (“What to do mean I can’t ever work at Goldman because I missed their presentation?”)  It’s funny, because I felt the same way at first. I didn’t come from a corporate background, so the recruiting events felt pretty alien to me, too. But I took Career Services’ word when they said I had to go, and a lot of my international friends didn’t. It was just too much for them to comprehend that a culture could actually work in such an artificial way—that being smart and hardworking didn’t always mean you got the interview.

International students also suffer from gaps in their knowledge of business jargon. In a lot cases my friends’ grasp of the English language was better than mine, but it took them time to learn all new vocabulary that we don’t think twice about.

Landing a full-time job after business school is hard enough; now imagine having to land that job at a company willing to pay thousands of dollars to sponsor your visa. If you want to work in finance your chances are better, but in marketing, consulting and a lot of other industries, good luck. A lot the marketing companies that came to my campus explicitly requested no international students at their presentations. Then even if you find someone willing sponsor your visa, you’re still not guaranteed the visa. This year the quota of H1B work visas was exhausted on the first day applications were accepted! One classmate I knew was stuck in the position of having stopped recruiting after he accepted an offer with an investment bank, only to find out months later that he was among the unlucky ones whose visa applications arrived too late.

Getting your MBA is stressful, but imagine how much more stressful it would be to do it in an entirely new culture and in another language. I saw tensions run high in study groups at times, and often it was due to cultural misunderstandings. But this is a chance to learn how to exercise patience, which will no doubt also serve you well in an increasingly global workforce.

The road to success is always smoother when you have someone to champion and advise you. And with all the networking opportunities, business school is the perfect place to find a mentor like this. So why don’t you have one yet?

There are two basic things you should know about looking for a mentor. The first is that you have to be social. You don’t make friends by compulsively texting your friends or hiding in the bathroom at a party. The same goes for finding a mentor. Start talking to people! Do it in situations where it’s appropriate, like at a business cocktail party or lunch, and do it in situations where it might be totally inappropriate—like on the bus or in line at the deli. I have a bad habit of reading over people’s shoulders on the subway, and if they are reading something interesting I’ll comment on it. A lot of the time I get the “you talkin’ to me?” glare, but every now and then I’ll experience a meeting of the minds or an exchange of business cards. I met a former mentor of mine while on vacation in Florida—he overheard me talking to someone else about what I wanted to do after business school and chimed in with his advice.

The second thing you need to do is be successful, or on your way to becoming successful. Mentors want to get something out of the relationship, too, and being associated with a rising star is a lot better than being associated with someone who is average. At the end of the day they want to feel like they’ve contributed to your success, so for that to happen you need to actually have some to build on.

Ok, so you’re social and you’re successful, but you still don’t have a mentor. Where do you start looking?

Start at office hours. Professors are an often-untapped resource for mentorship. We tend to think of academics as out of touch with the real world, but business school professors are different. They are on the cutting edge of their fields, and most of them also do a lot of external consulting. Establishing a personal relationship with them and demonstrating a true interest in their subject will open up a whole new world of contacts to you. And you might even get better grades.

Many business schools have part-time MBA programs with evening classes. Try out some of these classes. Since the average part-time MBA student is older than the full-time student, and has more years of work experience, you’ll meet a whole new group of people from whom to learn. Evening classes are also often taught by adjunct professors, who have day jobs in the industries in which they’re teaching. This means they are ultra-connected.

Make use of your school’s alumni network. Often there are mixer events where alumni and current students can mingle. Attend these, and make sure you don’t spend all your time catching up with your friends at the open bar. School clubs also often have events specifically for past and present club members. One of the clubs I belonged to even had a ten-day international trip every year that was open to students and alumni, so it was a great opportunity to meet people with more experience and career insight.

Finally, if all else fails, be your own mentor. Sheila Wellington has a great book on this topic. Sit down and map out your goals and career path. Discuss them with the career center, with friends, and with anyone else who will listen. Read books on how to succeed in your field. Take assessment tests to determine your strengths and weaknesses and plan how take advantage of them. And keep searching, all the while. You never know where your mentor is going to pop up.

As your spring break tan fades and panic over finals sets in, it can only mean one thing: summer internships are right around the corner. Yes, I know, you’ve got enough to do. But preparing for your summer internship is crucial, so add it to your to-do list.

After spending three months battling to land an internship, you may feel like your work is done—but it’s just beginning. You only have ten weeks to make a good impression and get a full-time offer. Time’s a-wasting!

Get to know the culture.
You spent months doing research on companies and interviewing for internships, so chances are you already have a good sense of the professional culture where you’ll be working. If not, it’s time for a crash course. Knowing the culture is the top thing you can do to give yourself an edge from day one. Are you going into a hierarchical, speak-when-spoken-to culture or a more informal, free-and easy workplace? Are decisions made by the highest ranking executive or as a group? Is debate considered healthy or hostile? You need to fit in to get ahead. If you don’t fit in (or don’t want to), then you’re probably at the wrong company.

