The incoming Class of 2003 may be the most plugged-in class in the history of business schools. Indeed, business-school administrators are racing to keep up with the online demands of their cyber-savvy students. While most understand the need to put admissions information online and while the more progressive are starting to post financial-aid forms, housing lottery numbers, and course-registration materials for incoming students, some have been caught flat-footed by the instant-messenger generation's intense need to chat about every aspect of the business-school experience.
Many B-school students began their virtual dialogue on Business Week's extensive "Business School Forums" -- a veritable cyber cafeteria in which prospective enrollees debate each school's merits, commiserate about evil essay questions, and drive each other to distraction trying to estimate their chances of getting into top programs given their GMAT scores and undergraduate GPAs. Some business schools have tried replicating Business Week's model but discovered that building community on the Web is trickier than it looks. Here are brief case studies of developments at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Stanford officials tried launching their own site on Yahoo. It never took off. The site was open to anyone interested in talking, says Maureen Phalen, assistant director of MBA admissions at Stanford, "and we were hoping that it would be as honest and free-flowing as Business Week's. But that was not the case. Because the MBA admissions office established it, it wasn't nearly as lively. Students realized that we were reading what they were writing and were much more reserved."
Once they've leaped the admissions hurdle, however, Stanford B-school students gain access to a password-protected site specifically for their class, also hosted on a Yahoo server. That conversation is considerably more animated, with students planning preadmit happy hours from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, debating laptops versus desktops, and sharing truck rentals for the trek from the Midwest to Palo Alto.
In January, Harvard Business School launched a slick, new interface on its site, designed to build community among incoming students, says Angela Gaffney, the site's Web mistress. She says HBS has been very careful not to intrude on the bulletin-board discussions, even if erroneous information is being posted. "If there's misinformation, students correct each other," she says. "The site's self-policing, and we like it like that. It's not an administrative space. That would alter the whole tenor of what these boards are."
One of the measures of the site's success, Gaffney says, is students' willingness to seek assistance. "We're bringing in people who are already leaders," she says. "You don't expect them to ask for help. But in this community, they feel safe -- as if it's okay to say, 'I don't know.' "
Despite Harvard's reputation for cut-throat competitiveness, users say that their classmates are proving remarkably generous and helpful. Vivian Tsai, who worked in corporate strategy at the Gap's headquarters in San Francisco after earning her undergraduate degree from Stanford, says that fellow HBS students warned her to prepare for the frigid New England winter ahead. "They said, 'You don't have the right clothes!' " she says. "And they warned people about housing, telling them that if a place is a 20-minute walk to campus, they'll be really cold."
Other Harvard students formed subgroups independent of the university's site. In San Francisco, nearly 50 of the 70 Bay Area HBS students have signed on to a Yahoo e-group. "Some people wanted a group for more frank and easier discussions," says Dazhi Chen, who works at an optical-networking startup in Silicon Valley and will head to Harvard this fall. Plus, he notes, the e-group makes it easier for his incoming classmates to organize barbecues, golf games, and bar nights. "A lot of people are not working, so they have lots of time to get together," he says.
At Wharton, Alex Brown, associate director of admissions, seeds the discussion on the school's bulletin boards, and then steps back and lets students go at it. Kuwait-based Yann Pavie, for example, found two other Lebanese Wharton admits -- one in Canada and one in France -- by posting details about his background on the "Admitted Student Profiles" section of the school's site. In mid-June, the three got together in Lebanon.
"By the end of our lunch," he says, "we all discovered that we had many friends in common, even related family members. It was truly amazing. We began not knowing each other and finished realizing that we had a lot more in common than what we thought imaginable -- all before even getting to Wharton."
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