3 weeks into MBA: a quick reflection
Pausing for a moment to process my thoughts since INSEAD is notorious for being over in the blink of an eye
I thought about dropping out of my MBA program a couple of weeks ago. I confided in my fellow students and alumni mentors about it. I still hadn’t paid the meaty second tuition installment, and that overhang begged a cost-benefit analysis: is the MBA experience worth it?
My core issue is that I don’t feel like I’m connecting with anybody. There are glimmers of alignment here and there, but they’re unsustained. School and people constantly pull us in new directions. Relationships seem to change every week.
I was jealous of my classmates who did pre-MBA programs: trips, classes, and meetups. Many seemed to have already solidified in their crews, their friend groups. I longed for the same.
I complained about it to my alumna friend over a phone call late one evening. “I went to yacht week with 50 classmates before MBA started,” she shared with me, much to my anxious chagrin. “And after school started, we all knew each other on campus. We even had a reunion dinner.
“But I realized later on that I was feeling comfort, but not connection. I didn’t feel connection to any of those people. I don’t talk to any of them now.”
I chatted with another alumna friend. “I well remember in week 4 when I straight up refused to go to more parties,” she explained. “Because they were boring and full of the same people behaving melodramatically to the same songs over and over. I also considered dropping out.”
She then advised, “Do trips, even if some are not to your taste.”
I was supposed to be in Saigon this weekend. The overall trip was not to my taste, so I had made a calculated justification to myself that it would be good for my overall MBA experience. But because of visa issues, I found myself stranded at the last minute, alone and unable to fly.
Somewhat to my surprise, there came an outpouring of support, concern, and love from my classmates, including some I had never really spoken with, which made me feel genuinely cared about and seen, even if for just a moment. And in a way, that glimmer of clairvoyance made the whole fiasco worth it.
I know it’s unrealistic to expect that real connection can come in a month, especially at our age. There’s some tempering of expectations that I need to do.
It’s clear to me that I can be more proactive in making connections. The ones who are taking this initiative are bringing the class closer together, and the effect is noticeable.
In parallel, I need a better routine to manage the MBA’s relentless drain on my introvert social battery. It’s keeping my body down in constant survival mode; I can feel my libido at a local minimum.
I spoke with a few classmates about my lack of connection, and they all seemed to feel similarly, which is comforting. “I haven’t talked to anyone about this,” a classmate remarked, chuckling, as I breached the topic. Ironically, the mutual acknowledgment of a lack of connection seemed to bring us closer together.
We recalled a meal we shared together with classmates early on, just before MBA started. Although that group never met again, memories of the meal had stuck vividly with both of us.
Other bits of advice I remember from friends who are in or have completed MBA:
“I honestly feel like I put more of my hobbies on hold at MBA, since the overlap of people who like my hobbies and people who I felt I could be really close to was low.”
“I think for people who I was already friends with, travel helped cement our friendship but there are also people who I traveled with who I wasn’t that tight with before the trip and then the trip wasn’t gonna make us closer…
“As the year progressed, I became more deliberate about who I wanted to travel with and next year, I want to use travel as a way to get closer to my friends and some of their friends, rather than just completely meeting new people…
“It’s the hard balance of MBA in general where you want to do new things and meet new people but after a while, you also want to just focus on deepening relationships with people you think you’ll be close with…
“And I imagine it might be trickier at INSEAD since it’s only one year, so it’s gonna go by so quickly.”