Getting a Running Start at B-School

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Strategize early for career events. Students who have a leg up at career events in the fall are usually ones who have spent some time preparing early, administrators say. How does one get a head start? Make an appointment in September to talk with a career services counselor about your options. Students who sign up for résumé workshops and mock interviews the first few weeks usually feel more confident when recruiters come to campus to interview for summer internships. "The really savvy student signs up for mock interviews," says Yale's Scully. "Students may have been coming from the business world and don't think they really need that skill, but boning up on those skills is important."

Take some time to breathe. If you're not careful, you can lose yourself in an ever growing pile of schoolwork, club commitments, and campus activities. Students forget to carve out relaxation time. When this happens, they can quickly succumb to stress and pressure and lose focus. "You need to have a life, too," Lane says. "You still need to sleep and go to the gym and go out to dinner with friends." With that in mind, make it a priority to schedule time for the things that matter for you outside the classroom, like being with family and friends. It takes a little extra effort, but the payoff is worth it in the long run.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. B-school students who need extra academic support can be reluctant to ask for tutoring help or assistance from professors. That's a mistake. Midterms start in mid-October, and it can be hard to recover academically if you founder during these exams, says Yale's Scully.

Students should not hesitate to take advantage of any tutoring resources offered by the school. For example, many have programs where students can ask the school's tutoring committee for help via e-mail. If you're struggling with a concept in class, reach out to a professor or teaching assistant as soon as you sense trouble. "Some business-school students are hesitant to do that, and [they] wait until it's too late to ask for help," says Scully. "I think that's where people get into the most trouble because then it might be too late."

Don't be a perfectionist. Students can spend hours trying to make sure they have handed in the best possible version of an assignment. While this is laudable, sometimes there just isn't time to spend three or four hours on one report. This can be a surprise to first-semester students, often type-A personality types used to putting their all into every project. "These students have been perfectionists in the past, but it really is hard to be a perfectionist in an MBA program," says Meghan Gosk, an associate director of University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School MBA program. "You have to fight that urge." Put your all into projects, but realize when it's time to step back, she says. If a student doesn't do that, he ultimately will have trouble getting anything accomplished.

Even if a student carefully follow all this advice, he will still find the first semester to be more overwhelming than anticipated, says Robert Carraway, an associate dean at Darden. "We have a saying here that everybody at some point during their first semester is going to hit the wall. It's just going to happen." The most important thing is to keep one's priorities in check, recognize when you've stretched yourself too thin, and reach out for help when you need it. Keeping everything in proper perspective is the key to staying afloat in the first phase of your MBA career.

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.