B-School, Day One: A Primer
B-School, Day One: A Primer
The first day of B-school is a nerve-wracking time, but a few simple rules can help new MBA students get through it with flying colors
By Sommer Saadi
(Corrects the graduation year of Chris Granger.)
Nearly three years out of school and Brock Rasmussen forgot what it was like to be a student: homework every night, running on four hours of sleep, and prepping for the first major exam only two weeks after starting classes. During his first days as an MBA student at Duke's Fuqua School of Business (Fuqua Full-Time MBA Profile) he was overwhelmed.
"I was blown away and wondered what I had gotten myself into," Rasmussen says. "Maybe I wasn't ready for this program, and maybe an MBA wasn't what I was cut out for."
Or maybe, he later realized, it was all part of the business school experience.
"The program has a goal of breaking you down so that it can build you back up," he says. During the rebuilding, Rasmussen learned to take every problem head on by first asking, "what am I trying to accomplish?"—then stepping back and creating a plan of action. It's a lesson he carries with him today as he finishes up Fuqua's Cross Continent MBA program and works as chief financial officer at the Foot & Ankle Institute in St. George, Utah.
For students starting an MBA program this fall, Rasmussen says it's a good idea to step back and ask what are you trying to accomplish. And when putting together a plan of action for a successful experience, it's helpful to know the lessons learned by students who made it out successfully. So we asked alumni from several top MBA programs to share their advice on making the most of the first days of business school.
MEET EVERYONE IN YOUR PROGRAM
Alumni cannot stress enough how important colleagues are to the MBA experience. Heather Zorn, a 2005 graduate of the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business (Mendoza Full-Time MBA Profile), created a network of people all over the world whom she can contact for everything from travel advice to job opportunities.
She met a friend who became so close he asked her to be godmother to his son. Another friend she met during orientation traveled with Zorn across India. And one of the women she met during the first week of school she later recruited to work at her current company, Amazon.com (AMZN), where Zorn's a senior manager. Your colleagues at school could easily be, and quite often are, co-workers and business partners after graduation, Zorn says.
Nate Challen, a 2008 MBA graduate of the Kenan-Flagler Business School (Kenan-Flagler Full-Time MBA Profile) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, suggests asking what your classmates were doing before school, because their past experiences could influence your present experience at school.
Challen, now a brand manager for Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), had a good friend who chose Kenan-Flagler specifically to pursue a job in strategy consulting. But after discussing another student's Wall Street career over buffalo wings one night during orientation, Challen's friend shifted his focus to sales and trading. If he didn't have that conversation, he might not have attended a banking presentation and would have never been exposed to the career path that made him happiest, Challen said.