Guest blog written by Kuan-lin (Fermín) Liu
Starting my MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, I feel FOMO (fear of missing out) all around me. It could not be more fitting that a business school publication was the birthplace of the term FOMO because that in a nutshell captures every MBA student’s experience.
As a new MBA student navigating orientation, Hyde Park, and Chicago, I feel FOMO trying to take control and make my decisions for me. While there is no panacea for FOMO, since its causes and symptoms vary from person to person, one antidote that I use to keep it from creeping up is the counterintuitive idea of doing less. Instead of trying and inevitably failing to do everything, be okay with doing less and taking a break.
FOMO, especially in an MBA context, has to do with a desire to succeed and a fear of failing. As soon as we are admitted, people tell us a million things on how to succeed at Chicago Booth. If you want to do well in recruiting, get your resume ready over the summer and join XYZ club. If you want to make friends, go on a Random Walk. While these are all good pieces of advice, we receive and process them with an implicit “or else.” Get your resume ready over the summer and join XYZ club, or else you will not land a great internship. Go on a Random Walk, or else you will not make friends.
Things become framed in such absolutes in our minds that it is almost impossible not to be afraid and have FOMO. To kick the FOMO habit, try operating from a place of confidence and hope rather than a place of fear.
If you are reading this as someone who struggles with FOMO, here are a few of my tips to start tackling this fear as an MBA student.
- Figure out your priorities
During my first week in Chicago, I found myself choosing between grabbing Chicago’s famous deep dish pizza with new classmates for dinner and staying home to assemble my bed frame. I chose to stay home and assembled my king size bed frame that night, and because of it, I have been getting great sleep every night since.
There is an argument to be made for why going out and meeting new people should have taken precedence—after all, most would say that’s what an MBA is all about—but for me, after sleeping on a mattress on the floor for nearly a week, getting my bed frame up and ready was my priority.
When you know your priorities, there is no need for them to make sense to anyone else—there is no need for an explanation. - Know how you connect with people
A big component of business school is networking. We even have a session during orientation titled, “Network Like an MBA,” in which we will learn “where, when, and how you will network for a successful MBA job search.” As much as I am looking forward to this session, it should come with a disclaimer that there is no one, prescriptive way to network.
In fact, experts have come out against networking, or the term “networking” and its traditional manifestation of people standing and chatting in a circle with drinks in hand. Instead, they lean into connecting with others, prioritizing the quality of the relationships over the quantity.
If you are an extrovert and enjoy the buzz of large crowds, go to large events and meet all the people you want. If you are an introvert and prefer one-on-one conversations in a quieter setting, set up a chat with someone and go from there. There is a way for everyone to connect—you just have to know what works for you. Without this self-awareness, people end up attending all kinds of events without actually getting much out of them. - Tune out the noise
While the nagging feeling that is FOMO has been around long before social media, it is without question that social media and the FOMO problem are linked. A study published in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior found “higher FOMO was associated with more social media use,” proving a correlation between the two.
One way to combat FOMO, as extreme as it may sound, is to stay off social media. As someone who had a Facebook and Instagram in college but has since deleted them and been off these platforms for the past ten years, I can attest that one cannot miss what one does not know or see. A less cold-turkey approach to detaching from social media is to turn off notifications for these apps or to unfollow people and accounts that do not serve you.
Beyond social media, noise still comes from every corner of our lives, so adopting ways to check our phones less often or to filter out advice and gossip are necessary to vanquish FOMO.
In her address to the Class of 2026, Deputy Dean Starr Marcello gave us 30 seconds of silence to contemplate what we wanted to achieve at Chicago Booth. While we did not take turns sharing our goals, there is no doubt that they are all different, or at least the reasons behind the goals are all different, which is why we should each approach the many, many opportunities available to us at Harper Center in our own way. For one student, an event that many of their friends and peers are going to may not make sense for them to attend at all—and that is OK.
When it comes down to it, the only way to no longer fear missing out is to be okay with missing out.
