Episode 3: On Networking

In my previous post, I touched on how Networking™ seemed to be a main reason for why people choose to go to business school. In this post, I intend to inflict violence on the asinine buzzword this concept has become. This is the reason I write about school under a pseudonym.

The conception of Networking at Business School hinges on cultivating wealthy classmates into some form of contractual friendship that they could cash out on (perhaps literally) in the future. The expectation is that by doing a lot of golfing, skiing, dancing in the club, throwing up in the ocean by expensive yachts, I will be known to people who may want to further my professional or creative interests. And you know, maybe this works. Maybe people really are closing deals while hiking at Burning Man (or whatever it is Bay Tech People do to approximate a personality). Even Mark McCormack, in his classically 80s book, What They Don't Teach you at Harvard Business School, dedicates at least one chapter to the etiquette at golf (and then lunch) to enable successfully closing a deal.

Networking, or its approximation thereof, has been difficult for me in business school thus far. During the first term of my first semester, I was forced to endure a hitherto undiscovered circle of hell called Preterm, in which we were forced through aggressive socialization: endless dinners, hangouts and more hangouts through this routine: You said your name, which consulting firm you came from, which consulting firm you were going to. The formula eats your tongue after the 300th time. I was so frustrated with how much I had to force connection with absolute strangers that it started to eat at the basic grace that I try to offer people (which, as you'll see later, isn't much).

The only way I could redeem my belief in humanity was by actually hanging out with people on a one-on-one basis. This was when the magical work of the admission committee truly came to light. People finally coughed up their actual origins, the rich complex tapestry of their lives, their deepest darkest fears, their ambivalence or certainty about business school, their views on Gorbachev, jellyfish, olive trees and God. They stopped being a homogeneous annoying mass of performers collecting linkedin invites on their phone. They could form cogent answers to whether they wanted to kiss/marry/kill an equilateral triangle, an isosceles triangle and a scalene triangle. They could be funny, kind, generous and even shockingly well-read. These conversations were brief and uncommon respites.

I have never understood the concept of paying for friendships. Maybe that screams of a different kind of privilege. Thus far, I've been extremely fortunate that I was able to select friends from very different arenas. I have friends from my days in comedy; friends who are linguists, engineers, DJ's, dancers, writers, athletes and artists; friends who were formerly of different genders, of different countries and made by different gods; friends I made off the internet, from the shared horrors at work and even from the friends of friends. Fundamentally, I had to invest time to cultivate such friendships, carving it out of my life if I didn't have intersections with these people already. Even in the atmosphere of business school, I believed I would somehow find my people (even if took me two whole years). I suppose b-school's constant aggressive socialization was trying to be a proxy for the depth of connections that take two to three shared existential crises to navigate.

So you can infer that I've been little miss popularity at business school. My program is nearly 1600 people, and on a daily basis I am perhaps interacting with about 200 people. To nobody's surprise, I dislike nearly 80% of the people I met. What is a surprise though is that I expected the number to be closer to 95%.

Here are a few ways the b-school model has been breaking for me: I don't drink, I can't shout over club music, I don't like super dark places and I am indifferent to fine dining. It's a telling indicator that people can recognize me from sharing classes with me. I like travel that brings forth commentary on it's intellectual, spiritual or culturally expansive merits rather than the exploitative instagram photo-tourism that pollutes the world and the internet. I also seem to have an allergic reaction to boring people. Whether they are boring because they are bad storytellers or because they have genuinely never had an original thought in their lives is a deeper philosophical discussion, and usually I'm not offered the evidence to distinguish between them.

But okay, maybe I've been doing it wrong. Let's consider that maybe friendship does involve financial obligations. After all, I paid my undergrad tuition for friends. I paid rent in cities like Boston and New York for friends. I pay for a wi-fi connection to the ocean of friends who live in a device I hold in my hand.

But in business school, the cost of tuition and club dues is insufficient. Instead, the common networking platforms are international trips and domestic parties. The international trips tend to cost anywhere between $4000 to $5000 per semester, and involve partying at fancy hotels in exotic locales.

The school also offers nearly four trips per semester, but those are catered towards either meeting heads of state or important business/community leaders in the world. There are cultural activities, and definitely "cultural immersion" (partying), but there's a graded assignment at the end and in some trips, you have to do enormous reading of the local culture and history before you're even selected to go. These trips aren't very popular because they're my kind of trips. They're also not entirely free, but they are heavily subsidized for students and range from $1500 to $3000, last a whole week and satisfy academic requirements.

Domestically, the parties hosted by the clubs tend to cost between $50-$120 per head and occur over Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The pricier ones happen at a club venue, the cheaper ones happen at the local tavern.

If, to increase my chances of forming the ideal network, I were to target every single one of these, I could easily overshoot my expected schooling expenses by $100K. It's bad enough that we live in a society that commodifies joys like discovering music or finding love, it's worse that something I consider as dear as friendship has to be commodified under the guise of networking.

Let me try to close with the grace that I find so hard to grant. Maybe the whole point of networking is a desperate grasp for time. That the consulting, finance or corporate jobs we will all be highly trained into will consume 18 hours from our days. That the memories on instagram are something to show for the time here, a value for the money exchanged for the cost of being here. Maybe that's why I write this blog. To remember that we are all oceans inside our human skin, with entire rich interior lives, and maybe the means we have of genuinely connecting with each other are so small, that maybe stupid boring hedonism, the absurd performance of hand-grasping and smiling, the remembering of names and statuses are the most we can manage in this very short time together.

Thanks for reading thus far. If you are considering applying to business school or want to protect a loved one from doing so, please feel free to subscribe or forward this email to them.