Introducing MBA Connections

Paul Davis

Welcome to MBA Connections, a project designed to bring together business school students from around the world. We also hope that this community will provide a forum for MBA recipients to discuss and share ideas about current events.

Topics here include, but are not limited to, finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior and technology. Ideally, perspective and current business school students can meet alumni and learn from their experiences.

Why create this forum? To understand where we are going, I must provide some background on my own social media and business school experience.

I largely self-taught in social media and HTML coding. For me, it was a necessity because I needed funding to go to business school. To help pay my tuition, I developed a comprehensive marketing strategy to improve the social media platform at the Wake Forest University Schools of Business and pitched it to Dean Steve Reinemund, a former chairman/CEO at PepsiCo. Talk about pressure!

Dean Reinemund hired me in 2009 to oversee a team of student bloggers to chronicle the MBA experience and develop a sense of community among the student body.

We were quite successful. By the time I transferred the platform over to Wake Forest earlier this year, the blog had accumulated more than 70,000 hits, the Twitter feed had collected nearly 2,000 followers and a Facebook group I created last year amassed 1,200 people in a matter of weeks. TopMBA even recommended that aspiring business school students follow us on Twitter.

Overall, it was a challenging and rewarding experience that went above and beyond what I learned in the classroom.

Since handing over the platform to Wake Forest, I have been eager to do more with social media. At first, I was unsure how to proceed. So I took a momentary step back to assess how I could apply the lessons I had learned from my work at Wake Forest to create something ... bigger.

MBA Connections is the realization that social media can go beyond connecting people at one school. We can also do more than just connect alumni. We should find a way to use technology to connect students across many different programs. We should connect incoming students with alumni. While we're at it, let's provide information and perspective about a range of programs and and current events.

It will take some time to build this network, and I would certainly appreciate your help. You can add classmates and fellow alums to our Facebook group. You can follow us on Twitter. I would also welcome any offers to contribute columns or perspectives. Over time, we can build a significant community that provides a superior experience ... learning from each other.

Thank you for your interest.
Paul Davis, MBA '11