One additional note to piggyback off what
bb mentioned in #10 -- for those international students who haven't lived/worked full-time in the US prior to b-school, be prepared to be completely CONFUSED about your student health insurance.
If you find it confusing, maddening and non-sensical (X is covered, but not Y, if and only if under certain conditions, but only once the deductible has been reached, plus copays) - just know that it's as confusing for Americans as well.
Also one more to add:
11. Don't let anyone invalidate your anxiety
This is a generational thing. I'm Gen-X, and there may be other X-ers and older Millennials giving you advice to "relax" or "stop worrying", who are sharing their advice based on their own experiences a generation before (literally...). And I'm sure you guys are ignoring anything the boomers say lol.
So this may go against my own (many years ago...) advice from above #9 or at least provide a counterpoint (we change too over time into our 40s and 50s and beyond).
I was in your shoes about 25 years ago. Most of you were toddlers. Bill Clinton was still in office. Yahoo! was THE Internet, and Google didn't exist. Facebook and the iPhone was 10 years away. 9/11 was a few years away. Apple was coming out of near-bankruptcy.
During school, we were Gen-X kids coming of age in the 90s - relatively carefree, and looking back the late 90s was probably the peak of unbounded optimism across the board - post-Cold War the free market was going to solve everything and make everyone prosperous, the dot-com boom was going to make the world a smaller but richer place with no war, jobs were plenty, housing costs were low, tuition was low, politics didn't tear apart families, etc. Objectively there wasn't a lot to worry about, so it's easy to tell the more anxious to "calm down" and not take everything so seriously.
Compared to today, it was genuinely a more innocent time. The dot-com crash and 9/11 soon changed that (which was a rude and sudden wakeup call for my graduating class...) but we had no way of knowing in the late 90s into early 2001. And even with these events, I have to say it's still not as nutso and uncertain as the world you guys are up against these days.
That's why when I see folks these days with more anxiety - just know that it's perfectly valid. That may not give you much comfort, but you'll be better equipped to handle or manage your anxiety more effectively if at least you know that it's perfectly valid and understandable. You're not over-worrying, as you're facing more uncertainty than people before you have.
Better to know that your anxiety is justified, rather than "it's all in your head."
Don't let others - especially older folks - invalidate your anxiety about your future. The future may be amazing and awful at the same time, but in ways no one can really predict or anticipate.
Honestly if I were in your shoes today I would probably be way more anxious. I wouldn't have been the carefree person I was in the late 90s, like so many of us then. We were incredibly lucky.
In b-school, you'll likely encounter more than your fair share of alumni, guest speakers, and others coming to campus to share their wisdom and advice - be wary of those who seem to have it all figured out. The truly wise ones are those who are less sure about themselves and of what they're sharing.