Was the Duke MBA Worth It?

A version of this post was originally published on the Duke Cross Continent MBA Student Blog from the Fuqua School of Business. 

No goodbyes, just a celebration

Yes, and not just for the reasons you think. Going beyond business, it taught me some surprising life lessons.

My classmates and I graduated a few months ago as proud MBAs. We kept our full-time jobs, studied as students both in-person and by distance, traveled to international residencies across five countries, and bonded over world adventures and 10,000-plus group text messages.

When people ask if it was a good investment and what I learned, how can I describe the experience and the newfound wisdom? Reflecting back on the past two years, a Duke MBA is worth much more than a business degree as I learned some powerful life lessons.

Listen to Your Younger Self and Don’t Stop Laughing

As adults, we tend to allow our day-to-day responsibilities overtake the younger carefree versions of ourselves. My best MBA experiences involved dancing with blisters, talking into odd hours of the night, traveling to new places, and watching sunrises. We don’t nearly live these moments often enough as we get older.

As grown-ups, we often let pride stop us from asking for help because we feel like we should know better. But the reality is that no one knows what they’re doing. We’re all just trying to make good choices with the information we have. Like a business case study, there are no right answers in life. You take chances and make decisions on the incomplete data you have. And your younger self will be the inner voice that tells you to seek adventure, stop and laugh, and look fear in the face.

Find People That Make Goodbyes Easy Because It’s Not Really Goodbye

Some classmates joined the Cross Continent MBA program because they had never left the country and wanted international exposure. For others, we chose this experience because it matched our lifestyles. We’re often labeled as “nomads” or “globetrotters,” never staying in a place more than a couple of years and buying as many one-way tickets as round-trips.

In a bittersweet way, this means that we’ve become adept at saying goodbye. I went to graduation to close this chapter as I had every time other experiences ended. To my surprise, no one said goodbye that weekend. Perhaps the nature of the program got us used to coming together every few weeks and then working on virtual teams. There were no tears, just celebration and laughter. The hugs were normal hugs that you give someone at the end of the night or after a vacation. It was as if we knew we’d see each other again soon. It was refreshing. It was beautiful.

You’re Not an Island and You’re Never Alone

I spent the better part of my adult life priding myself on being fiercely independent—living life on my own terms—but this experience has shown me how naïve I’ve been. Friends and family were always there even if it wasn’t obvious. Particularly for the past two years, I was never on my own. Dukies were always there. It was my classmates and their friends who helped me move apartments and climb 6,500-foot cliffs. They were there to attend my martial arts black belt ceremony. It was a Dukie I first called when my grandmother passed away.

I was never alone and the Fuqua community was there even when I didn’t realize I needed people the most. They say an MBA is good networking for your career prospects, but I find the most valuable aspect is to have people in your corner when life doesn’t work out the way you planned. Because when you don’t get the dream job, when you’re disappointed, or when that unimaginable Thursday afternoon phone call comes, you realize that you’re never alone no matter how many miles away you may be.

Growth and Character Come from Tough Places Rather than Checkmark Successes

When I met my classmates, their professional and personal successes easily impressed me. However, I soon learned the raw tragedies that became a part of their stories. Sick parents, the death of loved ones, diseases, divorces, heartbreaks, the feeling of not being good enough or doing enough. In an MBA program, you get to see people holistically as the blurry lines between the professional and personal reveal accomplishments and personal battles. Though tragedies don’t define people, the scars are to be remembered and the comebacks to be admired.

I find it ironic, but not coincidental that two of the hardest years of my life were also the best. I didn’t realize it then, but I spent the last two years experiencing the pain and the happiness of falling in love. With my classmates, with the experience, with life all over again with both its ups and downs.

Trust the Journey as You Chase After the Opposite of Loneliness

I recently took up surfing, and they say that you can never win against the ocean. Like life, you’ll often wipe out, but it’s worth it to catch that one perfect wave. I’ve learned to trust the experience and continue hustling. One moment, the world is crashing down on you, the next moment, you’re living and working near the beach with a sun-kissed tan. And that Duke MBA? It’s the best safety net there is.

In her final essay, Marina Keegan wrote, “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life…It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.”

A good MBA will teach business and management skills. A great MBA will provide you with a network of people to call on for anything. An extraordinary MBA, like the one I found at Fuqua, will empower you to become the best version of yourself and motivate you to help others on their journeys to better themselves.

Sometimes I wished a did a full-time MBA program as I could have seen the people I loved every day. Then again, the Daytime MBAs were jealous of us traveling the world with 100-plus friends while pulling in a professional salary. Everyone’s MBA experience will be different, but what I do know is that it’s an understatement when they welcome you into the Fuqua community. You’re joining a family, and you’re joining a tribe. And if you’re lucky like me, you’ll find love and the opposite of loneliness.

Why Diversity at Fuqua Gives Me Hope for Tomorrow

A version of this post was originally published on the Duke Cross Continent MBA Student Blog from the Fuqua School of Business. 

