Sponsored Content
The following content was submitted by Dale Jarosz, a first-year MBA student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and co-founder of BSchool Travel.
The MBA application journey is a grueling one, marked by countless essays, campus visits, and interviews. The opportunity to reflect was certainly rewarding, but even more valuable were the relationships I built with my fellow students via interviews and MBA admitted student events.
Our personal network helped us find our footing in nearly every aspect of our business school journey, from securing business partners to leveraging recruiting and reciprocity opportunities through our connections with students at Universities around the world.
For instance, many industries are very regionally focused—tech is no exception. To have a network of peers at MBA programs on the West Coast was a surefire way to expose us to opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have known.
The value of pre-MBA networking within one’s own university cannot be overstated. Michigan Ross offers a unique pre-MBA travel program, Mtrek, which connects incoming and second-year students during a 10-day global immersion experience. The relationships we forged with second-year students helped us navigate the major early steps that MBAs take, from course selection to recruiting to time management and FOMO resistance. To have these relationships before we set foot on campus was pivotal to our success as first-year students.
To our surprise, we learned that less than 20 percent of the top 25 MBA programs offer similar opportunities for incoming students. We also discovered that there was demand for pre-MBA travel, as several students went on solo backpacking trips or tried to arrange a group of incoming classmates themselves. However, the lack of structured programs and the knotty logistics that travel arrangements for large groups entail can make this challenging.
As we consider the thousands of incoming MBA students that might pursue summer travel, we wondered why there wasn’t a platform to help them all connect and grow their network along the way. With that, Bschool Travel was born.
Bschool Travel’s mission is to provide incoming MBA students with two major opportunities:
First, very few cross-MBA networking opportunities exist. The ones that do are typically tied to several affinity groups. Our goal is to offer more pre-MBA networking opportunities through our Cross-MBA trips—global travel experiences that connect students from top MBA programs based on their career interests. 
Second, we strive to help students that want to travel/network with their incoming classmates, but either don’t have a structured program or find it challenging to mobilize a group and arrange the logistics. We not only help student groups coordinate the whole trip, but also offer travel scholarships to make the program more accessible.
We always heard about the importance of networking but didn’t truly understand what it meant until we started our MBA journey. Networking has brought us together as business partners, helped us all secure dream jobs, and given us a tremendous support system. We hope Bschool Travel will help others grow their network while they make lasting memories along the way.
