Calling all Duke Fuqua MBA Applicants: (2017 Intake) Class of 2019!!

Has anyone applied for R3?

Round 3 Interview Invite

No interview invite! Congratulations to all invited applicants!

Got a Round 3 Interview Invite. Curious, though: I did not see until after I submitted my application that those requiring merit-based money should apply in Round 2 or earlier. I was really banking (quite literally) on some merit money (insomuch as anyone can bank on that sort of thing). My test scores are within their top 10%, I'm URM, with an interesting, non-traditional pre-MBA career, so I thought I had a shot at some of these funds. Now I'm realizing that my chances are virtually shot. Does anyone know if any merit money somehow is offered in third round?

Thanks, guys.

Good luck to us all!

FROM Fuqua Student Blogs: Launching Ideas: The Inaugural Social Impact Startup Weekend

When I walked into Duke’s innovation center, “The Bullpen,” to participate in the Fuqua Net Impact club’s inaugural Social Impact Startup Weekend, I had no idea what to expect. Many of the participants were students from graduate schools across Duke, some were from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others were local working professionals. We made small talk while gorging on the pizza, and we all wondered how this disjointed group of young adults from various programs and experiences were going to somehow spin our social enterprise ideas in just 36 hours. And to my amazement…we did. In fact, we had SIX great social enterprise ideas—THREE of which are still being worked on today. So how did we get from small talk and pizza eating to social venture-launching? A totally judgment-free, rapid-fire pitch session composed exclusively of sheets of paper, 60 seconds to explain an idea—followed by a genuine round of applause from the other participants. The environment this quick pitch session created was inclusive, exciting and inspirational—and resulted in the pitch of a number of ideas. Once all concepts were pitched, participants voted on their favorite ideas and teams were formed around the top 6 ideas—ranging from a chemical-free cleaning product, to an experiential education program focused on raising awareness about food waste. Our teams worked around the clock, using every space of whiteboard available in the building to map out how these social venture ideas could fulfill both a social and financial mission. Just 36 hours after the teams were formed, we presented our pitches to a panel of judges. It was incredible to see how far each team had come from blurting our their ideas in the rapid-fire pitch session to talking us through the financial projections and impact measurement metrics associated with their future social ventures. https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 24x576.jpg   Though the judges did have to pick just a few winners, I think everyone in attendance would agree the experience was worth much more than the value of the prizes. Individuals who had been ruminating on a certain idea for months or even years got the chance to work with a team to build out that idea and see where it might go. The positive energy and excitement for everyone’s ideas was contagious and even though we were all on different teams, I know we’re all rooting for the success of any one of these ventures to take off and make a change in our community. Read more about the event here.  https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x200.jpg https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x200.jpg https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x200.jpg https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x200.jpg   The post Launching Ideas: The Inaugural Social Impact Startup Weekend appeared first on Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog.

good luck to everyone waiting on R3 decision on 17th:)

Accepted from the Waitlist. See yall in Durham!

congrats:))

Accepted Round 3

Rejected Round 3 -- didn't get an email to check status, but checked anyway and found the rejection. I woke up the morning of the interview with a high grade fever and ended up bed bound all day afterward. I know I bombed the interview and can't help but think that this contributed. All that said, round 3 is certainly a challenge and there's nothing to say that I would have been accepted were my interview (in all likelihood) only slightly better. I really had trouble fitting my non-traditional experience (teaching) to the types of questions I was asked (primarily about teamwork). Teaching is unfortunately a notoriously insular profession, with little collaboration, so I was really reaching when trying to answer these questions (and more so given my fever-induced haze).

Oh, well. Congrats to those accepted, though!

