Surviving the Start of B-School

"What surprised me most was the moment I discovered I was not merely learning with my team, but also learning from them"

By Andy Rinehart

Worst part of business school: applying. Best part: everything else. The entire business school admissions process was a necessary evil (and an expensive one, when you factor in travel expenses and application fees). It conflicted with the U.S. Army culture I had grown to appreciate. An officer is a silent professional whose competence is measured in actions, not words. Unfortunately, that's not how the business school application game is played—it's a Darwinian combination of Guess Who? and The Dating Game.

After those months of shameless self-promotion, I'd like to offer the following pieces of advice for anyone applying to business school.

• Visit the schools before you apply. This is non-negotiable and a no-brainer: Every application will ask the Why School X? question. You should have personally compelling reasons that answer the question (and preferably reasons that equal the net present value of $120,000 in student debt from attending School X).

• Do the application for your top choice last. Applications get easier and better with practice, so make your most important app your best.

• Apply in the earliest possible round at each school. Spare yourself the agony of a drawn-out process.

• Remember that human beings are at the other end of the admissions black hole who will read your application and decide its fate. It is a human process, and therefore it is not perfect. Once you click the "submit" button, revel in knowing the final decision is outside your control and thus not worth worrying about.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert, so take the above advice at face value. If you get into your top-choice school after following my guidance, I will happily accept your gratitude in the form of $20.

Orientation and the First Semester

The highlight of the Wake Forest University Fulltime MBA program orientation for me was a speech by Donovan Campbell, a former Marine, MBA student, and author of the book Joker One (Random House Trade Paperbacks, January 2010). Donovan spoke to Wake Forest Schools of Business students in all the graduate programs (MA, MSA, MBA, and Executive MBA) about his experience as an MBA student and how it compared with his three combat deployments. His message was about the importance of perspective in life, and it was something to which I could immediately relate given our shared military backgrounds. Specifically, Donovan asked everyone to imagine what defined a good day compared with a bad day; some people might think of the bad traffic on the way in to work and decide that constituted a bad day. For any deployed soldier or marine, it boils down to a single question: Did anything blow up today? If the answer to that question is no, then you've had a good day. (Note: my soldiers defined a great day as a day when nothing blew up and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were visiting our base in Baghdad as part of the USO Tour. I would agree.)

That idea of perspective became vital once classes started. Wake Forest uses an integrated curriculum that weaves core concepts across multiple classes, meaning the linear regression we studied in Quantitative Methods is used in the problem set due for Managerial Economics the next week. That's a fancy way of saying we were taking eight classes at the same time. I was assigned to a learning team of five other students during orientation, and we quickly realized we would need to rely on each other to handle the seemingly impossible workload. Teamwork is one of the core values in the Wake Forest MBA program, and half our deliverables are team assignments.

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