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3 Before Your First Class

Good news for many of you: attending a highly selective college does not correlate with greater satisfaction, according to the Strada‐Gallup College Student Survey.¹ What does make people more satisfied includes “establishing a deep connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project, and playing a significant part in a campus organization.” In other words, don't just eat your education like a customer in a restaurant (passively); go into the kitchen and season it the way you like it.

David Alworth, a research associate in the Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, said,

You should think about your time in school as time that you are intentionally shaping, directing, and producing. During seminar classes, for example, you should feel both obligated and privileged to help steer the discussion with your peers and your instructor. In large lecture classes, you might help organize a smaller reading or study group.

One of the first things you will notice when you get accepted to an educational program is that the accepted students immediately start to connect with each other on social media. Your school will often create regional get‐togethers, which often continue through student planning well throughout the summer, as well as specialized online groups, for example, a Facebook or LinkedIn group for your class.

We recommend that you sign up for all of the online groups for your class and institution. These are wonderful opportunities to get to know your classmates and to ease your transition into your new educational home. Many of the friendships you make during the early months are the friendships you will retain for a lifetime.

Prepare a 30‐second “elevator pitch” answer to the two most commonly asked questions you will get: (i) Where are you from? (ii) What is your major? Of course, you can answer these questions with simple answers like “Marin County” or “math,” or you can choose to provide insight into who you are and what you hope to get out of your education. You can also use your answers to learn more about your classmates. Perhaps try something like: “I am from Miami, and I love filmmaking and water sports. Where are you from? What clubs are you interested in?” And, for the major, try, “I hope to major in math because I plan to enter sports analytics after graduation. How about you?”

Or, for students entering graduate school, be prepared to answer these questions:

 What did you do before coming to school?

 What are you planning to do after school?

People love when you ask them questions. Two thoughtful conversations are far more valuable than a dozen forgettable interactions.

Write very carefully your entry in the class directory and in any other social media systems used by your peers. Professors often refer to these sources to get to know their students prior to courses; this is the first impression you will make. A lot of people will search in these directories for students who share their interests, for example, students who wrote “Jewish,” “Chinese,” or “environment” in their profiles. Make sure that your entries use keywords that people might use in looking for people like you.

Set up and manage one central hub for your online presence. Whenever you introduce yourself online, point to that platform. This way people can follow up with you, without being restricted by the platform where you met.

The ideal online presence is a personal website, for example teten.com. An option with less flexibility is to build your profile using a service like About.me or Wix.com. The last option is to use a platform like LinkedIn. However, any individual social media platform like LinkedIn places restrictions on your online presence. It's much safer to set up a neutral venue. Don't build on someone else's platform; build on your own.

Mandee: We encourage our International College Counselors students as young as high school to start setting up LinkedIn accounts for personal information and websites, Facebook or Instagram accounts for a business or organization that the teen started or runs. This puts our students “on the digital map,” and allows them to create a carefully cultivated presence online. A professional LinkedIn page for a motivated high school, college, or graduate student is both acceptable and well regarded. By having social media accounts at a young age, you can also start to cultivate your network. Adding new friends or professional contacts to your social media platforms ensures that you don't lose track of them over the years, and you can easily reach out for future communications.

When you introduce yourself online, try to include the major points that you'd cover in the first 10 minutes of an introductory conversation with a new friend. It's common that in an online class or community, the moderator may ask everyone to introduce themselves. Make sure to highlight anything memorable or unusual about yourself, as it's hard to differentiate when everyone is in a sea of the same font. Include a photo if possible.

Also, include as many points of common interests as possible because each of them can be a conversation starter. For example, list the cities you've lived in, languages you speak, hobbies, something unusual about your family or background, pets. If the medium allows for hashtags (e.g. in Slack), we recommend hashtagging your hobbies, intended career field, and major. Limit your hashtags to four to six items.

Here are sample self‐introduction from two college students:

Hi everyone! My name is Nicole [Odzer]. I was born and raised in Miami, FL, and I am currently a rising senior at Yale University. I am majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and I hope to attend medical school after graduating. I love biology and have been conducting research in a molecular biology lab at Yale since my sophomore year, focusing on the study of large non‐coding RNAs! The rest of my free time in school is spent volunteering and shadowing at the hospital, playing viola in a student orchestra, and singing in a student‐run a cappella group! Some fun facts about me are that I have travelled to over 30 national parks and monuments in the United States (my family really loves hiking), and that I scuba dive!

