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10 Things To Do Before Coming to Stanford Sloan Master Program

· 8 min read

In descending order of importance, Complete your Linkedin profile. Linkedin has been used extensively by business schools, head hunters, and HR recruitment officers of many companies in US. It's gone mainstream and become a must-have in Stanford GSB.

Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP53

In descending order of importance,

  1. Complete your Linkedin profile

  • Linkedin has been used extensively by business schools, head hunters, and HR recruitment officers of many companies in US. It's gone mainstream and become a must-have in Stanford GSB. If you're looking for a job after Stanford, you can probably afford not to have a Facebook account, but you can't afford to have no Linkedin account. Linkedin helps to validate your professional history and it currently owns this market space.

  • Get your personal linkedin URL and don't use the default system-generated random link, which no one remembers and looks amateurish.

  • Spend quality time to polish and complete the Linkedin profile. A well updated Linkedin profile takes long time to fine-tune.

  1. Strategize on your personal branding

  • Think long and hard about how you want others to label/perceive you in KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) terms, for example, that startup guy, the VC dude, the hard-core quant guy, the non-profit lady, the corporate dude, the inventor genius, that marketing girl, etc. Ideally you want this reputation to precede yourself because that's how people start paying attention to you and pointing resources to you, in a crowded market filled with over-achievers.

  • 12 months fly by fast. The race of getting attention starts right on the first day when you land on campus. The earlier you can establish your personal brand/reputation, the more milage you can get out of your limited days in Stanford's universe. In fact, once you start promoting yourself with a solid brand that conveys what you bring and what you're looking for, many new friends and resources will start aligning around you naturally without you even trying. Yeah, it's magical.

  • Once you've identified the personal brand for yourself, don't change it. It's pretty costly to change a product positioning. The same goes for a personal brand.

  1. Know what you want to get out of Stanford/Sloan

  • We come to Stanford Sloan for many different reasons. Some are looking for career transition; some are looking for knowledge; some are looking for business partners; some are looking for validation; some are looking for professor's attention; some are looking for friends; some are looking for dates; some are looking for babies, some are just looking for chill. Our goal determines our plan; our plan determines how we will use our most precious asset - time.

  • For me, I'm looking for inspirations and partners. Coming from a pretty extensive business and finance background, I try to unlearn frameworks and theories that I deem no longer relevant or useful to me. I try to keep as little things in my mind as possible so that my mind can stay in its most vigilant and free-roaming state. Besides that, I spend a lot of time hanging out with  my classmates in various activities.

  1. Prepare for the accounting exemption exam

  • If you want to opt out of Accounting (a core course) in Summer Quarter, you need to take the Accounting exemption exam a few days before the start of Summer Quarter.  For my year it was an open-book, closed-door, fixed-time exam. Many students with finance background took it, got exempted, and enrolled into critically-acclaimed Professor Charles Lee's Alphanomics - a highly sought-after class for those quant-minded hard-core finance students.

  • For those who get exempted from Accounting, they have to take another finance-themed class of more advanced level. I've gone soft over the years and not hard-core at all now, and I didn't intend to build myself into an investment guru in Stanford GSB. So I didn't take the Accounting exemption exam. It was much easier to get by in basic Accounting than Alphanomics.

  1. Buy the latest Macbook Air

  • Apple's Macbook Air (not Macbook Pro) is hands down the best overall notebook for business school students. It's light, fast, powerful, and sleek. If your're about to change for a new notebook, use your Stanford email/ID to enjoy the student discount and get the latest model of Macbook Air. There might be lighter notebooks out there like Sony/Samsung, but they're using Windows.

  • (This is getting off the track a bit) All your personal files, including digital media ones (mainly photos), should be stored in some combination of Dropbox, Skydrive, Box, and Google Drive, the four most prominent cloud storage services. No additional back-up is needed. (However, as of April 2014, I'm moving away from all the above cloud services and switching to BitTorrent Sync)

  1. Research on what car you want to buy

  • If you decide you'll eventually need a car in the Bay Area, make the purchase decision as early as possible. The further away you're deferring this decision, the more money you'll be losing on the car you buy. Buying a car early in the Summer brings you a world of benefits and goodwill. Do not procrastinate. Make this the No.2 priority after arriving in SFO. (No.1 priority is to get a local phone number with 650 zip code)

  • Car-purchase decision in US can be done entirely on the Internet, where you can find anything you need for this very mature market. You can ping down which car dealer has the exact car you want and close the transaction in one day. For me I got my local phone number on Day 2 and bought the car on Day 3.

  • On a related note, get a California driver's license and a State ID as early as you can. Do not count on using your home-country's driver's license for the entire Sloan year, which is doable but not advisable, at all.

  1. Prepare for BBLs

  • BBL is one of the most amazing experiences out of Sloan Program and it should not be taken lightly. They form a very strong and intimate bonding among Sloans. Based on our preferences/requests, staff will schedule the BBL sessions for all the Sloans throughout the entire academic year (usually 4 BBLs during one lunch session).

  • Here's the golden rule: the earlier you can finish your BBL, the better. Just like in any other typical new social environment, people's interest in getting to know others is at peak level when the party just starts,  then it gradually slows down and diminishes as the party is coming to the end, since most people already form their own social circles and know who they want to hang out with. You do not want to be sitting at the end of that curve.

  • Bring your national costumes, for BBLs, and also for culture night parties.

  1. Identify your dinner targets

Following the same life-cycle analysis for the 12-month period, Summer and Fall Quarters are the best time to make some new friends before MBAs take over the airwave and we're swamped by rigorous academic workload in Winter Quarter. No matter how busy you think you are in Summer Quarter, it'll be nothing compared to Winter Quarter. Check out the profiles of your fellow students before arriving on campus and start scheduling 1-1/2-2 lunch/dinner with them. In Winter Quarter private dinner time with another Sloan will be a luxury.

  1. Know what class officer role you want to play

Throughout the 12-month period, probably more than half of my class will have performed some class officer roles. While every class officer role entails something very different, it's advisable to step up and do something for your class, especially when you have a generally forgiving crowd to work with. As my previous analysis demonstrates, social chair has the highest reward/effort ratio.

  1. Design your own namecards

  • This is a highly idiosyncratic move but I think it's worth trying. We don't have to use the standard business card from the program that has the Stanford logo. We can just design our own name cards with a style. It will stand out easily.

  • Then how do we print the Stanford logo on our own namecards? I would not even bother. If the recipient of my namecard doesn't even believe I'm from Stanford as I claim, then he/she probably does not deserve to receive my namecard in the first place.

In true Hollywood spirit, this is the prequel to my previous post Survival Guide for the First Three Days, the first article in this running series of Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow (aka, COASSF).

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