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12 Feb 2024, 22:54
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NOTE: This is a personal interpretation of the MBA Application journey. This is no way or form depicts the exact way to approach to the MBA Application at Fuqua. This article is solely for those who are considering applying to the Fuqua School Of Business and are looking to deepen their understanding of the school and the application process. This article will be updated continously with all new relevant information that I migght come across. If you feel that I have missed something, please let me know in the replies and I will be sure to add them. This article is a result of the feelings I had during the application process and a certain level of disconnect that I felt with respect to the content that was available. It is only natural that some poeple may find this relevant or irrelevant, and I hope that I can cater to your needs to the best of my ability. In the end, I hope that you feel connected in the process of your application and know that you aren't alone in this journey! Lets go!
If you're reading this, then you might have decided to apply to the Fuqua School of Business, or you might be trying to find out more about the school to help you make a decision. Either way I wish you the best of luck on your journey. What I intend to do here is pen down my experiences, my thoughts and my learnings along the way. This is not a success story by a long shot. I am still hopeful for upcoming decisions and equally scared of what comes next. No, this is a story about knowing what you want and finally setting out to achieve it. Rather than telling you HOW to get in, I want to help you figure out that you deserve to get in.
I fell in love with Fuqua as soon as I heard about it. Not just the school itself, but what it stood for. The history of how Duke University extended a helping hand to Fuqua’s namesake when no one else would, it just stirred an emotion in me. It is a story of how believing in someone can be vital for their success. And that is precisely why you should believe in your potential for success. You must have heard of Achilles’ heel, his vulnerability, his undoing. I believe that is an injustice to Achilles. Why do we not remember that knowing just how vulnerable he was, he still chose to battle - and won countless times, not letting his weakness define him? I have felt a lot like Achilles in the past few months. I tried desperately to cover up my shortcomings, and put my best foot forward. Now at a crossroads, I’m in search of a way out of this limbo. I scoured the internet ways to guarantee my success, to mold myself into the “perfect candidate”. In all this haze of trying to be someone they would want, I lost sight of who I truly am. We’ve heard it time and again, “be authentic”, and you’re probably thinking to yourselves - here we go again, regurgitating the same things we have heard in countless webinars and read on every single school page - and you’re right. I can give you no extra information or juicy tidbit that will give you an edge, but what I can give you is insight on what it means to be truly authentic.
Know yourself before you tackle the application.
We are the ones who have known ourselves the longest. But we are also the most blind to what makes us special. Knowing yourself is not just about what strengths and weaknesses you have; it's also about the opportunities and blind-spots you may face (a little SWOT Analysis never hurt someone). Take my example! An Indian male, from an engineering background, who doesn’t have a 750+ GMAT and isn’t in an MBB consulting firm. I spoke to numerous consultants, who all gave the same advice, “Apply if you want to, but know that it will be a reach for you to actually get in”. Were they right? Probably! But did that deter me? No. I took the time, a good 6 months really, to get my affairs in order. Can I take the GMAT again to get a 750+ score? (I tried, believe you me, it just wasn’t my ballgame) Can I take on additional impactful responsibilities at work? ( I thought I could, so I did, and voila, got promoted!) Can I do something that will automatically make me one-of-a-kind? Let me know if you have the shortcut to becoming an olympic gold medalist! Everyone believes that once you have the right stats, you’re golden; and rightfully so!
But no one ever talks about how difficult it is to actually bring yourself up to that mark. All you see are success stories that you fail to identify with and the failure stories that you successfully look away from, but no one talks about the struggle stories. The stories that aren’t quite done yet. But they all boil down to one question, “Did you try?”. Did you try to get a better score? Did you try to build your quantitative proficiency? Did you try to do your best with the opportunities that you were given? Did you try to push past your comfort zone? From the perspective of application essays, I invite you to consider this. Your successes and strengths and uniqueness will definitely make their way into the 25 Random Things essay. But those struggle stories? Those make the optional essay. Not everyone has these struggles, but if you did, they only add a dimension to your story. Were you handling odd jobs to make ends meet, is that why you have a low GPA? Were you juggling multiple responsibilities and packed calendars, is that why you couldn’t study well for the GMAT?
