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RightAwaySir
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Sorry but would USC support you all around and Anderson not? Or the other way around? If thata is something I wrote, I misspeke. I did not mean to imply that USC recruits sensitive and caring people a while UCLA recruits heartless animals.

Your network will be first of all your class. Your classmates will be your immediate network. Then, it will be other part-time students who graduated a few years ago. The connection becomes weaker when you transition to the full-time program and it becomes extra week when you go into undergraduate or engineering school or film school.

Sorry if I misled here. Was not my intention.

PS. USC does have a stronger identity they built around the Trojans.

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No sorry, I meant USC feels like it supports its students all around as in both the undergrad and grad student population will support anyone who went there based on the school spirit versus UCLA where it seems less strong? If you went to USC, regardless of what you majored in, I feel like a USC alumni will try to pull you in.

Thank you. Got it. I think the Trojan network is a nice thing and I think it’s a great brand. However, I don’t think it’s that much superior to the network that most of the business schools would provide. I feel it’s very well marketed and presented as a clear message. I think it’s awesome but I don’t think USC graduates respond at higher rates than Chicago booth graduates for example or Fuqua or UCLA. I would guess that some schools may have even stronger networks. I don’t mean to say anything negative… heck my cousin went to undergrad there 😂 but I don’t think it’s a secret society of some sorts. Funny enough, he networked for a job using his high school friends. He has stronger connection with those than his undergrad folks but that may be because he’s up in Seattle.

One interesting pattern with Business schools at highly prestigious undergraduate institutions and this includes even schools like Yale. Is that the caliber of undergraduate students is so high and so competitive that none of them would ever go to the business school in the same university. If you went to Yale, you don’t go to Yale MBA and similarly if you went to USC, you go to Stanford or Booth or Fuqua.

I can promise you that you will be salivating at the employers who come to recruit on campus for the undergraduates. There will be Google, Microsoft, Accenture, Goldman Sachs, and every possible star player. That will not be the case for the business school.

The undergraduate students who graduated 10 years ago or 20 years ago who would potentially be network opportunities for you, may not be very active in alum network anymore and they usually know that it’s a lot easier to get into the part-time program then the full-time program and they know that even the full-time program requirement is 85th percentile on the GMAT. They had to get 99th on SAT and this past year USC even waived test scores for many. Anderson did not (not sure about this year). Obviously it also depends on how much time and effort you put into networking. If you expect people to drop everything and help you out, then obviously that’s not going to happen. At the same time if you do homework and you are persistent, people will respond.

I think USC has a good thing going with the Trojan brand. However, it’s a huge net work and the bigger the network, the less responsive people tend to be which is just a human nature. It’s nothing against Trojans, I’m taking a swipe at humans :-) and I wanted to set realistic expectations

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OK, I am spilling all my beans and giving away all the secrets so the secret bschool society may go after me, but after the first semester, the love of studying in education evaporates and the honeymoon is over and the grind begins. You’ll be showing up to class after work and you’ll be tired and the last thing you want is someone to push your buttons for 3 hours. You may do this to yourself a few times but usually the second year everybody gets smarter and they start picking either more interesting or less challenging classes as opposed to challenging themselves. This becomes even more apparent in the last year when everyone’s trying to recruit and balancing school and work and recruiting is an art in itself. MBA is sort of like a dish, you have to look at it and it’s totality as a complete experience. When you start comparing which tomatoes go into which pasta and what kind of butter they used or which cheese, you may lose the big picture. And the big picture is that no matter how amazing the tomatoes are, if the cook did not pay attention while cooking the dish, it’s going to come out not so great 😂

I think it’s cool to be excited about classes and a number of programs do you have a legendary professors and very interesting courses but having spoken to business school graduates for the last 10 years, I can’t remember one who would share anything about their class. For example, my favorite class from my program was business law. I have learned a ton of various things that I really had absolutely no use for but I was really interested in it. You never know what will click with you. However, the big picture is recruiting and finding a job. I would poke around LinkedIn and look at the companies and see if you could spot a few people from USC. Frankly, you can even start networking with them now. There’s nothing that prevents you from reaching out to a few of them and saying I got admitted and I really love what you did with your career and I would love to be working in the same space in a few years, and would you have 15 minutes to chat about it. That could be the test of the Trojan network and probably lots of valuable advice. They should feel fairly safe speaking with you since you won’t be trying to get a job for at least a few years so it is not awkward and you won’t ask for a job at the end of a call.

PS. This is not common for part-time programs but a lot of the full-time programs will connect you with alarms and current students to help convert to you since people usually get multiple offers. So this isn’t anything weird you would be doing per se

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