Social Networking for Part-time MBA Students

This past weekend I had a negotiation simulation with my classmate in Conflict Management and Negotiations class. As I mentioned in the past, this class requires some of the negotiations to be held out of the class, so we had a scheduled appointment on campus on Sunday. We had allocated an hour for the whole negotiation as per the professor’s instruction. However we were able to complete the whole negotiation in about 15-20 minutes. We had a small chit-chat before and after the simulation, but generally, after we finished the negotiation I headed home.

Later in the day I was checking network updates on my LinkedIn account and I decided to look up my negotiation opponent’s profile. Turned out she is one of the executive editors on a quite popular blog – westboundboarder.com, focused on providing “female perspective on the traditionally male-dominated industry” – snowboarding. I browsed around the blog a little bit and it has a lot of interesting personal insights about snowboarding and beyond. As far beyond as tropical Rio de Janeiro, for example.

But the main point is that if I had checked out her profile beforehand, I would be able to ask and to learn more about her blog mechanics, traffic generation, sponsorships etc. in the time left over from our short negotiation. Besides, from her profile it appears that she had had prior experience in digital marketing, which could be quite interesting for me to learn, given my own interest in blogging , dah . Anyways, the opportunity was missed, and I am not sure if there will be another “organic” opportunity to re-visit it.

This situation led me to think more about the social networking in the context of MBA, and even more specifically – part-time MBA programs. I once mentioned in my blog that one of the drawbacks of part-time mode of doing MBA is limited networking opportunities. Part of this limitation caused by many business school sponsored activities scheduled during the working hours. Another part comes from the fact that juggling the full-time job and school academics, and, in many cases, family responsibilities leaves much less spare time and energy for all extracurricular activities.  Full-time MBA students spend more time together in and out of classes, so that they have a chance to learn a lot about each others’ professional or personal backgrounds. Often times more than they care to share, according to Case Studies & Cocktails: The “Now What?” Guide to Surviving Business School . So for full-timers social networking is mostly an add-on to their offline transactions.

For part-time MBA students, as mentioned before, these offline networking opportunities are not as abundant.  Therefore we need to find a way to compensate for that. And LinkedIn, being a professional social network, fits in very well. It seems to be very obvious, but why then it is not so natural? I will have to continuously remind myself to check out my classmates LinkedIn profiles before I get engaged into class activities or group projects, to see if there are common points of interest we could explore.

I am not sure I will have time to check everyone from the class roster, but at least the classmates who you are involved with in some meaningful interaction, like group project,  or whose comments/participation in class appears to be insightful.

Some of my classmates take this networking opportunity to another extreme. There were three or four people in  past classes who sent me invitation to join their professional network after the end of class. First I was flattered , thinking they found my work at class have some merit and it was a “personal” professional invitation. Then I realized that they blasted that invitation to everyone on the class roster. Of course, I would accept such invitation, since we have at least something in common, like GWSB MBA. But in one case I could not even put the face on the name of the inviting person. I am still in his network, along with hundreds of others, probably just as faceless,  but that connection is very elusive for  me .

Lesson learned: leverage the social networking to learn about your classmates, and to find potential points of  mutual interest. Just don’t abuse the system by “blanket connections”, or worse yet, bully like some employers try to do. Even though this bullying is less conceivable in the context of MBA classroom.

Tagged as: Business School, DC, Evening MBA program, George Washington University, GW School of Business, GWSB, GWU School of Business, MBA, MBA Program, Networking, part-time MBA, Professional MBA, Washington