Speaker 1: What I want to talk to you about is networking in b-schools and why do I think that certain aspects about this are so overrated that it is completely pointless to even think about that and I'll share why do I say that and what part of it is overrated as per me and how you as an MBA aspirant can do a good job at networking in your b-schools. Hi I'm Darpan Saxena an MBA graduate from I'm Aayam Udaipur and let's get on with the video. So I'll get straight on to the point. The fact is, I've heard a lot of MBA aspirants, a lot of MBA students, and even a lot of MBA influencers, talk about the fact that one of the very big advantages of getting into the MBA program is the fact that you will get to make connections with your friends who will be there with you in the program. Now what my point on this is that if your idea of networking is about making connections with your friends who will be there in your batch then I feel that it is an absolute waste of time and in fact instead of making those connections in the hope of having some future fruits instead of doing all of that I always advise you to work on your hard skills work on your skills and do the things which are included in my five steps ahead program. Do all of those things which will help you get the best outcome which you want from your MBA. However, a lot of you would say to me, but then hey, how do we establish the connections with our friends? Because probably it might just happen that somebody from my program, somebody from my batch may go on to become somebody who's very influential and I should have a good established connection with them for sure. My point in this thing is that what you need to focus on here is how you can build yourself because MBA is that two-year window where you are very free and where the entire focus can be on you. If you are able to build yourself what will happen is that people by themselves, your friends, your students by themselves they will approach you. So your mindset when you are thinking about establishing professional connections with your batch mates it should be that how you can be somebody who can be so influential in the future who will be so well placed in the future that others will interact with you. I'll give you a very small example of this so that you actually understand that what exactly am I trying to say. So when I was in my MBA I had very few friends I would say hardly 2, 3 or at max 4 people who I would say as friends and with whom I used to hang out. Now what happened is that during my entire MBA program, my focus was on to build super heuristics to what it is and what it will be in the future. Now because my entire focus was on super heuristics, I was actually able to build it really well and I was able to reach a place wherein I could quit my job, my good lucrative job after MBA to work on Superheuristics full time. Now when others my friends and a lot of others who were there with me at IIM Udaipur when they heard about it that yes I'm working full time on Superheuristics they wanted to speak to me they wanted to interact with me and find out that how can I help them in their careers. What I'm trying to say is that if you work on yourself These kind of an interactions will always happen by virtue of the fact that you were a part of that B school. Nobody is going to take away that fact away from you. Once you've entered a B school you will always be a part of that B school and by virtue of that you can interact with any alumni you want and you will have the full authority to talk with them even if you have never interacted with them in your campus. campus. Having said all of that what I'll say to you is that your objective with your batchmates it should not be to make connections with the intentions of some future fruit. What my advice would be to you is that when you are in your B school your objective should be only to make good friendships and I would say that your objective for MBA it should not be to make friends because frankly Nobody, no one out there has come to make friends. They have come there to make a good life for themselves. However, even if you are interacting with somebody, you should only see them as simple lighthearted interactions at best for friendships and not for something which can have some future implications, so on and so forth. So keep it very simple. on yourself because when you work on yourself these kind of connection opportunities where your friends who were there with you in your MBA wherein they can help you all of these things will happen by virtue of the fact that one you were a part of that B school and two because you have worked on yourself so well that now you are well placed somewhere in the industry and people anyways want to interact with you. So if you should not see your friends or your batch mates as connection opportunities, then whom exactly should you see from that lens, whom should you consider as a proper networking and the answer to that is that everyone who's out there in the industry of your dream role of your dream industry, all of those are the ones to whom you should be reaching out to establish connections and the very fact that you are at a b-school that gives you an edge because otherwise accessing these people is tough but the very fact that you are in a b-school you get a very good access point for you to interact with these people and from here i will give you three ways in how you can actually do some meaningful networking with these people who are out there in the industry. So here are those three points. The first one is that in your B school I'm sure there would be a lot of guest lectures which will be organized and your objective is that you should attend all of these especially the ones that interest you especially the ones which are aligned with the industry or the job role which you have to be in and then whoever is the guest from the industry you You should try and reach out to him either face to face during that interaction or after that interaction you can always go ahead and connect them on your LinkedIn wherein you can send them a personal message saying that how insightful their interaction was and how it is helped you learn new things. That is a good way to start off such a connection and from there you can probably build on it as well. Second way for you to go ahead and do it is through a way which I always speak about in my five steps ahead program that how about you go ahead and start your blog which is going to be a marketing experiments lab which means that whatever you learn you will be writing about it on your blog and once you've created a place which is your identity online your online identity then in that case you would be able to reach out to a lot of such senior people in the industry and you would be coming across as a serious student who's interested in that field, whichever field you blog about, and then it would be easier for you to start off a cold interaction. So what I'm saying is that start working on your blog, create some content on the blog and then go ahead and find out the email IDs of some of the most prominent people who are there in the industry, which you're aiming for. And then you go ahead and do a cold outreach with them. And what you need to know about this is that this first cold outreach has to be a very harmless interaction. It means you will not go ahead and ask them for advice straight away. All you will do is that you'll just go ahead and say that, hi, I'm a first year student of so-and-so school, and I am very much interested in this field so much so that I also have a blog on it. And I would just want to be under your guidance for the future for whenever I may need it. And hence from there you would establish a very harmless equation with him or her, wherein in the future you can seek a lot of guidance from them. And I can say that from personal experience that most of the senior folks out there in the industry, they're actually very helpful and they're very interested to interact with students. So please go ahead and do it. It is going to change your life. I can guarantee you that. And the third way is also very closely aligned to the second point, which I just now shared with you. So while you will be creating the content for your blog, you should also be active on your social media, especially LinkedIn, which means that when you create certain content, you also need to go ahead and share it on LinkedIn because that is where all of these people are. And you need to then do the outreach. You need to establish connections on LinkedIn with all of these senior influential people in the industry which you aim for. Allow them to engage with your content. You should also engage with their content frequently and that is how you will be able to establish a very long term connection with them which is going to be purely on the basis of the content and the knowledge which you share on social media. with these three things what you'll understand is that you'll be able to do some meaningful networking which is very unlikely to what would happen if you only focus on interacting with all of the students in your batch. My objective in this video was to help you understand that there are more meaningful avenues for you to explore and when you are in your B school with your friends with those who are around you you should interact with them without any selfish objectives just go Go ahead and make friends out of them and whatever help you may need from your alums that will always happen by itself by virtue of the fact that you would be an alum of that school and by virtue of the fact that you have worked hard on yourself to establish yourself in the industry and now people might also reach out to you to help them. Hence you can always do that. I hope you've completely enjoyed this video. If you have, please go ahead and comment what your opinion is and I'll see you in the next video wherein I'll be sharing with you another thought about how you can create the best career outcomes for yourself from your MBA. Thank you so much.