Hi all, I'm Michael [Waldman]. I was born in Buenos Aires but moved to the US at age 4, and to Chicago at 18 to study Computer Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. The past few summers, I've been immersed in the tech industry, and have gotten the chance to work at Facebook, and now Instagram as a software engineer. I also enjoy hobby projects in computer science and tinkering with electronics. Besides all the coding I do, I really enjoy bike riding, boxing, good comedies, mentoring and spending time with my family. A fun fact about me is these days, I do most of my work on a walking desk (a standing desk with a treadmill under), and in the past 6 months working from home I've logged over 1,500 miles.

Here are two examples from MBAs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management:

Hi everyone! My name is Katherine Boe Heuck, but please call me Kate. I currently live in Washington, DC, where I also grew up. I graduated from Washington and Lee University in 2013 and majored in Chinese and Biology. After college, I worked and lived in Hebei Province and Shanghai, China, for 5 years, in sustainability consulting for the Joint US‐China Collaboration on Clean Energy. I worked with food & beverage and consumer packaged goods companies, specifically Danone and Alibaba HeMa (cashless grocery store), which were looking to sustainably innovate products and brands for the urban Chinese market. I also ran my own education company before coming to Sloan. I speak fluent Mandarin and I plan to stay connected to Greater China throughout my career, although most likely based in the US. I want to pursue a career in #VentureCapital, focusing on #edtech. I'm also interested in getting involved with the #sustainability conference and the impact investing club. This summer, I'm interning with Versatile Venture Capital. My hobbies include #sailing, #golf, and #reading historical non‐fiction. My husband Sam Heuck is also in our MBA class and we are looking forward to meeting you all. Please reach out if we share interests! My personal email is kate@heuck.com and my school email is kbheuck@mit.edu. You can find me online at https://linkedin.com/in/katherine-boe/.

Hey Sloanies! My name is Sam Heuck. My wife Kate Boe Heuck and I are excited to join the class of 2022. I currently live in Washington, DC, but my hometown is Pittsburgh. I graduated from Kenyon College in 2012 with a degree in Political Science and Chinese. I speak Mandarin fluently and spent 6 years in Shanghai, China working in management in textiles manufacturing companies. Post‐MBA, I hope to join a private equity fund, continuing to focus on #manufacturing and industrial and #supply chain technology. I'm also interested in emerging markets, having worked and travelled in China, India, and Vietnam. My hobbies include #sailing, #squash, #travel, and #reading. This summer, I am interning for Schematic Ventures, an early‐stage venture capital fund that focuses on industrial technologies based in San Francisco. My email address is sam@heuck.com and my school email is sdheuck@mit.edu. I look forward to meeting you all and connecting. You can find me online at https://linkedin.com/in/sam-heuck-80a56558/.

Upgrade your wardrobe. Seriously. If you can afford it—prepare for a more mature stage in your life. Do you have a nice suit for job interviews? How about a clean pair of jeans and a collared shirt for meetings with professors? Although you don't need to lose your identity, do dress to show you care, especially when dealing with faculty and employers. Consider some of the online services that make it easy to dress professionally, for example, Poshmark.com or Renttherunway.com.

Read through and familiarize yourself with the main sections of the school intranet. Learn about where important school news is posted. You don't want to be well into the first semester before you learn about the many wonderful speakers and events you've missed. A great habit is to review the school public calendar once a week to see which businesspeople, politicians, academics, or other interesting people are visiting the campus.

If you can, find an older classmate who can help guide you: course choices, club activities, and the unwritten rules. If you can't find a current student, contact an alumni organization, and see if there is a recent graduate who can speak with you. Some schools will designate a “Big Sib” to smooth your process. The extracurricular clubs are a great way to meet friendly students with more experience than you.

Contact the presidents of the clubs you are interested in. Join clubs from the very beginning to see if you are in the right place, or if you need to seek other opportunities for learning. The earlier you get involved, the more easily you can switch directions or take a leadership role in a club you enjoy. Unlike high school, there will be no “free periods” for clubs. Getting on a club mailing list is free; you can decide whether or not you want to participate in a given club once you get a sense of their activities.

Note

1 1. Brandon Busteed and Zac Auter, “Career‐Relevant Education Linked to Student Well‐Being,” Gallup, February 13, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226934/career‐relevant‐education‐linked‐student.aspx.