First year @ Fuqua over...

Wow...

my first year at Fuqua is officially over.. damn!  But..it has been a truly great year.. and the best part is, this year has led me with many opportunities. To have the ability to dream, and see opportunities - I feel - is one of the luckiest feelings one can have!

I thought I would dedicate this post to my internship search and how it progressed. I feel like I did some things right and others wrong. But in the end, I think it paid off... To give you an academic calendar of my internship search , here's how it went:

August: School started, no idea what this whole internship search stuff involves.

Sept: Started attending company presentations after company presentations. Wisdom # 1: Do NOT attend the company presentations you really don't give a damn about. It doesn't matter if they hire ' a lot of internationals' or that they pay so well. If you're not interested, thats that.

Oct: Again, just trying to follow the crowd. Not sure why I went to all those presentations at this stage, and what I achieved from it all.

Nov: Missed out on the Week-in-Cities. Thought I was "too cool" to follow the herd, and go network by going on a 'Week in Cities' networking trip. Instead, I took it easy.

Dec- Jan: Didn't have any luck in the on-campus internship search. Finally realized why everyone said you need to 'network' (and what is that exactly? For next time) to get an internship.

Jan - Feb: Started thinking about which companies interest me, and how I am going to go about doing my off-campus internship search. Off-campus means that these companies do not come to Duke to recruit for internships, rather I have to contact them on my own, make an impression, and learn about the internship process.  Harder? Yes.  Less competition? Maybe, maybe not. Does having Duke / Fuqua alums in those companies help? Yes, but its not a pre-requisite. 

Feb - April: Started doing an aggressive internship search. Sending out emails to prospective employers, Fuqua alums, trying to learn more about the opportunities present, how they related to my past experience, where I wanted to be going ahead et al.

May - received my 1st internship offer: for a non profit in NYC. :) Work sounded great!

May - received another internship offer: for small and medium business consulting in Phillipines.

May- received the offer I finally decided to accept - headed to Bloomberg for this summer in NYC! Yay! Bloomberg sounds like a great place, and excited at the opportunity!

Lessons learnt from my subjective experience....

Don't give up hope. Stay positive. Be yourself in interviews. Be natural. Be genuinely excited about the work, company, culture. The markets are definitely better this time, compared to last year. Numerous, and i mean many many of my "international" students friends at Fuqua have gotten amazing summer internships. Its been a great year for all of us.

Fuqua club-elections

So, only 6 months down with my FY and we're already fully fully entrenched in everything - I'm running for co-presidential elections of INDUS - S.Asia MBA Club; creating a platform, giving a pitch presentation, presenting our agenda for next year, and dreaming of what I'll achieve as Co-president - the politics has already set in. Lets see, results will be out next week. 

Fuqua R1 admits have already started becoming active - excellent! I guess some R2 applicants are hearing of interview invites nowadays - if any of you requires any advice, pls feel free to reach out or drop a message.

I'm sacrificing some study time for Operations & Inventory Management as I'm typing this - but couldn't resist the temptation to update with my little blurb about running for elections :)

Adios!

Term 3 at Fuqua! Woo hoo!

I guess my track record at blogging hasn't been too regular...My last post was in November :( Wow, when I was applying to b-schools, I promised (myself) to be more regular so that fellow blogger readers could get more updated info on b-school life.. Sadly, b-school life is well, ever-engulfing. It takes you by in a swirl, makes you dizzy, until you realise the term's almost over.

And so today's the second day of Term 3. Half of my first year at Fuqua has flown by. Already. Wow, it has been super quick.

So, yes, the internship search is still going on. I relaxed for my term break - a whole 5 weeks. Quite generous I have to say. Perhaps I relaxed a bit too much.. But anyway, its back to spinning wheel once more :) 

Thank goodness Durham's less cold now. By the way - international students - if you thought Durham won't get cold because its in the South, think again. It definitely gets cold ...but then again, I am ever grateful I'm not studying in Chicago or NY - that cold is unbearable (for me at least).

So, again, Term 3. My courses for this term are: Operations Management, Market Intelligence (one of Fuqua's most prized and popular courses), GATE course in Latin America and Effective Advocacy. Interesting. 

I've also signed up for Junior Achievement (www.ja.org) - every week, I am going to train kindergarten / 1st grade students at a local school on how to develop business skills :) Now that's called an early MBA education! Seems fun nevertheless!

For all my Fuqua-applied-and-waiting-desperately-for-the-result-bloggers, relax! You've earned a great break..Hope for the best, and enjoy the time till b-school starts!

Cheers! 

What Fuqua's all about...

I remember when I was applying to Fuqua, I had a hard time finding current student's Fuqua blogs, and not being able to visit the school as I was international (and the ticket was steep!), really left me wishing I could get a glimpse of a current student's life :) So, if any of you are in the same situation, here's a collection of my random thoughts on Fuqua, what makes it stand out amongst other B-schools, and what I've enjoyed about it so far.

Some common topics that you always wonder about:
1) School culture.
"Team Fuqua", yea baby, that's what its all about!

For me, Fuqua's greatest strengths are its focus on Team Fuqua (collaborative, team culture) and diversity. Roughly 40% of our incoming batch is international - and quite diverse - from nationalities, backgrounds, work experiences - everything. We get quite a few people from "non-traditional" backgrounds as well e.g. some of my batchmates are professional sports players, some have done non profit work in Latin America and Africa, some have had their own businesses, some have been school teachers. My favorite so far? Our batch is quite sporty- a professional (ex) NFL player, NBA player, and a tennis player too.

