Create a network at university

Business schools are ideal places to create and extend your social network. In this note I describe five useful strategies. This is part one of three.



Business schools are ideal places for planting social networks, because they combine a healthy mix of diversity and similarity. At a good business school, an incoming class consists of people from many countries. Students’ first degrees could be in engineering, computer science, business administration, politics, psychology, law, or medicine to mention the most common. People with different backgrounds and with different career goals mingle in the same physical campus. However, they also share certain characteristics with each other. They are generally achievement oriented, many have had comparable career experiences during their initial years of working life and many aspire to similar careers after graduation.

This combination of diversity and similarity makes it easy to engage in network planting during graduate school. Students also have plenty of free time for social activities compared to later in life. It is like having a large garden, ideal weather conditions, and many different types of seeds just waiting to be planted. The notion of economy of network planting is illustrated in figure 1.

Figure 1. The curve indicates ease of planting a diverse network during different life phases for the typical business school graduate.

Network planting can take place all throughout life, but is easier during two life phases: tertiary education and at the peak of one’s career. After graduation, most students take a functional job, the working hours are typically long, and a few years later it is common to start a family. All these factors conspire to make network planting more difficult after graduation as the required time to plant a network is in short supply. During this life phase, network planting tends to be driven by the immediate needs of one’s current employment. Later in life, children grow up and business school graduates generally reach higher management positions. At the peak of one’s career one can more easily network with other people and one probably has a bit more time available for engaging in networking activities. 

Since it takes time to plant and cultivate a network, it is important to start planting the network early. If one starts network planting only after being made redundant or after having made the decision to become an entrepreneur, one is at a severe disadvantage compared to the person who has invested time and energy since business school to build up a network. Finding the required diversity and developing relationships of sufficient strength takes relatively long time and networking efforts should hence start early in life. Even if there were no contacts during business school, one can still receive benefits from engaging with the alumni network. With geographical proximity, it is relatively easy to network with members of the business school alumni even if there were no direct contacts during your studies. The generally pleasurable, common experience during student years creates goodwill, which most business schools have transformed into alumni associations. Many older alumni members are genuinely interested in helping committed, younger people to succeed. In addition, alumni also have an interest in helping because the success of younger alumni improves the reputation of the business school. However, the homophily and reciprocity principles naturally apply to alumni as well. So advice and help is much more likely to be forthcoming if members of the alumni are working in the same, or an adjacent, department of the same corporation or at least in the same industry. The situation is unfortunately much more difficult when the geographical distance makes frequent face-to-face contact less likely. However, by active network planting during business school, the negative effect of geographical distance can be reduced. It is much easier to connect if there was some positive face-to-face interaction ten or twenty years earlier. 

The benefit of network planting does not increase linearly with regard to time and effort involved. There are smarter ways to plant your network than relying on letting the network grow passively through a laissez-faire approach. In the next section, we will outline five strategies that can be employed to more actively plant your network. These strategies will focus on overcoming the bias of the homophily principle while at the same time taking advantage of the reciprocity principle. Being aware of how strongly these principles shape human networks is imperative. 

To understand social networking, we will employ a biological metaphor consisting of three phases: network planting, network cultivation, and network harvesting. In elaborating how specific strategies can be used to achieve organizational or individual goals, some students object to what they consider instrumental, negative use of other human beings. Nothing could be further from our intention. Our organic metaphor emphasizes that social networking is not a win-lose game, in which one person wins and another loses. 

If you do not plant your professional network based on our strategies, chances are high that you will create the wrong social network. This will result in a network that gravitates towards stability. By following our strategies you will instead plant a network that abounds in new information and knowledge. We would argue that it is your responsibility as a privileged member of society to help create such social networks. And by following our advice, you will be better positioned to support people in your network. In the end you will develop your own networking strategies, but we urge you to pay close attention to the strategies we present below. In the typical undergraduate program, students often make a distinction between studying and having fun. This distinction should be much more fluid in graduate school. Network planting is an essential aspect of graduate school and it happens both when you study and have fun. 

