My last first day of class ever

Today my entire class started a 4-day leadership workshop, and we'll start full-time classes next Monday. Since I'm in business school, I'm bullet pointing this one.

What I feel about Fuqua

• I honestly love being back here because of the people that surround me. It's an amazing feeling to come back here after only one year of school and feel connected to so many kind, accomplished, and generally great people. After spending the summer with people from other business schools (and policy schools and education schools), I'm pretty sure there's something legitimately special about my business school. The culture is, in my opinion, distinct from other schools in a very real way. When I walk down the school hallway and can't stop saying hi to people and actually wanting to spend time talking to them (vs. just giving an unenthusiastic hi... going through the motions) - that's a great feeling. I feel very lucky to have ended up here.
• As our dean said, Fuqua's student brand is "whip smart, but real (can drink beer and champagne)." I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Fuqua update

• Applications were up 21%. There are two schools in the top 20 that had an increase in the number of applications: Fuqua and MIT. All others were flat or declining.
• The % of accepted students went from 30% to 24% - a very important figure in school rankings.
• The male/female ratio for the incoming class was 70/30. It should be 60/40. Our dean's explanation was that other schools know that Fuqua is recruiting the right people, so they're sniping our women by offering them scholarships that we can't. Player haters.
• Building a reputation among leading companies...
• John Chambers, CEO of Cisco: "Fuqua is the only school that gets it"
• Wal Mart: wants Fuqua to be their primary source of MBA talent
• HCA (and the Frist family, all graduates of Harvard and Princeton): "Fuqua is my school."
• Bob McDonald (CEO of Procter & Gamble): Bob is dropping every volunteer board except Fuqua's
• GE was about to cut Fuqua from it's list of schools it recruits from (they were cutting the list by half). Jeff Immelt saw the list, personally intervened, and now Fuqua's back on the list.

Impressive speakers

• I was thinking today about the most impressive speakers I've heard at Fuqua. Two characteristics distinguish the really good ones:
• 1) They are incredibly well read. The most impressive ones (and these are business leaders, mind you), can cite lessons from history, politics, etc. just as much as they can from the business world.
• 2) They're very, very self aware

Observations

• It's a damn good feeling to answer the question "how was your summer internship" with "lifechanging."
• By and large, the stereotypes of business schools hold up pretty well. You can guess what these are.