Be informed.
This should go without saying, but read up on your industry before and during the summer. You want to be able to jump in to conversations about the latest mention in the WSJ. Set up a Google alert for the company’s name, and for the names of C-suite members and any other major players with whom you work. And check out some pictures of the head honchos—one guy I know I was trapped in an elevator with a very well-dressed gentleman during his summer internship. They talked about the weather for 10 minutes until the elevator started working again. The gentleman got out at the executive floor and my friend later realized it was the CEO.

Don’t be all work and no play.
You’re there to work hard and prove yourself, but you also have to pass another test: are you someone people want to work with? Would they want to be on a business trip stranded in the Tokyo airport for 6 hours with you? If you’re no fun it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. Take some timeouts and build relationships with your co-workers, your managers, and with HR. Go out to lunch. Have drinks after work. This way when it comes time to extend full-time offers, they’ll think of you as a friend, or at least as someone they like to have around. During my internship I helped the HR Director out by organizing a couple of happy hours for the summer associates. No one else would volunteer to do it, even though all it took was making a couple of phone calls and sending out an email. At the end of the summer when I got my offer, this was one of the things she brought up as something she really liked about me and used to build a case for me.

Learn how to delegate.
Now that you’re an MBA-to-be, there is probably someone below you on the food chain. Ask around and find out what is expected of those people in terms of support. Don’t be afraid to delegate to them if that’s how it normally works. This frees you up to do a spectacular job in other areas, and it shows that you have some management skills.

Go shopping.
Not while you’re supposed to be in a meeting and your boss it looking for you, as one person I know did, but before you start your internship. Make sure you have the appropriate clothes for the culture, and that you look great. When in doubt, overdress—you’ll just look more important than you are. Take some mental notes the first week on what other people are wearing and adjust your style accordingly. If your style is totally out-of-whack with what’s going on around you then you either need a Tim Gunn intervention or you’re not at the right company.

Don’t burn bridges.
So you get halfway through the summer and you’re miserable. You picked the wrong company, the wrong industry or the wrong internship. You tell yourself you’d rather swallow live dung beetles than work there full-time. Whatever you do, don’t write off your internship before it’s over. Even if there is one meaningful relationship that comes out of it, you never know when that person will be in a position to help you in the future. Working in the finance group at AmEx and hate it? Have lunch with some folks in marketing and see if that floats your boat. The last thing you want is have your 10 weeks on the job feel like a complete waste of time.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention a word in this post about honing your technical skills. That’s because I think it gets too much focus, whereas it’s easy to overlook the importance of cultural know-how and social skills. Most companies have training programs set up to teach you the technical skills you’ll need, but you’re on your own in terms of learning how to fit in or to build relationships. Don’t underestimate these skills.

There is a huge emphasis on socializing in business school. But as you pack your schedule with happy hours, karaoke nights and student club activities, it’s easy to network yourself into exhaustion without feeling like you’ve made any true friends. The social pressure to meet and befriend as many people as possible kicks off at orientation week. I consider myself to be an outgoing person and I have never had trouble making friends, but at times orientation felt like a do-or-die friend-making competition, and I was definitely losing. Conversations lost their normal rhythms and took on an artificially sped-up tone where everyone was talking at once, trying to impress with their wit and self-confidence. People moved on minutes after they started talking to you if you didn’t immediately seem like one of the cool kids. Even I was doing it. At the end of each day I would fall into bed exhausted from socializing all day. And yet I didn’t feel like I was making friends--I felt like I was networking.

Orientation was successful in that by the time I started classes I knew a lot of people. But none I would consider a friend. I also felt like everyone else had already formed friendships and was having the time of their life. Turns out nobody really had. Even in the hyper-social world of business school, building friendships takes time. And it wasn’t like I was sitting home on Friday night--at first everyone socializes in a herd. Literally. Someone would pick a bar and later that night 350 people would show up. And after a while the speed-dating-on-speed feel to conversations is replaced by more normal interaction and you can get to the bottom of people’s personalities, not just their personas.

People also self-select through the activities they choose. The first friendships I forged were with people who chose, as I did, to be officers in a specific club. The cohort/block system also does a good job of putting you in daily close contact with a group of people so you can get to know each other better--but you have to make it work for you. In my block most people always sat in the same place for class, a practice I’ve always distained. Then one week I plunked down every day in the same spot and found that by the end of the week I chatted more with the people around me (who, by the way, always sat together), and that they started including me in all their lunch and weekend plans.

