This week’s Fridays from the Frontline comes to us from Kellogg School of Management second-year MBA student Rohan Rajiv, a regular contributor to Kellogg’s full-time MBA student blog. In a series called MBA Learnings, Rajiv has chronicled his progress through Kellogg’s MBA program. In today’s post, he shares candidly about MBA recruiting, which he says “is probably the single hardest piece of the graduate school puzzle.” Peer pressure and self doubt can combine to make the process of landing a post-MBA job fraught with stress. Read on to learn some of Rahiv’s tips for staying cool under pressure.
The following post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, “The Inside Perspective,” Kellogg’s full-time MBA student blog.
MBA Learnings: The Recruiting Journey Through Self Doubt
The MBA learnings series has two objectives. The first is to develop the discipline to synthesize and share some powerful concepts I’ve learned while at school. With about four and a half months left at school, I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to do this after I graduate as well.
The second has been demystify what the journey is really about. I have been surprised at the lack of really good resources on this topic, and I hope to have a definitive list of eight to 10 posts on the topic that will be helpful to prospective, admitted and current students after I graduate. I’ve listed five posts I’ve written so far on the topic at the bottom of this post.
Today’s topic is one that aims to demystify an important part of the MBA experience—finding a job or—to use a one-word description—“recruiting.”
My experiences—both as someone going through the journey myself as well as someone attempting to help others through the experience—have shown that recruiting is hard. It is probably the single hardest piece of the graduate school puzzle.
It is easy to laugh—this is almost as privileged a place to be when it comes to finding a job. Some of the best employers around the world make it a point to invest hours and days on campuses to talk to students about what life at their firm is like. All definitely true. But I don’t think life gets any easier when you are Bill Gates. Sure, you take away worries about shelter, sustenance and the like.
But the kind of challenges you face are in no way inferior to everyone else. In fact, it is my belief that challenges of the mind tend to be the hardest to talk about and deal with. As evidence, I have learned that students from the law school and business schools at most universities are the biggest users of on-campus counseling services.
I think this part of the experience is particularly hard for three reasons:
1) Every person going through the process has a track record of success that got them into school. It feels natural to expect this to work well with relative ease (and, in a few cases, it does).
2) The fact that you’re going through it with so many classmates—some of whom do better than you by balance of probability—increases the pressure.
3) And finally, most of these folk have received really bad career advice in the past that has led them to believe that there is that one “dream company” out there for them.
In my case, I think the peer pressure involved with the experience definitely made me question my own competence and abilities more than once. I made a couple of unusual choices and those came back as questions—did I do the right thing? What if I had done things differently? It also took what seemed like ages for any progress to come through.