Furthermore, if you lack networking experience, you should also consider business school network planting as training for future network planting during your business career. In fact, we think that you should consider the time and money spent on your business school studies as an investment in both knowledge and networking. Hence, forsaking the ideal networking opportunity would be to generate a low return on your business school investment We have identified five strategies to increase the size and quality of your network while you are in business school. These five strategies are ordered from the least to the most demanding strategy in terms of time and energy. Depending on your level of ambition you might decide to engage in all five strategies or just in the first two strategies. Some of the relationships that you plant will naturally come to involve friendship, but that is not necessary from the point of planting a valuable network. In fact, you should deliberately plant a network that is considerably larger than the number of your close friends. 

Strategy 1. Make active use of natural opportunities to create diversity. The typical business school class has substantial diversity in terms of gender, undergraduate studies, work experience, and geographic origin. You can easily take advantage of this diversity by seeking out different fellow students to work with in the group projects present in most classes. This is a very valuable networking strategy compared to always teaming up with students you already know. In contrast to corporate life, business schools are low-risk environments and the increased tension, from working in heterogeneous groups, is a small cost for planting a more diverse network. There is also diminishing marginal return for network planting in your main area of specialization, so seek further diversity by taking elective courses in other specializations. Do not be afraid to choose an elective to enhance your network rather than to learn specific knowledge. You can also join sports or other special interests associations to increase your exposure to diversity. Yet other opportunities include joining a study trip taking you to another region of the world or participating in a student exchange program with a partner school. The latter strategy can be especially useful to build up a valuable regional network in a part of the world where you think you might want to work in the future.

It is impossible to know exactly what kind of diversity will be useful five, ten, or twenty years later in life. However, there are a few guidelines to consider in terms of functional, geographic and industry diversity. Once you have an idea of the kind of diversity that you want to create, scan the list of CVs of your fellow students to consciously make sure the homophily principle does not guide your network planting. In terms of functional diversity, you will probably start out in a specialized field, e.g. finance or marketing. However, the diversity you should aim for is determined by the needs when you later on receive general management responsibility either as a senior manager or as an entrepreneur. The diversity you should aspire to get in your network includes all business school specializations and in addition it probably includes people with background in industry, government, banking, and law. In terms of geographical diversity, you should include people from all of the economically important regions (i.e. North America, Europe, East Asia, and South Asia). Specific countries within these regions or other countries outside of the major regions should be included based on special interest. If you do not aspire to become a global manager you should put more emphasis on the region in which you would like to live, but you should still cover the four regions. Your regional contacts are also more able to plant a richer local network than you are able to do at a distance. If you know that you want to become an investment banker in London, it is a good idea to include people from the major economies of Europe. 

Generally, it is also important that you pay specific attention to your own nationality. Even if you aspire to become a global citizen and lead a nomadic lifestyle, you might experience the pull from your home country in ten or twenty years. This could be the result of ageing parents or the desire to let your children experience your culture. Returning to their native country has so far mostly been a concern for Australian, European and North-American families, but with the strong growth of emerging economies, including China and India, it will increasingly be a concern for families from other parts of the world as well. If you decide to return home, your globally diverse network might not be that helpful compared to the nationally focused networks of many local managers. One approach is to capitalize on the fact that the world is becoming more international. If you are Singaporean and think you might want to return to Singapore later in life, it would make sense to start building a regional network including people from other South-east Asian countries. When you eventually return, there is likely to be a higher degree of cross border activity in the region and having a regionally diverse network will give you an advantage that is difficult to replicate for individuals with a predominantly national network. It is more difficult to provide recommendations regarding industrial sectors. However, if you have already narrowed down your choice to a few industries it is worth considering upstream and downstream industries. 

It is also useful to think about building a network around skills that are in relative short supply in your target industry. The logic is to network with individuals that are in possession of best practice, which is often portable across industries. If you target consumer electronics, you might want to extend your network to retail and distribution experts in fast moving consumer goods. For a career with a telecoms operator, you can learn a lot about managing transactions and analyzing customer data from credit card companies.

