MBA Student’s Digital Top 10
The INSEAD MBA is known for its intensity. It’s a year full of adventures and challenges on every level. Even in the digital world, students lead a very active lifestyle.
Everyone has their own style of communication and singular behaviour, but some actions repeat themselves, creating some fun and interesting traits.
Because you asked and voted for it, here are the ones that made it to the top 10 INSEAD MBA students digital/social media behaviours:
Professional apps - LinkedIn
1. Polishing
Let’s face it, we’re here to take our career to the next level. Be it an upgrade on the corporate world or an opportunity to create our own successful businesses. For this, we need not only to be great but also look great. If you enter a LinkedIn profile of any INSEADer you will find it polished and looking incredible. Good looking professional picture, a catchy headline and a strong summary that would make you want this person on your side.
2. Connect, connect & connect
While at business school, we learned the power of building valuable networks and the positive effect it can have on yourself and the ones around you. As recommended by the school, students are encouraged to connect as much as they can with people on LinkedIn. INSEAD alumni, fellow MBA colleagues, and other valuable contacts are all potential targets.
Social apps – Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat (and a bazillion others)
On trips:
3. The UN of business schools
When we travel (and we tend to do that a lot) we do it in groups with as few as two people or as many as a hundred with people from every corner of the world. It’s always lots of fun to put all our passports together at the airport and observe the diversity (and post about it of course). The “Gram” will be burning with this classic INSEAD pic.
4. The sharing curse
Trip is over, it’s time to share the joy with our followers, friends from back home, and our INSEAD community.
There is a slight problem, 30 people went on the trip but there are two or three really good pictures to be posted. The fun starts when everybody posts the same pictures. Be it as a story or as a post, you see the same picture on everyone’s profile.
It’s usually an awesome picture of people having the time of their life or of a beautiful scenery, so no harm done here.
5. Have you ever been?
Another popular post is travel destinations. They are as random as they could be and cover any point on the planet. By scrolling through social media, you can learn about a lot of new places. For example, one friend went to an island in Indonesia close to Papua New Guinea to live in a boat for three days to dive and shared some amazing material of the landscapes and underwater wildlife. Another visited South Africa as part of a school trek to work on the growth strategy of Unjani, a primary health care clinic reaching the smallest and most vulnerable communities of the country.
On campus:
6. Dressing up for class
Apparently, dressing-up (especially onesies) is a recurring theme at business schools. At INSEAD we take it to the next level with Dash and National Weeks. This is fresh meat for hungry student-influencers who won’t miss the chance of making a boomerang with an astronaut sitting on the first row of the classroom or making a video of some crazy Latinos with wigs and football jerseys storming into the amphis dancing Despacito.
7. Fun lectures & original professors
INSEAD professors not only stand out for the quality of their lectures but also for the entertaining gifs and memes you find in their slide decks. To communicate effectively you need to know your audience, and professors know that students’ attention (and phone cameras) is drawn by these elements. Other activities trending among students’ profiles are the tests and exercises done in teams during class. In particular, in Statistics class, during which we open hundreds of bags of M&M’s to count how many there are of each colour. Or in Organisational Behaviour, to get an egg falling from three floors above to land safely with a paper parachute made in 15 minutes. Let the slo-mo’s begin!
8. Quality speakers
As part of the amazing job done by all the different clubs, highly interesting themed events are organised with quality speakers visiting our Fonty, Singy and Abu Dhabi campuses. Students always take advantage of this by sharing key takeaways or pictures of the event/forum/conference. The club leadership makes a huge effort to organise insightful events such as the Women in Business Conference, the Retail, Luxury and Consumer Goods Forum or the presentation of INSEAD alumni Javier Sobrino, Chief Strategy & Innovation for FC Barcelona.
Messaging apps - Whatsapp & Telegram
9. Group avalanche
FOMO is a concept you will hear very often at INSEAD, so many choices but so little time. To stay updated on what’s going on, there are a million groups available to join. I could start naming them, but I would need a day or two. It can go from a Fintech group, passing through scuba divers up to a group to decide where to go for dinner on Friday. The picture can probably give you a clearer idea of what I mean.
10. The battle of platforms
All this group activity happens in either Whatsapp or Telegram. INSEAD students are in general more used to Whatsapp, but Telegram offers a greater advantage since there is no restriction on the number of people joining the group.
The debate on which platform to use is more of a hobby among students, like discussing what are our favourite professors or which campus we prefer.
I hope you enjoyed this MBA student’s digital top 10!
Thanks to all the students that have shared their material to make this post possible.