I also started making more friends when I became more open-minded about the people I thought I could relate to. I started business school in a very different place than most people, and I had an admittedly narrow view of who was worth being friends with. Then someone surprised me and I had to get more open-minded about who my friends could be. I graduated with friends from different countries, religions, professional backgrounds, races, political ideologies, and sexual orientations than me. It took time, but social life at the end of business school was a far cry from the frenetic networking of orientation week. Some of my very best friends I didn’t get to know well until my second year. But they, as with all true friends, were worth waiting for.

An MBA is a two-year course in how to get a job. So what happens if you graduate and you don’t have one yet? This is a classic “it could never happen to me” situation, but it could and it might. And it’s not the end of the world. Take a deep breath and come up with a plan of action. If you don’t have a plan, use this one.

1. Figure out why you don’t have a job.

Is the market awful right now? If so, then lots of people are in the same situation and you may need to take the first job that comes your way and ride out the dip in the economy. Are you looking for the right kind of job? If you’re blanketing an industry with your résumé and not getting a single phone call then you’re either not qualified to work in this field or your résumé doesn’t portray your skills accurately. Talk to someone in the field to find out. Where in your job-hunt is the hang-up? Are you getting zero responses to your applications? The problem could be your résumé. Are you getting invited to a first interview and then not getting a call back? You may need some help with your interviewing skills. Identify where the problem lies and create a solution that directly addresses it.

2. Hire a professional résumé writer.

Yes I know they’re expensive. But so is not having a job. Your résumé might be good, but it can always be better. It’s a key marketing document and provides potential employers with a first impression of you. You would hire a professional to represent you in court to make sure you don’t make any false steps, so the same should go for the job hunt.

3. Job hunt in unusual places

You could spend hours weeding through job postings on Monster or Jobster and sending your résumé off to bottomless HR email inboxes. Or you could get out in the real world. If you’re in a waiting room next to someone reading an industry magazine, strike up a conversation with them. I have a friend who got a job because she overhead a conversation on the subway between two people who worked together and joined in. One of them became her jogging partner and a month later helped her get a job with the company.

4. Ask everyone you know for a job or a contact.

You just graduated from business school. You know a hundred people who each know a hundred more people. Start going to happy hour with your business school friends and be upfront that you’re still looking for a job. They will either help you or they will know someone who can.

5. Start hanging out with your parents.

Drop in on their dinner parties. Crash their golf dates. Even if you think your parents don’t know anything, they know a lot of people who know stuff. And anyone they know is probably further along in their career than your friends, which means they have more power and influence to use in helping you get a job.

6. Work for free.

If the months since graduation are piling up and still no one will pay you to work, volunteer your services. Target places you would want to work anyway. Ask for a 3 month unpaid internship, no strings attached. At the end of it they might decide they want to keep you around on the payroll. This way you also avoid having a big hole in your résumé.

7. Stay positive.

Research shows that optimists are more successful. If you’re a pessimist, don’t despair—you can learn to be an optimist. Martin Seligman tells you how.

Networking is a scary word. For me, it conjures up images of guys with slicked back hair, glad-handing and passing out business cards or playing golf in funny looking pants. Nothing about it sounds natural or fun. Before business school I never gave any thought to networking. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a network; I had friends and friends of friends. I didn’t “network”, I just hung out with people who introduced me to other people. I talked about things I was interested in, and if I had those things in common with other people I met we exchanged emails or phone numbers. I didn’t shake hands and I didn’t have business cards.

Thus imagine my distaste when I got to bschool and found I had to attend a mandatory workshop on networking. I pictured some used car salesman teaching us the art of schmoozing through a crowded room of complete strangers. Then during the first five minutes of the workshop it hit me: I already knew how to network. I had been doing it all along. When I found an apartment in my favorite neighborhood through my ex-roommate’s cousin, I was networking. When I got free tickets to see my favorite band because I knew someone who knew the drummer, I was networking. My friends and their friends were my network. What I had going for me was that I was already interested in people; I liked to chat and find out about people’s lives and interests, particularly if they were different than mine. I just had to transfer these skills to a professional environment.

People tell you all kinds of things about how to network, but the most important thing is that you need to be able to meet new people. It doesn’t have to be a formal activity. Networking means striking up a casual conversation and getting people to talk about themselves until you find a common ground, whether it’s a shared interest or an acquaintance you have in common. And people love to talk about themselves so it’s not that difficult to get them started. Think about the last time you chatted with the person in line behind you at the supermarket, or when you met someone new at a friend’s dinner party. That’s networking. You don’t need golf pants or slicked back hair; you already know how to network.

Although nothing trumps a face-to-face conversation with someone, those of us who are part of the increasingly antisocial stay-at-home-and-surf-the-web generation have invented a new way to connect to people: online social networking. Sites like LinkedIn, Doorstang and others are now mandatory for successful networking and career development. If you’ve never used one of these sites, the co-founder of LinkedIn has some tips for you on how to get the most out his service.