So, what really is Team Fuqua? Well, it basically means that you think as "we", not " I", to put it very simply. It means you should think globally, you cannot succeed individually - have to be able to benefit from and help others along your career and personal growth. The school prizes itself on its team-oriented approach - it's a close knit school. Probably this also has to do with the location - Durham's a small(er) city, sort of like a college town (but not quite), it's very different from the big city life you would get in NYC for example - as a result, you get to socialise with and see more of your classmates much more than I would expect for a larger city.

My favorite? Almost always see a classmate at Super Target when I do my quick 10 minute sprint of picking up some basic groceries or buying folders for the heavy course packs :P

2) What is student life like?
Student life is fast, crazy hectic, diverse, social, stress, fun, food, corporate presentations, friends, cultural activities, blur. It's all that, and much more. Why I find this question tough to answer, is because you really can't put down on paper (oops, blog), the whirlwind of activites that encompass a typical MBA student's day. But anyway, I'll try to be more specific.

One of the things I have enjoyed has been "Fuqua Friday" - basically every Friday, we have a 2 hour social event at school - with a theme. So a few weeks ago, as part of INDUS (South Asian MBA Club), we organised a Diwali Fuqua Friday; other Fuqua Fridays have also been done by other student clubs such as Chinese New Year, Jewish New year, Eid, Oktoberfest etc. It's a great chance to just socialise with your classmates and seniors (its open to 1st year and 2nd year MBAs, plus their families) who you may not have seen on regular weekdays due to the work load. It's also an amazing way of just learning so much about different cultures. The INDUS Fuqua Friday saw a lot of us teaching bhangra to our class mates :)

3) Some cool things?
Okay, so I find these things cool - its pretty subjective.
1) The GATE / GCP trips - I'm doing a GATE (Global Academic Travel Experience) trip to Latin America in March - other locations this year which you could choose from were S. Africa, Russia, China, S.E.Asia and Middle East.

2) Love Durham's greenery. Very pretty.

3) Mentored study opportunities.

4) Habitat for Humanity - any weekend, or whenever you feel like, you can help Fuqua build houses for H4H ( above) - it's pretty cool, plus such a good way of distracting your mind from the usual academic talk.

More later, I guess. Thought I'd throw this out in time for those of you eyeing the R1 deadline in case you had any queries on Fuqua!

Happy to help on any last minute queries, just leave a post.

Fuqua - first month!

So , I finally found a free half hour in between events and thought I'd update y'all (apparently y'all is a very Durham/N.Carolina/ Southern-ish phrase, so i'm going to use it!) on life at Fuqua.

To all prospectives, hopefully this should give you a better idea of what b-school is like just as you're approaching your early-D or other deadlines.

So, after orientation, we all had a compulsory 1 month pre-term called "Global Institute" - which basically consists of two courses: Leadership Ethics & Organisations (LEO), and Global Institutions & Environments (GIE). So primarily, we had classes of LEO and GIE every weekday from Mon- Fri (at least thats what I can remember - seems so long ago!)

In a nut shell, what do you learn from the Global Institute?
Well, it's one of the only times when you pretty much get to see the WHOLE of your batch i.e. 450 people, so you can interact with people from other sections as you're all on similar schedules and courses.

In LEO, we learn about basic concepts that managers / employers consider when building organisations such as decision making, motivation, organisational culture, how to have constuctive discussions etc - it's a great course to build up your skill set prior to the "real" b-school classes/ world. We had some fun activities in this, such as Triangle training day - a day where you get to go to an outside resort of sorts, do rock climbing, role playing, balancing on ropes, and other physical activities that really build your knowledge of how working in a team is. e.g. in rock climbing, you (4 people) are all linked to one another from a rope, and so the leader can't move on, because he's limited by the people beneath him (his team) - lesson learnt? one person can't move ahead while others lack, you need to develop as a team. it was also a great opportunity to get to know your team members i n a non-academic setting.

GIE course is more macro- and teaches you concepts of efficiency - how to view different ideas, markets and economies based on their institutions, the level of efficency of institutions etc. i found it quite interesting.

So after the Global Institute, we had a few days break (not really, they had some compulsory career days in between!!), and what ensued was the blur, haze and speed of life, i like to call "B-School".

let me just say one thing - it is SUPER fast. I mean i thought i knew what a hectic life meant, what it means to be busy all day long, but honestly, this is a new level :) it's fun though - as we're just now building onto the summer internship recruiting/company presentation/ student clubs info sessions.

We have team assignments due almost every class, so make sure you have / build a good rapport with your 6/7 member first year team during the Global Institute. This team is the one you will work on for ALL courses and ALL team assignments until Jan of your first year. The teams are formed randomly, and they try to ensure there is diversity of background, work experience and academic experience in each team.

e.g. in my FY team of 6 people, there are 3 Americans and 3 Internationals. Our cumulated work experiences and backgrounds span the US, Latin America, Japan, Europe, China, S. Asia and parts of Africa as well - now that is what Fuqua really is all about - diversity.

So that's me for now - i'm off to run an info session with Second Years to learn more about what their summer internships were.

By the way - in case any of you prospectives have any specific questions on Fuqua or life at Fuqua, feel free to write a post and I'll reply to your queries.

Adios!