By Hernán Silva, MIFPT2026
The knowledge, skills, and tools provided by the LBS academic professors during the lectures are among the best that you can acquire from anywhere in the world. However, when it comes to really increasing the ROI of your academic investment, active networking is just as important (and in some cases even more important) than the great theory and technical skills you learn inside the classrooms. In other words, effective networking is a must for every experience in a business school, and LBS faces no contest on this matter especially on a global platform.
How to do it? Every LBS student’s approach will be different and shaped according to their specific goals, career aspirations, talents, and personalities. I would like to recommend my general guidelines and an example I believe will help you showcase how to do it and what opportunities could be waiting for you.
- Specific targets: “Finance” and “Business” are very wide fields that offer many different career paths. It can be easy to lose your target on what topics and type of roles you want to pursue. To try every option can work, but I would not recommend it. Concentrating your energy, time, and passion on a couple of topics and networking events relevant to your goal is more effective. If you want to break a barrier fast, putting all your energy on one point is more effective than doing spreading it widely. Breaking into your next new role should not feel too much like venturing into uncharted territory.
- LBS Clubs: Once you have identified your areas of interest, join the related LBS Clubs. This could the Investment Management or Private Equity and Venture Capital Clubs.
- Provocative Questions: LBS Clubs offer a wide range of opportunities to engage in discussion panels, coffee chats, and networking events. These experiences are valuable for building meaningful professional relationships – whether with a future colleague, manager of someone from your target industry. It’s often said: ‘It’s better to be prepared and not have the opportunity than have the opportunity and not be prepared.’ That’s especially true in networking. Take time to do your research beforehand. Go into conversations with thoughtful, open-ended questions like:
- ‘What’s the most difficult challenge that you have been seeing lately?’
- ‘What’s the million-dollar questions that everyone’s trying to answer in this field?’
Questions like these can spark deeper, more engaging conversations. They position you to share ideas confidently, connect with peers and professionals on a more meaningful level, and gain insight you won’t find in the lecture theatre.
An example? The LBS Commodity Trading Club and the Geneva Trek. So, let’s think about some practical examples of the 3 steps suggested before:
- Specific targets: I have experience working on sustainable finance and energy transition themes and I would like to gain more knowledge from practitioners to take ideas and integrate new ways of tackling challenges in my current role of ESG Associate at my firm Patria Investments. To this end, considering the insights from peers and people from other industries that are dealing with the same type of topic is key.
- LBS Clubs: Considering the interests mentioned in the previous point, a couple of Clubs are potentially good candidates: the Energy & Environment Club, the Commodity Trading Club, the Asset Management Club, and the Social Impact Club. Stay tuned through WhatsApp groups, email and LinkedIn. Thanks to a message on the cohort’s WhatsApp group, I learned about the Geneva Trek organised by the LBS Commodity Trading Club and I signed up to join.
- Provocative Questions: The type of questions previously suggested were important to have long conversations with industry leaders and get great new ideas for my upcoming research on sustainable finance and energy transition. For instance:
- Batteries: “The billion-dollar question on this topic is what system would be used to replace batteries for energy storage, not what the next gen of batteries would be, but what would be the new mechanism and science for energy storage and transportation that would leave the battery method behind”. Power Trader, PhD. Material Science, MSc. Physics.
- Latin America, the most important region for Sustainable Food Supply: Brazil has been able to keep first place as the world’s largest soybean producer from 2019 to 2024, with a yearly production of more than 160 million tons during the last 3 years, doing it with high environmental standards and ESG responsible practices, followed by the US with 122 million and Argentina with 50 million. The situation has been similar for the coffee industry, with Brazil and Colombia accounting for more than 40% of global coffee production. Food Commodity Trader.
- Social Responsibility around Energy Transition metals: When it comes to transition metals, there is still a lot of work to do on ESG engagements around social compliance regarding high health and safety standards in emerging market regions like Africa. However, emerging countries like Chile present important opportunities not only because of its well-known transition metals capacity, but also for its responsible production. Corporate Social Responsibility Team, Commodity trading firm.
While classroom learning provides the technical foundation and academic rigor expected of the Masters in Finance programme, it’s the conversations beyond the lecture theatre that often spark the most transformative insights. Bridging the gap between theory and practice means actively engaging in both spaces – absorbing the frameworks in class and then applying, questioning and expanding on them in dialogue with practitioners and peers. At LBS, what happens outside the classroom can be just as important as what happens inside.
So, mind the gap between the lectures and the LBS clubs’ networking opportunities!