It’s 3:30 a.m. and I can’t sleep. This happens from time to time as the 80% humidity in New England makes a summer heat wave unbearable. But perhaps, the world has finally caught up with me.

As a content writer and an MBA student studying international business, I spend a significant amount of my time reading current events. In terms of seeing theory put into practice, there’s no better time to study global business than now.

As a part of Fuqua’s program, my classmates and I travel to five different regions of the world and examine macroeconomic trends and political institutions in our core course Global Markets and Institutions. While in Latin America, we analyzed the spiraling economic indicators of the Brazilian recession. We’re currently studying the elements of government structures in the Middle East and watched with great interest the coup attempt in Turkey.

We’ve seen firsthand, the incredibly tough and chaotic times in the world. It hurts that by the time I finish writing this piece, there will likely be another mass shooting—one that could have been prevented. It hurts that we need a movement asking for lives to matter, because it’s a given that lives should matter in the first place.

But I know this brokenness isn’t all of the world, nor is it how the world has to be.

Through the Cross Continent MBA, the world I’ve experienced is one where an American-born Syrian, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and a bi-racial mom can travel together for a shared dream of visiting the Taj Mahal, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for being “the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world’s heritage.”

The world I know is one where days later, my classmates and I would celebrate our own version of Holi, known as the “Festival of Colors”, as colored water and powders are playfully thrown around family and friends. It’s a celebration of colors and love. How appropriate I get to celebrate with my friends who identify as black, Jewish, Colombian, brown, Nigerian, white, Indian, and more?

The world I know is where individuals originally from Pakistan and India, two countries with a long history of tension, can stand as friends in front of the remnants of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic paradigm of a city once divided and now united. And where two Americans, one raised Buddhist, one raised Muslim, can share in their interests and similarities while celebrating their differences.

In another core course, Culture, Civilizations, and Leadership, we study cultural frameworks to apply as we work through business situations.  What I love is that we’re able to have tough conversations in and out of the classroom. On separate occasions after nearly 12-hour days of classes and activities, 70-plus of my classmates gathered to honestly ask one another questions and discuss our personal experiences around race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and more. We listened to each other’s perspectives without judgment.

Though I’m proud to be a part of this community and proud to have a dean that encourages empathy amongst disagreeing perspectives, I know as a business school and as individual leaders of consequence, there’s more we can do around diversity and inclusion systematically as a school and personally with our biases. But when I look at these photos, the diversity at Fuqua and celebration of it, it gives me hope for the future and reminds me that even in the toughest times #LoveAlwaysWins.

How My MBA Training Saved Me on a 6,500-Foot Cliff

A version of this post was originally published on the Duke Cross Continent MBA Student Blog from the Fuqua School of Business. 

My travel mates designated as “Team Xi’an”

MBA lessons can prove practical in unlikely places.

I’m hanging off the side of Mount Huashan in China, dubbed “one of the most dangerous and terrifying hikes in the world.” Attached to the mountain by a questionable 4-foot harness, I have to walk across a 1-foot wide wooden plank. Looking down more than a mile to the ground, I’m remembering that I’m deathly afraid of heights.

Of course, this was my idea to begin with.

This past summer, my 114 classmates and I began our MBA journey as a part of the Class of 2016 in the Fuqua School of Business Cross Continent MBA Program. Living and working in various parts of the world, we enrolled in the working professional program to allow ourselves to earn an MBA while keeping our full-time jobs. A core part of the program is to attend international class residencies and essentially travel the world studying, going on corporate visits, and immersing ourselves into various cultures.

Hiking the “Plank Walk” at Mount Huashan…smiles cover up our fear of heights!

Our first international residency was to the powerhouse of China, whom the IMF deemed the world’s largest economy just a few months prior. A handful of us decided to arrive one week early to explore Xi’an before classes began. During my travel research, every web site stated that we couldn’t miss out on the infamous “Plank Walk” at Mount Huashan, a sacred Taoist mountain located in the Shaanxi Province.

The route is a complicated one. After about 2.5 hours of climbing up steep, vertical staircases (and we took one of the easier routes), the trail leads to the edge of a cliff. Before reaching the “Plank Walk,” there are steel rods about 2 inches long and holes in the rocks to climb down. The wooden plank is only a foot wide and to top it all off, there is only one exit. So as you attempt to walk or climb one way, there are other people attempting to walk or climb the other way around you. Carpe diem!

Flashing back to day 2 of our MBA orientation during the first residency at Duke, every student went through a team-building ropes course in small groups at the Triangle Training Center. The goal was to practice our teamwork and communication skills, capitalizing on each other’s strengths while identifying and improving upon our weaknesses. As I was hiking in China, I couldn’t have imagined that the same skill sets we worked on during the ropes course (and the entire class term) would come into play.

The Blue Devil was a crucial member of the hiking team!

