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Anyone thinking about going to business school knows the value proposition includes networking. When I was asking around my social circle about what an MBA education was all about one close friend told me that 50% of the value was in the education itself and the other 50% came from the relationships you build while in school. The education-to-network breakdown fluctuates widely for different individuals, but a 50/50 split is a reasonable generalization.
Business school networking
The expectations around network-building likely involve some or all of the following:
- your classmates
- other b-schoolers you might meet at business competitions
- outside professional relationships founded via an internship
Each expected source is reasonable, valuable, and realistic. However, an oft overlooked and severely under-valued source for enriching relationships the diverse, intelligent, experienced, and invested group of individuals that comprise your institution’s teaching faculty.
A Bloomberg Businessweek article reminds us of the importance of making concerted effort to connect to your professors and offers up tactics on establishing such connections. Author Francesca Di Meglio derives eight approaches to ingratiating yourself to your instructors, included below. Read the article for full details.
8 tips on maximizing relationships with faculty
- Don’t wait for trouble
- Prepare for the meeting
- Contribute to the class
- Show interest in professors’ other work
- Consider an assistant job
- Include professors in extracurricular activities
- Talk to them about nonacademic stuff, too
- Remember the professor after graduation
The list is neither novel nor revelatory, but the article is nonetheless useful in that it primes prospective, incoming, or current business school students on taking full advantage of the networking side of graduate management education.
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The post Business School Networking: Don’t forget your professors! appeared first on Kaplan GMAT Blog.
