For those of you looking to go to business school to switch careers, even if you were not entirely up front about that fact on your essay, you need to be prepared.  There will not be the down time that you imagined to sit back, learn a little business and lament on your potential future.  At most schools this process begins during orientation, when you are recruited by the various clubs on campus.  Some of these clubs can be fun (eg: Food and Wine, Sports or Adventure), but most of them are focused on future employment.

At my school, and from speaking to friends at others schools, the following clubs typically exist; Marketing, Investments, Real Estate, Consulting, Private Equity & Venture Capital, Banking and many other clubs.

Some of you are lucky and know going in what your dream job is and will be able to join those clubs, but if you are like me, you will find that you could see yourself in a lot of these fields.  You will either end up joining all the clubs and blowing your Cost of Living funds for the month, or simply joining them on a first come first serve basis until you feel you have spent too much.  Neither of these are good plans, which is why you need to start thinking about what you want to do with your MBA as soon as you get into business school.

Once you have made it through this club gauntlet and the first quarter core classes are reminding you why in a lot of ways school and homework can be even worse than a day job, you will get more emails than you could possibly address.  The more important emails will be from the career center notifying you of companies coming to present on campus.  So just when you thought you had a nice Wednesday night to relax and catch up on reading that Marketing case, you find out you have to be in a suit and prep for two different company presentations.

If you are shooting at the flock, that is looking at every career option available, this is where you can quickly overstretch yourself.  If you are interested in working for these companies however, it is very important that you attend their information session.  It will be worth your while to do limited research on any of the specific companies that catch your eye.  Fifteen minutes of time googling the company can save you hours of time listening to presentations, because time is valuable and grades do matter to some employers.  If you know your desired field, go to each and every one of the events in that industry and be prepared to ask questions and follow up with the presenters afterward to get business cards.

Whether you know what you want or are still testing the waters this process will help you sort out what you are aiming at, but will also introduce you to the underlying current of the entire business school process – networking.