Imagine attending several business meetings per month over the course of five years, listening in rapt fascination to your clients discuss their complex workplace challenges, increasingly wishing you were in their shoes, knowing in your heart of hearts that a career in sales isn't what you want after all.

Yep, that pretty much sums up my pre-business-school world.

My name is Leela Damm and I'll be commencing my MBA studies at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College this fall. Turning 30 last year (which sounds so much more serious in print than it is!) made me re-evaluate my life and career. I came to realize that, while I enjoyed many aspects of my job as sales manager for Business Wire, the leading commercial newswire service, I didn't see myself as a company "lifer." There were a few other career avenues that intrigued me. And, although I suspect I've probably missed the boat on a couple of those (Broadway starlet, Wimbledon champion), I'll wager an MBA will set me well on the way to exploring the others.

A wee snippet about my background: I was born and bred in Scotland, but my mother is half-Polish and my father is originally from India (hence the absence of the archetypal red hair and freckles). After powering through high school, juggling academics with field hockey, tennis, choir, orchestra and drama, I wound up at Edinburgh University and graduated with an M.A. in History and English Literature in 1996. On the side, I immersed myself in the whole singing/dancing/acting scene, appearing in "West Side Story", "Cabaret", "110 Days" and "Chicago" with the Edinburgh Footlights Theatre Co.

During my final year at university, a succession of investment banks, accounting and consulting firms paraded through campus, wooing students with free-flowing champagne, shrimp platters, and talk of tantalizing London salaries. Unlike my friends, I cunningly avoided the task of finding my first "real" job in the U.K. by falling in love with and marrying an American exchange student by the name of Dan eight years ago (and yes, he's heading to Hanover with me). In my seven stateside years I've lived in Jacksonville, Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and most recently Boston, Massachusetts.

Why an MBA? Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade my liberal arts degree for anything – but if you pair that with my post-college experience, which is dominated by sales, marketing, PR, and the so-called "softer skills", my resume is crying out for a quantitative backbone. In fact, due to differences between the U.S. and British school systems, I haven't taken a math or quant. class of any sort since I was 17.

Trust me, much of my pre-Tuck summer was spent wading through books on accounting, Excel, statistics, and microeconomics. Math camp is designed for people just like me. At Tuck, I gather I'll be considered a "poet" thanks to my academic and career history. The pressure's definitely on for me to exceed expectation in core classes, particularly given my post-graduation goal, which is to work in financial services for a few years before ultimately landing my dream corporate job: VP, Investor and Analyst Relations for a Fortune 500 company.

There's no doubt that the road ahead will be tough, but I was lucky enough to be awarded a fellowship from the Robert Toigo Foundation, which each year selects 50 or so incoming minority MBA students from 17 top schools around the country and grooms them for success in the finance world. I'm certainly looking forward to learning from, and contributing to the foundation's prestigious network as well as that of my school.

I said at the outset that I've enjoyed working with Business Wire, and I faced a pretty tough decision back in December when I embarked on the application process. The possibility of an MBA had been at the back of my mind for a few years, but sometimes it's so much easier to avoid upheaval, to keep doing what you're doing, to put off ringing the changes, to continue cashing the paycheck. For me, the decision to attend B-school is all about finally taking the plunge, making short-term sacrifice in order to do more, be more, contribute more. It's about taking the risk in the hope the reward will be there at the end of the road.

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