Fellow Classmates

Indeed some of the best friends you make will be those you meet in business school. One of the most powerful brands and products to have emerged in the past few years is the popular search engine service Google. Google was co-founded by Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Doctorate students that are now making sense of the Web and sorting the overwhelming information found on it better than anyone else. This theme must have been contagious in Palo Alto because Yahoo! was created by two Stanford students as well.

David Filo and Jerry Yang were two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. As the Web was starting to spiral out of control, the two started a guide out of their campus trailer in February 1994. Their goal was simple but ambitious: to keep track of their personal interests on the Net. As the Web grew, so did their guide and the time they spent on it – at the expense of their Doctoral dissertations. With time, the endless links morphed into directories, and with it the seed of Yahoo! was planted.

Originally called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," the site eventually took on the name of Yahoo!, an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The founders maintain that the name stuck because of the connotation of something "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Whatever it was, in the fall of 1994, Yahoo! was serving over 100 thousand unique visitors.

Like Yahoo!, Google was a project that turned into a business. Ironically, in 2001, the industrious Google search engine began to power the millions of daily searches on Yahoo! A match made in heaven? Well, Stanford anyway.

Projects lead to teamwork and gamesmanship. But teamwork and competition engenders opposition, jealousy and envy.

It will not take very long before you see why business is a rat race. Before your first term is over, any idealistic notion you have of school being fair will go down the drain. It is often in business school that the seed of ambition, success and teamwork is planted and nurtured. But it is also at this juncture when envy, jealousy and backstabbing infect you.

In any student's development, a time comes when that greed muscle starts pumping and paranoia sets in. Intel co-founder Andy Grove said it best in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: if you want to get ahead, you should learn to trust others but always sleep with an eye open .

Some will be happy to see you succeed. But envy and jealousy are too innate in human beings for most to be genuinely happy for you.