The First 100 Days

It's become a bit of a cliche to have a 100 Day Plan whenever you take over an organisation or project. I don't necessarily recommend this but looking back on my first 100 days at B-School I've come up with some tips for utilising the first 100 days effectively.

1. Meet as many people as you can - spread your net wide, as wide as possible, before you know it you'll be sub-divided into cohorts/streams/groups/teams and you'll struggle to meet people outside of those groups. But for a few glorious weeks, it's your chance to meet anyone who happens to be at the bar when you are.

2. Student Club positions, you really need a few. As disturbing as it sounds your class mates will treat the Fall Term start as rather like the first few rounds of Monopoly, and will race around the board picking up as many properties as they can. They say in Monopoly that the outcome of the game is decided in the first 3 rounds. I don't think this is the case for B-Schools in that club VP positions clearly don't matter THAT much, but don't sit by smug and aloof and watch others scrabble around for these jobs - you'll regret it later.

3. Competitions - Enter them. Yeah, they're lame, yeah, they're time consuming and ultimately futile. But come January and internship recruitment time, those pesky recruiters are going to start asking "So what else have you done at Business School?", and apparently an A+ in Statistics doesn't cut it... There's an IPO Challenge, Case Challenge, Marketing Challenge, odd combinations of all of the above ad nauseam. Get involved even if you don't want to.