Darden's Demanding, Fulfilling Schedule

The school makes no excuse for its rigorous reputation. Students quickly learn how to work in teams and squeeze in meals, even pizza in a cup

by Scott Clemente

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• Setting Priorities
• First-Semester Shock

Scott Clemente
University of Virginia
MBA Class of 2009

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Pizza in a cup. This is by far the biggest innovation I've come across since starting classes 10 weeks ago. While I don't think you'll ever find this remarkable product in the aisles of your neighborhood supermarket, I think it does a good job of illustrating how busy first-year students at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business find themselves.

Let me explain. As a first-year, you quickly learn time efficiency. Between classes, working on cases, and attending various recruiting and club events, there is little time for anything else, including eating. It is the situation a friend found herself in three weeks ago. I was sitting in the library, working on cases for classes the next day, when my friend walked up to my table with her book bag slung over her shoulder and a coffee cup in her left hand. There was nothing unusual about this, but when she sat down I noticed what looked like a pizza crust sticking up over the top of the coffee cup. I asked her what it was, and she confirmed my suspicion that there was a slice of pizza stuffed pointy-side first into her cup.

Now, why would someone ever do that? Well, on this particular day my friend had gone straight through three classes in the morning, right into a presentation by PepsiCo (PEP) about its summer intern program, to a meeting for the marketing club. She had just enough time to pick up a slice of pizza from the cafeteria on her way to the library, where she was going to work on her cases before meeting with her learning team later that night (more on learning teams later). There was only one problem—food isn't allowed in the library. Her solution? Pizza in a cup. The cup concealed the pizza and allowed her to sneak it in.

If you talk to enough Darden students you will hear stories like this repeated often—from people doing laundry at 2 a.m. to a second-year who thought he lost his car keys only to return to his car and find them in the ignition…and the car still running! The dean of Darden, Robert Bruner, recently wrote: "Our reputation on Web chat boards and in the B-school rankings is that Darden's MBA program is the most demanding of all. We make no apology for that reputation." In short, it is intense.

School Days

A typical day at Darden starts off with your first class at 8 a.m. Afterward, the school meets for the Darden tradition of First Coffee, a brief informal gathering in between classes. It gives people a chance to socialize and catch up on any funny events from the previous weekend or any late-night study sessions. After First Coffee we have our second class, another break, and then typically a third class that gets done just after 1 p.m.

After classes we have from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. to attend any recruiting events, work on cases for the next day, and hopefully squeeze in some time for personal matters that need to be taken care of. It gets busy. I have classmates who put reminders in their Outlook calendars to call their parents out of fear of forgetting.

One for the Team

At 7 every night we meet with our learning team. This is a group of five to six classmates who are assigned to the team by the school. The team's purpose is to work through the cases for the next day's classes, and generally help each other learn. My learning team consists of six people, including Katie, a former AOL (TWX) communications manager originally from Tennessee; Ian, a professional cyclist and entrepreneur from Virginia; Vikram, a business developer from a software company in India; Jihyun, a television news director from South Korea; and Saul, a corporate development director from Spain.