FROM Fuqua Student Blogs: Staying Fit at Fuqua

If you walk the halls of Fuqua, you may occasionally overhear students grumble about the so-called ‘Fuqua Fifteen’—a phenomenon where MBA students gain a few, err, extra pounds at business school. This isn’t entirely unexpected. The change in routine, greater number of social events to attend, and the delicious Southern food you’re surrounded with are all culprits for weight gain faced by students. However, in my experience Fuquans do a great job of staying fit and active throughout their first and second year. Facilities The gym and running facilities on campus are second to none. The Wilson Recreation Center, which is located on West Campus and just a few minutes’ walk from Fuqua, offers almost every cardio and weight machine you can dream of, an indoor running track, an Olympic-sized pool, group fitness classes, and squash and racket ball courts. The Brodie Recreation Center on East Campus is a little closer to where many students choose to live and offers a lot of the same features as the main gym. It would be remiss of me not to mention that it has more than a dozen state-of-the-art tennis courts, all of which are surrounded by a beautiful two-mile running path.   Professor John Graham with some of the MBA students he’s dubbed the “Wilson Gym Rats” #FinanceCanBeFun #TakeCorporateFinance A post shared by Duke Fuqua (@dukefuqua) on Apr 17, 2017 at 5:30pm PDT Clubs and Events Several sports clubs are active on campus and provide more options for staying fit. To name just a few: the Running & Triathlon Club organizes group runs and events in which many Fuquans choose to participate. A highlight of my first year was running the Tar Heel Ten Miler in Chapel Hill with approximately 60 classmates and our Daytime Dean, Russ Morgan, who generously hosted all of us at his house for breakfast afterwards (in spite of the sweat). If running is not your thing and you prefer organized team sports, you won’t be short of opportunities. The Tennis Club organizes an annual tournament where the six different student sections compete across both the first-year and second-year classes to determine the winning team. The Rugby Club hosts a large tournament once a year in Durham where rugby teams from other schools —even as far away as London Business School—travel to our neck of the woods to participate. Fuqua Hoops plays basketball games against other schools and recently traveled up to Washington, D.C., for a tournament. A highlight of the spring calendar is Blue Cup—a friendly tournament between Fuqua and UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School just down the road. The two business schools compete across almost every category of sport, including soccer, golf, tennis, running, and cornhole (yes really!). The tournament represents a great opportunity to expand your network beyond Fuqua. The ‘Fuqua Fifteen’ may be real but there are countless opportunities on campus to break a sweat, stay fit, and make some new friends while you’re at it.   #Repost @dukeawib ・・・ Blue Cup ends (today)! There’s one more chance to cheer on Fuqua athletes – women play (today) at 7:15 at Fetzer Hall at UNC. See you there! ⛹️‍♀️ A post shared by Duke Fuqua (@dukefuqua) on Apr 13, 2017 at 5:28am PDT The post Staying Fit at Fuqua appeared first on Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog.

FROM Fuqua Student Blogs: Finding Yourself Through Recruiting: My Road to Tech

An open secret at Fuqua is that for most new MBAs, your past career—and even what you wrote as career goals in your admissions essays—no longer defines where you’re going once you walk through Fuqua’s doors. I was no exception. A Fresh Slate After working nearly six years at a major electric utility company, I had essentially ‘run out of energy’ in regards to where I thought my career could take me. With business school on the horizon, I was excited about the fresh slate an MBA could provide, as well as the opportunities to explore different industries and job functions. Little did I know some giant online retailer in Seattle would become my future home. While formal internship recruiting generally kicks off in September of your first year, your own job exploration starts as soon as you step foot on campus for orientation in August. Career intensive seminars organized by our Career Management Center (CMC) right after orientation provide in-depth overviews of different industries and career paths. From those and individual discussions with counselors, I started to identify what type of industries and jobs would be the best fit for me. More importantly, however, I began thinking about my future career not in terms of company or job title, but more about what I valued. Recruiting Season https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x300.jpg As recruiting got into full swing, an almost overwhelming number of employers began coming on campus. During this hectic time, I kept an open mind about industry—networking with everyone from consulting firms to auto companies, all while trying to understand fit more than anything else. Through many discussions with recruiters and returning students over wine and cheese, I started to identify three job attributes I most valued: An environment where continuous learning is the norm A company culture that embraced innovation and questioned the status quo Control of my own career path With these attributes in mind, it became easier to narrow my job search, and through that process one company continued to stand out—Amazon. Now, unfortunately I learned like other MBAs that you can’t fall in love too quickly (or too early) with any one company. First you must get the interview. Then you must succeed in the interview. And the more prominent the company, the more likely you’re not alone in your quest to get that final offer. While we’re blessed at Fuqua with an unbelievable support network, recruiting can still be a daunting, emotionally grueling process. I applied to many internships that met my basic criteria. Some of them gave me interviews. Most of them declined to move forward after the interview. But it only takes one to get you employed for the summer, so the day Amazon extended a summer internship offer with their Retail Leadership Development Program was almost as exciting as the day Fuqua called me with my admissions decision (key word: almost). On to a New Career Fast forward to the end of the summer (or read about my experience here), and I was fortunate to receive a full-time offer! While it was easy to get caught up in the prospect of not having to recruit again during my second year at Fuqua, I still evaluated Amazon not by its prestige but whether those values I identified during recruitment were still applicable after seeing the company for 12 weeks. No company is perfect (including Amazon), but this one still felt right, and I knew that it was a place where I could learn and grow after graduation. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, “Every day is day one!” The day I leave Fuqua will be a rough one, but I can’t wait for my next day one at Amazon. The post Finding Yourself Through Recruiting: My Road to Tech appeared first on Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog.

