Extreme Networking: MBAs Show the Way

By: Linda TischlerWed Dec 19, 2007 at 9:12 AM

And you think you know how to work a crowd? Incoming B-school students from Harvard to Stanford use Web-based communities to get to know each other, to make group deals for cell phones, and to launch business plans -- before they attend their first class!

At Kellogg Graduate School of Management, students use the site to figure out the best cell-phone service provider in Illinois, to help find work for their spouses, and to unload graduating students' gear on incoming ones. A site like this is "an absolute necessity for a top business school," say Greg Lief, a London-based consultant for a health-care consulting group who met his future roommate at a happy hour organized via the site. "It would be a real detriment if business schools didn't have these things sorted out very well."

Your Network, Yourself

While other preprofessional schools keep in touch with incoming students via email lists and plan mentoring programs to address their questions about housing, banking, or course selection, business schools seem to have the edge when it comes to serious preadmission networking.

"Business schools are much more tech-savvy than we are here at the law school," says Rene Post, associate director for admissions at the University of Pennsylvania's law school. Angela Gaffney, assistant director of communications for the MBA program at Harvard Business School, concurs: "The B-school tends to be in front of the curve in marrying technology to the educational environment."

The reason B-schools have embraced this medium may have less to do with their fondness for technology than with the philosophy of business schools themselves, says Maureen Phalen, assistant director of MBA admissions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "Business schools think networking is a good thing, a real advantage to you in terms of job seeking."

When it comes to soliciting job offers, it helps to be able to tap into an extensive -- and networked -- group of alumni. The sooner students start forging those bonds, schools realize, the more likely they are to reap the rewards. "Some 80% of HBS alums find jobs through networking," says Robert Gardella, assistant director of alumni career services at Harvard and author of The Harvard Business School Guide to Finding Your Next Job (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). "We have one of the most powerful networks in the world, and one of the reasons people come here is to plug into that."

Linda Tischler (ltischler@fastcompany.com) is the Fast Company managing editor of new media.

Read Part 2: Students already walk the plugged-in talk. Can Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton catch up?