While climbing down the cliff, I couldn’t see directly below me, so I depended on my classmate to tell me exactly where to put my feet. Afterwards, I had to direct my other classmate where to go and predict the upcoming path for her. As people attempted to walk around us (and often we didn’t speak the same languages), split-second decisions had to be made to stay on the safest route. More importantly, given somehow that we all were afraid of heights (no one wanted to admit it until the few days leading up to the hike of course), we had to support each other so we could face our fears and encourage each other to push through the exhaustion from the long day.

When I first researched Duke, I knew of the emphasis placed around teamwork—which is not necessarily the case at other business schools. However “Team Fuqua” was simply a phrase I had heard before starting the Cross Continent program. As this experience has shown me and as every day passes, I’ve found that the spirit of “Team Fuqua” goes beyond a methodology. It’s a community of trust that has taught me to be a better leader, teammate, and communicator that can take on a boardroom or a 6,500-foot cliff.

Watch the video to see Krystina and her team’s treacherous route

5 Must-Dos for Preparing for the Cross Continent MBA Program at Duke University

A version of this post was originally published on the Duke Cross Continent MBA Student Blog from the Fuqua School of Business. 

The wait is finally over and I’m here on campus at Fuqua for Cross Continent MBA (CCMBA) orientation. As excited as I am, I can’t help but reflect back a few weeks to my thoughts as this MBA journey was about to begin.

It was two weeks before the course materials arrived for our reading period, and just one month before orientation and our first residency. I felt like an 18-year-old undergraduate again, getting ready for the first day of college. How challenging is it going to be? What will my classmates be like? Will the food really be as good as everyone makes it out to be?

This time around, however, I’ll have a little over six years of work experience under my belt, continue a full-time job on top of being a student, run a career consultancy on the side, have significant bills and responsibilities including these new student loans on top of my current student loans—did I mention I chose to put myself through this?

Alas, the academics, travel, cultural experiences and Team Fuqua network makes choosing the CCMBA a winning choice for me. As I’ve received a ton of advice from others, I’d like to pass on my 5 must-dos for MBA preparation in Fuqua’s Cross Continent program.

 My classmates during our Fuqua scavenger hunt on the first day of orientation  

Get started early on the preparatory work.

I can’t emphasize this one enough! Our class had to work through 20 to 40 hours of MBA Math.com, turn in an accounting quiz after watching and reading accounting lectures, and fill out tons of paperwork on the Incoming Student Website (ISW).

I applied during Round 2 to increase my chances of a scholarship and then started doing the early assignments for incoming students consistently in April. By the time the middle of June rolled around, I was essentially done with them and didn’t have to deal with stressing to make any deadlines. Plus, you can help out your future CCMBA friends and classmates with advice on how to best navigate the process for which they’ll be truly grateful! (Note: for MBAMath.com, my strategy was to skip the pre-quizzes as it will save you time, especially in the subjects where you’re more proficient, but make sure you ace the post-quizzes!).

Connect with classmates on social media and start networking as soon as possible.

Filling out my student bio on the ISW and joining the CCMBA ’16 LinkedIn and Facebook groups were the first things I did. This allowed a slew of streaming requests and personal messages to and from fellow classmates. I also attended a Fuqua Around the World event.
What were the results of getting connected before class started? I was able to have study sessions with other Boston-based students, commiserate immediately when receiving emails about the amount of things to do, and even collaborate on ventures (I had a LinkedIn exchange encouraging another student to start her own career consultancy and we’ll be giving each other future referrals in the areas of our expertise—the power of Duke!). One student created a WhatsApp group that 50 of us have joined, so it’s a lot of texts, but you’ll get everything useful from soccer results to when new action items go up on the ISW that require your attention.

 

 

 Cut out the fat.

This is my new mantra in life in general. With limited hours in the day for everything, I’ve decided to only do the things that absolutely must get done or I really want to do. Doctor checkup? Crucial for my health. Read that pile of magazines that I’ve been meaning to get to? Sorry, they get thrown in the trash. I don’t apply this rule to my cooking though, especially as I love bacon.

 

Accept that life is not going to stop for you.

Hanging out with this little guy in Panama was the perfect pre-MBA vacation!

I told my friends and family that my life for the next 1.5 years would be working, studying, and working out. Beyond prepping for CCMBA in the last few weeks, I’ve torn an ankle tendon and started physical therapy, underwent the joys of apartment hunting, and was asked to take on a new position at work. Life’s a ride no matter the choices we make, so hang on tight!

Relax!

It’s summertime in North America, so hit the beach. Travel, binge on Netflix, spend time with your favorite people, and even reach out to ones that you haven’t seen in a while. They’ll be excited for the next chapter of your life too!

These are things that I’ve realized while jumping into the journey of full-time professional and part-time student. If you have any questions about your own must-dos before starting the admissions process and CCMBA journey, reach out to Admissions. They can help and even put you in touch with current students who can share their unique insights.