Strategy 2. Make your own willingness to plant relationships clear to other people. You should take advantage of the reciprocity principle by making clear that you are willing to contribute to future social relationships. Unexpected gestures of goodwill or symbolic gifts or actions are particularly useful in this regards. There are many opportunities available in daily life: buy coffee or tea, invite people for dinner that are not close to you, offer to provide comments on a term paper, bring a small gift from your home country, or if a fellow student is admitted to hospital, pay a surprise visit. Such acts are a great way to show your openness and willingness to contribute to a future relationship. Many business school students can be quite self-centered so it can be rather easy to show your own willingness to contribute to a relationship. 

A more ambitious application of this strategy could be to buy all fellow students in you cohort a drink once during the program. This gives you a chance to have many informal face-to-face discussions. If you help other people, the reciprocity principle creates an obligation for them to in turn help you. We all know individuals who want to receive, but who are reluctant to give. You should not become such a person. 

Another example would be to show openness by speaking English even if you are talking to people from your own country. Speaking other languages makes it harder for other people to join your conversation and you will be seen as more interested in maintaining your current ethnic network rather than to build a diverse network. 

Another strong way to show your willingness to plant and cultivate a relationship is to be mindful of other persons’ interests. By this we mean that you should put yourself in other persons’ shoes and let this guide your behavior towards them. One way to be mindful is to provide access to parts of your social network. You have probably developed relationships, from which other people in your network can benefit. If a fellow student wants to get a job in management consulting, you can connect him with another person in your network with actual consulting experience. You might get this person to conduct a mock interview to prepare the student for the real interview process. Your fellow student will be very grateful to you. Do not try to take personal benefit of any such broker position, in which you might find yourself. The network you plant at university is supposed to provide long-term benefits. During your business school years it is more important to be a person that does not mind sharing network relationships. The benefits to you will accrue later in life when you harvest.

Strategy 3. Use social settings to establish other people’s willingness to plant relationships. It is not sufficient that your network is diverse and that you are willing to plant relationships. You also need your network to consist of people that are mindful of your own interests. It is not realistic to think that people in your network will think about your interests all the time. However, if your network connections are never mindful of your interests, they are frankly not very useful members of your social network. This is one reason why networking only to collect business cards is not recommended. You do not need to have a close emotional relationship to gain the majority of benefits from networking, but you do need a relationship of some quality. As student life involves a combination of studious and social activities, it is relatively easy to monitor the degree to which the other person respects and values the relationship with you. You can assess this during group projects, collaboration on exam preparation or social activities requiring a certain amount of work and involvement. A group member that always shows up late and does not like to do mundane tasks is less likely to be willing to help you in the future than a group member that diligently participates in all meetings. If you followed our earlier example of buying everyone a drink, you could assess their willingness to build relationships by how they respond later during the term. 

As you accumulate further evidence, you should try to assess the scope of a person’s mindfulness. Somebody might be very disordered, but quite reliable once a promise has been given. Another person might not be mindful in a professional work situation, but could be very mindful when approached about his extensive knowledge of modern music. At the minimum, being mindful entails some desire to provide help when asked. If you ask for advice where to bring a client for dinner in a foreign city, you should expect the other person in your network to think about your situation and then recommend a couple of suitable restaurants. If he or she only provides a standard laundry list of restaurants without paying attention to your needs, the person is not mindful. 

Mindfulness beyond this minimum level can provide even further benefits. Trust and mindfulness often develop hand in hand. Trust can develop easier in business schools than in corporate settings. In corporate environments, there is often a certain degree of competition between employees. This is much less the case in business school. The best way to assess somebody’s trustworthiness is through face-to-face contact. It might be easier to build stronger relationships if the business school you are attending is somewhat isolated from other arenas of social life. If your business school is located in a major world city, less time is generally available to build relationships with fellow students. In this case you need to work a bit harder to build stronger, diverse relationships. 

When evaluating other people, you should be aware of a number of biases that can influence how you judge people. First, initial impressions tend to count disproportionately more than they should. Be aware of this risk towards premature judgement. Second, we tend to judge people that are different from us harsher than people that are similar. So be aware that your views of what constitutes normal behavior could be too narrow to judge people’s willingness to plant and cultivate relationships. Consider how you would evaluate a younger person, of the opposite sex, from a very different culture, with different social background and personality compared to yourself. 

