“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn
Taken at face value, Rohn’s statement is preposterous. Who you are is a consequence not only of your current personal relationships, but also of chance (for instance, were you born into a wealthy family and/or prosperous country?), inherited capabilities (such as intelligence, athleticism, verbal or artistic skill), and life experience (such as war, illness, discrimination)—as well as people who influenced you in the past but are not with you today (such as grandparents, grade school teachers, youth coaches). Most importantly, are humans chameleons? As some of the great autobiographies (Gandhi, Mandela, Malcolm X) reveal, you can will to be different from those around you. Each of us has at least some say in the matter of who we are.
Yet Rohn’s maxim seems so relevant. It recognizes the great influence of one’s peers. Parents everywhere ask their children, “Who are your friends?” because parents know that friends can steer behavior. “No man is an island,” as John Donne wrote, we are all part of a larger fabric of relationships. Most importantly, if you can choose with whom you hang out, that choice can be a tell-tale of significant preferences and direction.
The idea of the “five friends” resonates with me, because at this time of year, business school applicants from around the world are choosing who will be their friends for the next couple of years. Some admitted applicants reach out to me for advice or with questions. To my regular surprise, few of them consider the impact of the prospective “five friends” with whom they will spend their time in business school. This is a serious oversight. Let me explain why and then offer some questions that the admitted applicant should ask.
You should care about the “friends” with whom you will spend your time in business school for several reasons:
· Learning. In graduate school, you learn more from the friends around you than from the faculty. After all, it is graduate school; it is tougher; the expectations for you to figure things out for yourself are higher. The faculty are there to facilitate, provoke, inspire, and evaluate. But students in graduate school do more of the heavy lifting of learning than in undergraduate school. In any of the professional graduate disciplines such as law, medicine, or business, you are not only learning about tools of the trade; you are also learning how to conduct yourself as a professional: you acquire expectations for high performance; you learn how to communicate effectively; you adopt an action-orientation; and you sharpen your ethical foundation. So much of this important learning is social. At Darden, we explicitly harness that fact in the way we teach and structure our programs: students are assigned to learning teams and sections within which cutting edge business concepts are explored in depth; nearly 45 student clubs yield extensive opportunities to exercise leadership.
· Network. An MBA program affords the opportunity for you to forge deep relationships with classmates, faculty and staff members, and even alumni of the school. This kind of social capital can prove to be crucially important in future years when you need insights, introductions, or advice in dealing with opportunities and challenges. At Darden, the purposely-small scale of our programs promotes deep bonding and learning. Our alumni respond actively to outreach by students. And our faculty often rank #1 because of their willingness to work closely with students. By the time a student graduates, he or she will have made an acquaintance with virtually everyone in the class, and with faculty and staff members.
· Brand. The behavior of your “five friends” in future years will polish or tarnish your own reputation. Though you may have nothing to do with the subsequent behavior of those people, the public perception can be powerful. You must be comfortable with the “five friends” you acquire today and with the prospect of whom they will become in the future. Our admission process at Darden goes beyond mere academic potential to consider indicators of character. We require students to sign on to UVA’s Honor Code as a condition of enrollment.
I want to emphasize that the wrong way to contemplate a choice of school based on the “five friends” principle is to pursue elitism. Nothing about elitism ensures personal growth. The right way to implement “five friends” is by finding a school in which your peers will stretch, challenge, coach, and bolster you. Through your peers, you should grow in confidence and competence.
So, what the “five friends” notion ultimately means is that the admitted applicant should give serious consideration to several questions that bear on learning, network, and brand. Answers to these questions can be gained from attendance at programs for admitted applicants, typically held by each school this spring.
1. Do you want to learn through engagement with other students? Though I have made the argument that you should want to learn from your peers, some people simply prefer the anonymity of the lecture hall or the online course—this carries the lost opportunity of engagement with others. If the answer to this first question is “no,” then stop here; the rest of the questions will be irrelevant to you. Darden’s MBA programs actively harness the collaborative learning among students.
2. How selective is the school? Most of the 15,000 institutions in the world that award degrees in business are “open enrollment” schools: if you can pay, you can be admitted. In 2013, only 55 schools in the world admitted less than a third of their applicants. In recent years, Darden has admitted about a quarter of its applicants.
3. On what attributes does the school select applicants? You should be able to see some dimensions that matter to you, because you will almost certainly be stretched in those ways. At Darden, we look to compose a class of students who bring diversity, intelligence, leadership, integrity, and business potential, among other attributes.
4. Do I get energy from the other admitted applicants? Do I like them? Can I learn from them? Some of the attributes of excellent teachers include positive motivation, an ability to connect at a personal level with the learner, and a perspective that broadens the learner—so it is with the best peers.
The “five friends” principle invites the applicant to consider the influence of future peers in selecting which school to attend. This influence is a vitally important contributor to the success of one’s learning experience in business school.