Many people cite the people, and in particular, the students as a reason for attending a business school. During these two years, you’ll have countless opportunities to work with and get to know your classmates. Matt Cairns, a MBA Candidate at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business shares with us the ways in which you’ll engage with your classmates while providing advice on how to work best with your peers.
Name: Matt Cairns
School: Duke University (Fuqua School of Business)
Year: 2016
Summer Internship: Amazon.Com
What you need to know:
Your class will generally be divided into sections or cohorts of about 35-70 students, depending on the size of your MBA program. This is the group of students with whom you’ll take your core classes. It’s also your first community at school. At Fuqua, our sections are the first group of people we meet at orientation. We compete in Section Olympics together, scale massive ropes course walls together, and go through accounting, economics, and finance together. It’s a great mechanism for the school to break down an overwhelming number of students into a digestible chunk that you can get to know as you start your business school experience.
Your section will then be further subdivided into study teams of about six students. You get to be very close with your team – each of your core classes will have group assignments that you’ll complete with them. Classes will vary in the amount of group work they require – some will have one or two big assignments while others will have a case write up due every class. Working with your study team is often very rewarding and sometimes challenging. Every person on your team brings different strengths and life experiences to the table, which means that everyone on your team will see problems from a slightly different angle. The analytical person may start looking for numbers to crunch while the person with an eye for detail may start calling out potential twists or tricks in the case. As a team, you get to leverage these diverse strengths into a polished answer that beats anything anyone could have done on their own. You also get to learn from each other’s strengths and incorporate their viewing angle into your own problem solving tactics. Of course, when you put six overachievers in a room together, meetings will go long, disagreements will occur, priorities will differ, and patience will wear thin. Learning to work through these moments is as important as passing accounting to your MBA experience.
Advice:
Listen – I have a nasty habit of spending the time in between when I’m speaking thinking about the next thing I’m going to say. I needed to work on actively listening to my teammates and being fully present in our meetings. Very little gets done when six people are talking past each other while multitasking.
Engage early – You will only get busier as your first year progresses. For that reason, take advantage of the relative slowness of your first few weeks to build camaraderie with your study team, participate in section events, and get to know your fellow classmates.
Get to know your study teammates – You will spend countless hours in a tiny (often windowless) team room with these people. Make sure you make time to get to know them outside of school – get dinner, drinks, or coffee. Learn about their lives and meet their significant others. You don’t all have to be best friends, but it’s important to know more about them than how well they know accounting.
Say Something Stupid – I heard this advice early on: set a goal of saying one thing that sounds dumb in every team meeting. If you’re meeting your goal, it means you’re contributing to your team without self-editing yourself into silence.
Speak up – When you need help, ask for it. Chances are at least one of your teammates has the same question and at least two of your teammates understand the answer well enough and are willing to explain it to you.
Share your goals up front – Are you recruiting for consulting and thus need to shoot for a high GPA? Will you be leaving most Fridays in the fall to visit investment banks? Discussing your expectations for grades, recruiting, timeliness, cell phone use, meeting breaks, and anything else you can think of at the beginning of the year can go a long way towards getting people on the same page – or at least understanding what page everyone else is on.
Time box it – Try to break assignments up into chunks and set a goal for when each one will be done. You can waste a surprising amount of time discussing question one before someone realizes your meeting was supposed to be over 30 minutes ago.
Find the cadence that works for the team – Will everyone read the case and write answers to the study questions? Or will two people collaborate to turn in the assignment while everyone else just skims the case?
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