The INSEAD Experience Before INSEAD
Networking is one of the many keywords you start hearing when you decide you’re going to attend a business school. My formal introduction to networking happened during a visit in Oct ’15, to a friend studying for an MBA at Wharton. During the 36 hours I was with him, we spent 5 hours attending an EMEA network get-together, 16 hours trailing a hiking trek with the hiking club folks, 4 hours meeting the same hiking club to plan another trip to Venezuela, and 5 hours on a Wharton campus visit. We managed our meals and sleep in the remaining 6 hours, and that to him was a relatively less loaded weekend. This experience posed a few pressing questions on me: can I find time for all this while doing a 1-year MBA? Especially if I go with my wife? Do I need to hike 16km of rocks to network effectively? And above all, how will I manage the funds for all this extensive travel? Quite honestly, I got apprehensive and worried if I would survive the whole MBA routine.
However, with fear often comes curiosity to explore and understand the challenge; or at least thankfully in this case, I am glad curiosity eventually overcame fear :)! Before I take you through this transition, I would zoom out of my experiential journey to briefly quote what my definition of effective networking eventually became: “it’s an exclusively valuable tool to expand your professional and acquaintance network in order to both expand your intellectual horizons and, hopefully, land a greater number of interviews at your target firms”. Networking is about creating meaningful shared experiences; it’s not obligatory to hike mountains, get wasted at parties, spend a fortune in travelling or sleep less than 5 hours a day to achieve all this. It should not be confused with socializing which is something equally important, but with a very different purpose: to create life-long friendships! Because after all, studies and career are not everything you go to a grad school for!
Having built the above backdrop, let me get back to my story. My transition from apprehension to curious exploration was helped by my interaction with McKinsey earlier this year in February. They approached and interviewed me for the position of Associate in their Dubai office. Being absolutely new to the consulting industry, I had no idea how to prepare for the case study interviews. Thankfully, McKinsey organized a live coaching session, for about 50 candidates, in which two McKinsey consultants conducted a formal mock interview. Prompted by a strong need to practice more, some of the candidates initiated a discussion to start practicing mocks interviews in a similar way. The next few weeks gave me an ocean of knowledge and 10 good friends from all over the world who I am still in touch with. This experience cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had developed about effective networking. It also exposed me to the rich culture of learning in the consulting industry and left me craving for more. I had experienced first-hand the powerful benefit of mock case study simulations and wanted to share this with others for mutual learning and development.
By Apr ’15, INSEAD had made offers to R1 applicants for the Class of December ’17 and the network fired up at lightning speed. In a matter of days, I started receiving about 500 messages a day on Whatsapp and Slack. I was presented with the ideal opportunity to put forth my interest in practicing case-study mocks. This led me, with the proactive interest and involvement of a few other INSEAD classmates, to organize the first session of mock case study interviews in May ’16. It was about 20 of us in the live video conference call connected via Google Hangouts to witness the session and we recorded and posted the entire interview followed by a Q&A session on YouTube for others who couldn’t join us live due to the software’s technical limitations. Our Slack consulting channel got flooded with active discussions on the interview with many students asking for more of such sessions and volunteering to role-play the interview/interviewee for their learning. With just one month after 1st round admits accepting their offers and more than half a year until our INSEAD journey would begin, the turnover amazed me. But what excited me the most was that in those 90 minutes, we had about 12 nationalities represented, covering all the global time zones. We had people join us from India, Singapore and the Middle East to Europe, Australia, and USA. Despite having worked for 9 years with multinational corporations such as P&G and Mondelez International, never had I experienced that rich and diverse an interaction. That 90-minutes long conference call was INSEAD! This is the power of exposure, diversity and being the world's most international school. That, right there, was the authentic INSEAD experience!
More to the point, all this proved that networking is in fact about creating meaningful mutual experiences. From May'16 until now, we've taken this initiative to a whole new level. I created an excel file to help us schedule the mock sessions. We identified partners to practice the cases with and then we discussed and exchanged feedback and ideas on different forums. What’s even better is that I got to become good friends with 60+ people without a single visit to campus or anywhere else. One of them helped me connect with BCG, Sydney and another one with Microsoft.
To conclude, I would say – especially to future students who are planning on coming with sizeable family and financial responsibilities – don’t eat up your peace of mind if someone tells you that you need to spend X dollars or Y hours so that you can network effectively. All it takes is initiative, a smart, pro-active, and well planned approach. If just a bit of initiative by a few students, who haven’t even formally become classmates, can achieve all this, I can only imagine what we can and will achieve while actually being at INSEAD.
