The Top 5 Things That Suck About Business School

So, Admit Weekend is upon us again. For those of us who are not part of the bschool cult, Admit Weekends are actually a pretty big deal in our world and they take months of relentless planning (at least at my school) to make sure that everything is properly laid out and ready for our bright-eyed prospective students. Here's how it works: a prospective student somewhere in the world gets a call in the early winter time (usually around December, depending on the school) telling them that they are awesome, probably one of the smartest people in the world because they got into one of the biggest-deal bschools on the planet and congratulations. A few weeks later they get invited to an admit weekend, where they can come to visit the school and learn more about the culture.

They come for a weekend and current 1st and 2nd years (usually) are brought in to show them around campus, answer questions, talk to them about what it's like to go that school and participate in "late night events" to show them how fun that particular school is. Usually, it seems like all the big schools have their weekends the same weekend, so we are quite literally competing against each other for the minds and hearts of prospective students.

I participate in this now since I felt like it helped me make my decision when I was a prospective student, and I went to training last night which covered all the basics I would expect: don't trash talk other schools, please don't have sex with the prospectives, please don't assume it's always the male in a couple that has been accepted (nowadays its almost more likely it will be the female), etc. Basically, don't mess this up. I started thinking about all the reasons I love bschool (they're not ground-breaking: the people, the experiences, the opportunities, the alumni network, etc.), but then I realized that there were a couple of things that I didn't like about it. Bschool really skews your perception of what is real-life, and I think sometimes it pushes you toward some kind of irrational thinking. Some examples:

1. You hear conversations that are ridiculous (and that may make you a crazy person). Particularly around recruiting time. Walking around the halls, you'll hear the inevitable, "He only got an interview invite from McKinsey and Bain? What about BCG? He must have really messed up". Dude. You got invites from two of the top consulting companies in the world, calm it down. Or, another of my favorites once signing time comes around is, "Can you believe I got a signing bonus of only $15k? That means this year, my salary will only be like, $120k. You may think that's a lot, but it's not. I'm living in San Francisco!". Okay, true that. San Francisco is expensive. I get it. But there's lots of people who live there that live on a lot less than that. And are less of a jerk-off than you are.
2. You live in a constant state of Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO). Damn right we made it into an acronym. And we use it freely, because it's just so damn common on campus. "Man, I'm FOMO-ing like whoa right now", "Come to the party this weekend! FOMO!". Yup, these things happen. So you live in a constant state of "Yay! I didn't miss out on all of these things" instead of a "Proud of myself I did all of these things". I feel like that just can't be healthy.
3. You do more than any sane person should do. Especially as a second year, you would hope that your life issues are pretty much condensed into whether or not you watch an entire season of Revenge or an entire season of Breaking Bad on weeknights, but in reality, you still have a lot to do. There are clubs to run, first years to help, big school events (like admit weekend) to participate in, and, oh yeah, don't forget to hang out with your friends/significant other when you have time (aka when you're sleeping). If you decide to be one of the crazy ones that works part time, good luck and god speed to ya.
4. You are constantly hyper-aware that you are probably behind in something. You want to be a high performer-- do all of your homework, analyze all the readings, prepare all of your cases thoroughly. But sometimes life doesn't work out that way (see 3 above). For example, (at least at my school), it is more likely that you're in a silent competition with your group mates to be the first person to put their first draft into the Dropbox. You don't want to be the last one, lest your group thinks that you're a complete slacker, so start accepting that for every first draft you turned in there's at least three others you missed the boat on. It all balances out in the end, but for those super-prudent folks who organize and plan everything, we just need to let go a little bit and accept that, hey, sometimes you'll be the late one.
5. You pretty much disappear from your non-bschool friends lives. There are a lot of workarounds to this one, but I feel like I'm never budgeting my time appropriately between bschool and non-bschool acquaintances. And that makes me feel bad. I feel better that I try my hardest to make sure I carve out at least a little bit of time, but....FOMO.