Anne Turchi: Making the Transition

When I was living abroad in Rome, it didn't take long for me to start dreaming in Italian. Last night I dreamed I was the CEO of Big Corporation X, and I had gone to work without my pants. I have been in business school for three weeks.

Last year at this time I was in the midst of an economics class at Portland Community College, preparing for the GMAT, and researching business schools. I didn't want to be too ambitious (applications are expensive), but I didn't want to limit myself either. Each business school wanted its own, personalized set of "praise" and "self-awareness" essays. I have a theory to explain this: If each school requires me to write half a dozen essays of varying lengths and on varying topics, they're more likely to get the real, unpolished me in at least one of them. I could rely on friends to comment on two, maybe three essays, but they're betting that somewhere in the middle of my fifth edit of essay No. 12, I'd be on my own. I get it. It's an awfully annoying way for admissions officers to get to this point, but I'm sure it's equally annoying for them to have to read the same mauve admissions essay over and over.

I chose to attend the University of Washington for a few reasons. First, I knew that any school that would try to fit me into an "MBA track," even a "non-profit MBA track" type of education would not be a good fit for my uncommon goals. UW embraces differences. With a little initiative, possibilities here are limitless. The program is small enough (118 in my class) that professors, career services staff, and administrators all have open-door policies and plenty of time to help me uncover the school's potential, and help the school uncover mine. Second, since my raison d'MBA is to apply my skills to the non-profit sector, I ruled out schools that would put me in so much debt that the act of getting an MBA would prohibit me from using it for my intended purpose: accepting a (lower-paying) position at a non-profit. UW's reasonable tuition made this possible. Third, this program oozes academic support. There is an overwhelming feeling among my classmates that "we're all in this together." I doubt many other MBA students are as lucky.

During the summer, the UW team contacted me, wanting to assess my quantitative abilities. I will now tell you a secret: Before I came to business school, people asked me about the geographical makeup of our class. I replied more than once, "30% of the students will be from Washington state, 30% will be U.S. students from other states, and 30% will be international students." My friend Jason tells me, "We all have our resources." Math is not one of mine.

UW gave me three options: Take the test and pass; take the test and fail; do not take the test and proceed directly to Math Camp. I chose option three.

Math Camp (AKA Jumpstart) was a weeklong introduction to accounting and statistics. I was pleasantly surprised with my performance. I had expected a very full, serious week trying to get us up to speed in these very difficult subjects. Instead, it ended up being a relaxing confidence builder. I found myself exclaiming, "Hey, even I knew that!" Seriously, we spent time calculating the mean and median of a list of data.

Math Camp's message was clear: "Hey — you can do this!" I finally understood that this layer of confidence in my own abilities was far more important than any mathematical or statistical principle that I would learn in a week. The message was, "This is going to be hard, but it's going to be hard for everyone. Don't let your lack of confidence in your abilities limit you." This is only my third weekend in business school and by Monday morning I'll have put in over 16 hours of coursework. Pre-Math Camp, I would have excused myself from the difficult quantitative stuff. Now, I'm intrigued.

The following two weeks of orientation were full of speeches, workshops, and team-building exercises. I met my six-member study team, the team with which I would work on all of the projects for fall quarter. The business school does a good job of matching up students with complementary skills. Hence, I have some quantitative rock stars on my study team. We consist of two Americans, two Koreans, a Chinese woman, and a Taiwanese man. It's been cool to experience the dynamics that come from such a diverse group. We have absolutely nothing and absolutely everything in common at the same time.

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