By going to bschool you are already part of an amazing network, so one of the most important things you can do is develop and maintain these connections. You will spend two years with a bunch of talented, ambitious people who will have successful, interesting careers in all corners of the world. Get to know as many of them as you can during bschool, and keep in touch after graduation. You never know where people will turn up again later on.

I have friends who love dating. They love the first-date flurries, the anticipation of the unknown, and the excitement of the chase. I am not one of those people. The reality is that occasionally you have a great date and it results in a second one, and maybe even a relationship. But more often than not you bid adieu at the end of the night, exchange “Don’t call me I’ll call you” cheek kisses and head home wishing that’s where you had been all along.  Or worse, you have a great time and think you’ve finally met someone perfect and then you never hear from them again. And you start all over.

Recruiting, to me, was like dating. Except that it was easier to decide what to wear and I never had to pick the restaurant or worry about whether to split the check at the end of the night. For me it began around the fifth week of first semester when the Career Development office started sending out a weekly bulletin of companies that were coming to campus for corporate presentations. Corporate presentations generally all follow a similar format: there is a Power Point presentation with some rosy information about the company and a list of reasons why you should be honored to work for them. Then there is time for Q&A. The best advice I can give you in this scenario is to keep your mouth shut. Corporate presentations are not for making a good impression. They are to avoid making a bad impression. If you absolutely must draw attention to yourself in this scenario, at least avoid the following list of I’ve (real-life, actually happened) questions:

-          How much do you make? (Rude)

-          What are your hours like? (Lazy)

-          I know your company is currently facing a nasty sexual harassment suit from a former employee. How is that affecting moral? (Only if you’re looking to completely silence a room)

Next there is an hour or so of mingling with the people from the company who have the jobs you want. There are hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, not because you might be hungry or thirsty, but to separate the talkers from the eaters. You can distinguish between them because as the Q&A session is wrapping up, the talkers become agitated in their seats, poised to rocket out of them towards the nearest (and most senior) person from the company, ready to pull out the big networking guns. The eaters hang back, fortifying themselves with crudités and shrimp cocktail, telling themselves that they are just waiting for the right moment to make their entrance into one of the tight little circles that are forming around the company representatives. In the beginning I was among the crudités crowd, terrified of approaching someone to ask “So what is it exactly that you do?” and getting an answer so foreign and confusing that any follow-up question I could think up would surely show how clueless I was. To get over this I practiced attending presentations for companies lower down on my target list so that if, as I feared, I made a fool of myself, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal. I forced myself to approach someone immediately after the presentation, thereby bypassing the safety and camouflage of the hors d’oeurves table entirely.

It’s not easy to make your way into a circle, and there is a good way and a bad way to do it. Throwing a few elbows and interrupting the flow of the conversation is not the good way. Stand at the edge and listen to the conversation so you can make an appropriate comment or ask a question when there is a pause. If you don’t get a chance to introduce yourself when you enter the conversation you can always do it later on when you’re leaving the group.

Once in the circle, you may end up talking to someone who works in a job function that you’re not interested in. While you don’t want to waste the entire presentation chatting with someone in sales and trading if you really want to work in banking, you also don’t want to be rude. When there is a pause in the conversation it’s fine to politely say “It’s been very interesting to hear about your experience, however I’m actually more interested ______. Are you able to point me in the direction of anyone who works in that area?”

Don’t monopolize the conversation. Be concise and give other people the chance to talk. Prepare your story ahead of time so that you can answer commonly asked questions like “What did you do before business school?” or “Why do you want to go into _____?” in one or two sentences. Short answers also keep the conversation moving so that you can cycle back out more quickly and meet someone else.

Don’t try to impress anyone with your deep knowledge of the industry. I guarantee you that everyone in the room from the company knows more than you do so you’ll just look silly. Keep questions general, along the lines of “It sounds like you’ve been with the company for quite some time—what is it that keeps you here?” and “What do you think is important for someone in my position to know coming into this job?”  Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand what someone is talking about. People tend to fall back on industry jargon that you would never be expected to understand, and admitting that you’re not familiar with something they’ve said can often make you look like you’re listening and trying to understand.

In recruiting, as in dating, at the end of the night you either hope for a second date (called an informational interview) or you decide you’re not interested in pursuing things further. If you decide it’s worth pursuing, getting someone’s business card is the best way to set up your second date. With a business card in hand you can send an email thanking them for their time and asking if you might be able to follow-up sometime to ask some additional questions about the company or their position. You carefully write this email, hold your breath and hit send. And if you’re lucky and they had a nice time with you, too, you just might get that second date.

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