FROM Fuqua Student Blogs: My Summer Internship at Amazon

I had no idea where I’d land after my first year at business school. Coming from the energy sector, I was optimistic about what seemed like the endless internship possibilities Fuqua could give me. But if you told me that by summer I’d be doing in-depth market research on how moms and dads choose strollers and cribs, I’d probably ask if you had the wrong person. Needless to say, that’s exactly what happened, and I couldn’t be more thankful for my summer experience at Amazon. While Amazon offers a wide assortment of MBA programs (after all, it’s Fuqua’s top non-consulting employer), Amazon’s Retail Leadership Development Program interested me the most.  Housed within Amazon’s retail business, the full-time, three-year programs allows you to explore and rotate through two different job functions in two different retail business units. At the same time, the program comes with more formalized training, career development, and exposure to senior leadership. Ultimately, the program builds general managers that are comfortable with ambiguity and excited to solve new problems in a wildly changing industry.  Given the size of Amazon’s presence and the level of innovation it already brought to the retail space, I knew the scope and breadth of learning opportunities would likely be staggering, so it was a no-brainer to apply to the internship as a trial-run. One application and four interviews later, I saw the word every MBA loves to see starting an email—“Congratulations!”—and by mid-May, I found myself touching down in Seattle for a 12-week internship. While you don’t rotate during the summer, you are promised real work, solving real business problems, at the level of a full-time participant. In my case, I was put on Amazon’s Baby Registry team and given a broad work prompt: figure out how we can evolve the Baby Registry customer experience through product curation and personalization. I had no experience with baby products, professionally or otherwise, and I didn’t quite know what the words “curation” and “personalization” actually meant. But that’s what makes Amazon a potentially exciting employer; the company trusts you to make real business decisions, but how you make those decisions is largely up to you. https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 00x300.jpg Amazon’s headquarters Despite the ambiguity of my work and the pressure to deliver something tangible by the end of 12 weeks, I was amazed at how much formal and informal support I was given. My manager, an MBA grad and a former intern himself, knew what my experience entailed and was always willing to answer my dumbest questions and gave me constant feedback on my progress. At the same time, I was given a senior manager as a formal mentor to help me better understand my progress, as well as a recent Fuqua alumna as a ‘buddy’ to provide support on a more informal level. I was also impressed by how easy it was to receive help from others; whether it was the coworker sitting next to me or a stranger in a separate building that was working on something I deemed relevant, I found that most people in the company were willing to give me at least 30 minutes of their time because they likely needed the same from someone else given the speed Amazon grows. From a work standpoint, every day was largely driven by my own decisions on what tasks to prioritize. While the first half of my project focused more on combing through customer data and market research and scoping out my project’s vision, the second half of my internship was tailored to execution—what can Amazon do immediately to test and implement my final recommendations (even before I leave), and what are the requirements and next steps to see my vision get implemented long-term? At the end of my internship, I had to present to key stakeholders a six-page white paper that outlined everything I had studied over the summer, as well as detailed next steps to ensure my work kept momentum when I left. Did I work a lot? Yes. But was I also in a super cosmopolitan city with a stunning mountain backdrop and a surprising amount of sun and bars and restaurants? YES. Seattle made the summer that much more enjoyable, and it also made it easy to accept a full-time offer from Amazon. Amazon’s headquarters are in central South Lake Union, with most of the city’s most desirable destinations like Capitol Hill, Pike’s Place, and Fremont only 10 to 15 minutes away by walking or car (or even public transit) and the Pacific Northwest’s lush playground for all things outdoors less than an hour away. With planned Amazon intern events and plenty of current Fuquans and alumni in the city, I had no problem finding opportunities to step away from work and recharge. To learn more about my recruitment journey, and why I ultimately made the career decisions I made, read my other blog post. Amazon is not for everyone, and it’s important to keep an open mind when you start your MBA. Despite the cliché, it really is about the journey and not the destination. But if you find yourself up for a challenge and fascinated by the act of shopping (not just by what you’re buying), Amazon may be for you! The post My Summer Internship at Amazon appeared first on Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog.

