First Year Revisited

My first year in Darden was… let’s say intense. At first it felt like a relentless cycle of doing cases and going to classes but after a while I got used to it and even began to enjoy it. Now I can say that it was an amazing experience.

These are some of the highlights from my first year experience:

The Case Method

This is one of Darden’s trademarks. It really allows the whole class to learn from each other and leverage our past experiences and our ideas. Furthermore, it allows us to get to know several industries and while we don’t become experts on each of these industries, we do get an idea of how they do business and what is their competitive landscape, an invaluable asset for your summer internship.

Also, after getting used to the case method, lecture-based courses become very boring and slooow.

Section E

I was lucky enough to be part of the best section in Darden, which is of course Section E. This is a group of extremely talented, competitive and totally awesome people who made the learning environment exceedingly rewarding and also fun and supportive. Getting to know them and bonding with them was one of the best experiences of my first year.

And of course, we won the Darden Cup for the third time in a row (a record, by the way)

Black January

In Darden they call November “Black November” because of the amount of coursework and career related activities that happen during this month. For me November wasn’t so bad, especially when comparing it with January. Being an international student, a lot of my summer internship recruiting activities were off-grounds (as opposed to companies interviewing on Darden grounds), this meant traveling to cities like NYC, Boston and Chicago for interviews sometimes twice a week on top of having a full course load. And the winter weather didn’t help. I had to do a mid-term stranded in Charlotte’s airport which was not fun.

It was brutal.

Of course none of this matters when you get your offer for your…

Summer Internship

I spent my summer in D.C. working for a consulting firm focused on development finance in emerging economies. It was a great summer experience; I got to work in projects with teams around the world in different practices such as small-business finance and mobile and branchless banking.

I loved D.C. it has a lot of things to do (I got to see U2!), plenty of good restaurants, cultural stuff and it is an overall great place to live even though for a while we were one of the hottest cities in America. (temperature-wise, sadly). Overall had a great time and learned a lot.

GBE

This was one of my favorite experiences in Darden so far. I spent a week in Barcelona, Spain at the IESE School of Business learning about Strategy, Design and Innovation. Of course, the city is amazing and fun and the class was very interesting (the teacher, Jeanne Liedtka, is awesome).

Also, we got the opportunity to get to know people from the MBAE who provided a more experienced, more “executive” point of view which I found extremely enriching.

I highly recommend this course to anyone who is interested.

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I’m sure there are other things that happened over the last year that are worth remembering and writing about but I think this is enough for now.

See you next time!