Strategy 4. Do not forget to plant relationships with lower status individuals. Whether you like it or not, humans have explicit or implicit ways to determine a social pecking-order. Where in the pecking-order you end up is determined by your level of status. At business school, status can typically be influenced by the following factors: being part of a wealthy family, whether you are a first or second year student, whether you come from a developed or developing country, and physical appearance. If you are a high status actor, it is much easier to form social relationships compared to if you are a low status actor. As a high status actor, other people will approach you. Hence, you are more likely to plant a valuable network even if you remain relatively passive. If on the other hand, you have a lower status, you need to be a lot more active in order to be successful. The natural instinct based on the homophily principle is to interact with people at the same status level as ourselves. With a more instrumental view towards networking, it is common to try to include people with higher social status in the network. While this can be a good strategy, you should think hard about the time and effort involved in the endeavor. 

We would like to propose the counter-intuitive strategy of spending time networking with actors with lower status than you have. Most people at business school are likely to be successful later in life and the current status markers of your business student peers are poor predictors of their later success. At business school, students in the first year have lower status than students in the second year. While you are a second-year student being preoccupied with getting your ideal job, the first-year students are still struggling with Basic Finance and Basic Marketing. However, time soon passes and chances are that ten years later many of the former low-status actors will have surpassed your own level of status. Networking with lower status actors at business school is not about networking with losers. It is about finding a way to plant a diverse network using the limited time and energy available. So spend the first year networking with people in your cohort and spend the second year extending the network to students in the cohort below you. At the very least do not display any signs of higher status just because you happen to be one year ahead, a few years older, and from a more wealthy country. Sometimes it can make sense to network with high status individuals. When you do this you should be aware that it requires more time and energy. You need to have a value proposition so that you are able to add something of specific value to the relationship. If you are an amateur chef, you could team up with a student having a lavish apartment and arrange dinner parties. Having a large apartment normally provides status, but your cookery skills will also be a source of value. Eventually, you will probably acquire higher status yourself due to your skills in making people’s palate happy. Without a unique skill it is generally difficult to network with high-status actors. With some creative thinking based on the reciprocity principle you might possess more skills than you think, but be aware that this strategy can consume more time and effort than networking with people on your status level or lower levels. 

Strategy 5. Create new arenas for social interaction. In addition to taking advantage of existing social groupings you can take a more active role in creating new temporary or permanent social arenas. This is a sophisticated strategy aimed at creating new arenas that play to your strengths and match your specific objectives. As you are setting the rules of the game, this is likely to increase your status and enhance your ability to establish strong relationships. One example of this could be to establish a new student club focusing on a geographic area of specific interest to you. In general try to push your interests into new arenas for social networking. If your business school is located in a major city, you can take advantage of this by creating an arena which includes students as well as industry participants. An example of this would be to create a student club that invites guest lecturers to campus with a specific focus such as finance or consulting. 

Another very strong networking opportunity is the people you live together with. So our advice is to find flat-mates who have diverse backgrounds, but with whom you can still get along with. If possible, consider sharing a larger apartment with more people rather than a smaller apartment with fewer people. Even if you can afford staying in your own apartment, seriously consider the networking benefits of sharing an apartment. If you have the space and required resources, we suggest that you prioritize a large dinner table. Arranging dinner parties is an excellent way to both strengthen and create new relationships. If you cannot cook, order pizza and buy some drinks. If you are an MBA student it is certainly also appropriate to invite faculty members but given the faculty-student ratio do not be too disappointed if they cannot attend. If you are married with children, you automatically have another social arena which you can use to plant relationships. Being a partner to an MBA student can be an isolating experience, so involving the partner in network planting will be beneficial for both you and your partner.

This was written five years ago together with Andreas Birnik. The paper was written from the perspective of an MBA student, but it is equally relevant for undergraduate students. This is an edited version. Comments are appreciated!