Shadowing project sorted out
It was painful but I finally managed to find someone to shadow. The shadowing project is a core project, to carry out before the beginning of the second year of MBA, where the student observes a manager performing his day-to-day activities over a 5 days period.
It's quite difficult to actually convince a manager to participate to this project because he usually sees little value in having a student behind his back during a week. However by nicely presenting him the project (ie: I would like to shadow you because I could really develop my leadership skills by observing you...") , he could be actually flattered and accept but my take is that he has to like mentoring people otherwise he won't deal with the hassle.
During the year, I've contacted 7 persons (the founder of a VC fund, the CEO of a French bank in the UK, the CEO of a medium size defence company, the founder of a startup company, a French Deputy, a MD with a PE firm, an associate within the same PE firm) who all refused or did not even bother to reply, before this eight person agreed. He is a MD with a major Investment Bank in London so this should be interesting, at least for the networking opportunities. I'm indeed not so sure that one can really develop his soft-skills by observing the work of a manager but we'll see after I completed the project.
A word of advice for incoming students: do plan you shadowing research early on (eg: first term) because it takes lots of time to identify people, contact them and convince them to participate to the project and time flies in year 1.
It's quite difficult to actually convince a manager to participate to this project because he usually sees little value in having a student behind his back during a week. However by nicely presenting him the project (ie: I would like to shadow you because I could really develop my leadership skills by observing you...") , he could be actually flattered and accept but my take is that he has to like mentoring people otherwise he won't deal with the hassle.
During the year, I've contacted 7 persons (the founder of a VC fund, the CEO of a French bank in the UK, the CEO of a medium size defence company, the founder of a startup company, a French Deputy, a MD with a PE firm, an associate within the same PE firm) who all refused or did not even bother to reply, before this eight person agreed. He is a MD with a major Investment Bank in London so this should be interesting, at least for the networking opportunities. I'm indeed not so sure that one can really develop his soft-skills by observing the work of a manager but we'll see after I completed the project.
A word of advice for incoming students: do plan you shadowing research early on (eg: first term) because it takes lots of time to identify people, contact them and convince them to participate to the project and time flies in year 1.
posted by k at 4:16 AM
3 Comments:
Good advice. I’ll keep that in mind.
However, I thought that LBS would already have a list of executives (probably LBS alumni) who want to have people shadow them.
This will allow the execs to give back to the LBS community and network with the school as well. After all, networking is just as important for them as it is for us. It’s to their advantage if they can get the top recruits every year and what better way to do it than by maintaining a good and active relationship with the top local schools?
LBS has indeed a list of alumni who have expressed at some point an interest in being shadowed but those people are busy people and their agenda might be too packed to deal with a student observer. In my case, 2 of the people who refused my offer were on that list.
btw, thank you for your help when I was working on my scholarship essay :-)
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