FROM Fuqua Student Blogs: Duke’s Impact as Host of the MBA Chile 2017 Conference

On April 7 through 9, 2017, the MBA Chile conference—the most important meeting of Chilean students abroad—was held at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for the very first time. The conference brought together more than 150 people including renowned speakers, students and their families from 18 top universities in the United States, including Duke, Harvard, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Columbia and MIT, among many others. The process of choosing the host university for this conference year after year is competitive. Each business school presents its project which is voted by the student body. One of the main reasons why Duke won was for our proposal for unity and integration. Committed to the values ​​that inspire our formation, we proposed an inclusive, diverse and high-quality meeting where families felt fully welcomed and incorporated; where students from all universities could contribute their talents to the organization; and where the topics of discussion looked beyond the business world towards the integral development of Chile itself. So it was. A team of more than 40 people from 10 universities led by Duke worked hard to set up the best possible experience for everyone. https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 24x628.jpg Fuqua’s Dean Bill Boulding speaking during the event   Our goal during the three days was to discuss, analyze and look for potential solutions to the main challenges Chile is facing today: how to grow inclusively and reduce inequality; how to foster entrepreneurship and innovation to the next level; how to diversify our productive matrix; how to improve the quality of politics and institutional design; and how to progressively include women in national leadership positions. To discuss these issues, we had the opportunity to share with 16 exceptional speakers. Among them: Fernando Fischman, the founder of the largest unicorn in Chile—Crystal Lagoons—with whom we talked about the challenges of internationalizing Chilean innovations Harald Beyer, former minister of education, with whom we discussed how to improve the quality of primary education Bernardo Larraín Matte, president of Colbun and business leader, who spoke on the challenges of leadership faced by the company in the face of institutional transformations and new citizen demands Cecilia Pérez, former Minister of Government, who talked about how to stimulate the participation of young people in politics and public service But we also tried to identify our role as future MBA alumni in facing these political, economic and social challenges Chile faces. In this sense, MBA Chile was an opportunity to consolidate lessons from what we have learned here at Duke: the importance of the genuine conviction that together we are much more than each person separately; the importance of doing the right thing, as inspired by the idea of leaders of consequence; and the strong commitment to generate a real impact in our context and society. MBA Chile was also a unique opportunity to strengthen the ties of over 100 students who will lead the country’s destinies in the near future. This network of influencers, consolidated at Duke, will be fundamental to disseminate the appropriate values ​​that will facilitate the building of bridges between the public and private sectors. We are convinced as an organization of the need that exists in Chile to break this false dichotomy between the world of business and public life. Today, more than ever, citizens demand stronger ethical standards and a greater social commitment from firms. We must be prepared to meet that challenge. https://blogs.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-mba/w ... 24x683.jpg Some of our student organizers   Bottom line, the conference was a success, thanks to the hard, dedicated and committed work of several students from multiple universities led by Duke. In the words of students, speakers and sponsors: this was the most comprehensive, integral and deep MBA Chile conference ever. I firmly believe that our spirit of teamwork and the pursuit of a transcendent impact on our society has been a strong contribution to consolidate the MBA Chile brand and strengthen our ties as privileged students, which will allow us in the near future to genuinely contribute to building a better country with more opportunities for all. The post Duke’s Impact as Host of the MBA Chile 2017 Conference appeared first on Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog.

Received news about a week ago

Matriculating on: 2016/12/26
Location: United States, IL
GMAT: 740, Q50, V41
GPA: 3.82
WE: 39 months
Industry: Consulting
Submited on: 2016/10/12
Invited on: 2016/11/10
Interviewed on: 2016/12/02
Decision Received on: 2016/12/26

My Fuqua MBA Program Review by alumni. Rating:*****

My Fuqua Interview Experience Review for an Video conference interview. Rating:*****