Honestly, I had no such compulsions or hardships. I have a low GPA because college was the first time that I had freedom to choose what I wanted to do with my time. I tried out for every college sports team there was. I joined 7 clubs that interested me. I took up academic and research projects that I thought could help the world! I could have very well stayed put studying in my dorm and used all the time I had to graduate with distinction, but I made the choice to be open to everything college and life had to offer. And that helped me. Now I know the kind of person I am. One who doesn't just sit and wait for things to come to him. No, I get up and chase what I want, more often than not failing, but never giving up. My diversified endeavors make me who I am today, and while in hindsight I could have handled things oh-so-much better, I do not regret the choices I made.
You know who you are, now how do you actually get in.
How do I work with the hand that I have been dealt? Like in any game of Poker, confidence is key (though unlike poker I might suggest avoiding the bluff - the penalties far outweigh the rewards!). The application has a diverse range of questions, meant for you to use to bring out the best in you. The AdComms want to know your story, so give them what they asked for. Build a brand for yourself. Have a vision (long term goals), mission (post MBA goals), value proposition (what you bring to the table, or in this case, the classroom), and probably even a differentiating hook story. Something that I realized after writing these hooks a dozen different times is that simplicity is best. “Have your heads in the cloud and your feet on the ground” I read somewhere, aptly describing the way you should tackle these questions. I hope you know where you want to go, but do you know what you need in order to get there? Have you invested the time and energy to sit with yourself and chart out what it is you want to do and why? Yes the bags of money you rake in are a definite reason, but there has to be something more than that. Being rooted in practicality is great, required even, but where would the world be without dreamers? Even if you need to be rich so that you can become Batman and fight crime, it works! (though with the current economy, you’d need to start investing at the age of 10 or have some generational wealth). But your dreams have to be bigger than you.
Look at Fuqua’s 6 principles: “Authentic Engagement” (Are you intrinsically motivated to do better?), “Supportive Ambition” (Do you dare question the status quo with your passion?) “Collective Diversity” (Are you sure you’re not a closeted self-centered bigot?), “Lifelong Learning” (Do you have the humility to learn, even from mistakes?), “Common Purpose” (Will you share your ideologies, learnings and even failures, with those around you?) and finally “Leadership Development” (I mean, do I really need to explain this one?). These traits do not require you to be a superhero or an outstanding high-achiever. Most of you are already living similar values! The only effort you need to put in, is to find where you have these traits stowed away.
You’ve learned to work with what you have, but how does that make you unique.
You are finally asking the right question! Have you ever seen a post online and thought “that is so me”? Well so do a million other people. Your “unique like a snowflake” element is not in what happens to you, but in how you deal with it. Don't follow? Drawing from personal experience (because why not), I met with an accident that left me in a wheelchair for a year. I don’t have exclusive rights to wheelchairs, or to injuries. There are others who have had similar experiences, but how it shaped my life is unique to my story. Frustrations while recuperating motivated me to pursue a career in healthcare, working towards eradicating access and quality barriers. Another person might have taken this opportunity to advocate for differently-abled rights, or to design better safety protocols, or maybe just to grumble about how unfair life is (not that I was a ray of sunshine that year). No one knows your lived experiences better than you and no one comes close to understanding how they shaped you. “But what if I don't have interesting experiences, or if I come from a life of comfort and privilege?” Well if privilege is what you were given, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is still up to you to decide what you make of it.
A simple trick that I used was the “So what” tactic. Imagine you are talking to a teenager (oh the horrors), and try to emulate their indifference towards your point. “Hey I teach underprivileged kids” you say. “So what?” retorts your inner demon child. “Well, it's a pretty big deal because an alarmingly large number of these students graduate without any working knowledge of what they have learnt, they simply assimilate information through rote and spew it on the test papers” you huff back. “So?” the devil spawn (probably based on that one annoying cousin) snaps back. “I try to mitigate the aptitude issue by training them on mental ability, helping them with scholarship exams, and taking them one step closer to pursuing a higher education” you say agitatedly. “So-” the manifestation of all your self doubts starts, right before you silence it. You now know the actual impact of your actions, and you are able to drill down to your motivations and your thought processes. Now all you have to do is repeat this exercise a couple of hundred times and ta-da!
I got all my impactful stories, but how do I choose what to use.
The selection of what you put down is by far the most challenging task that lies in wait for you, on this journey. In the immortal words of people I see on TikTok, you must align the “vibes” of the school. What does that mean in english? Well simply put, imagine each school is a student at Hogwarts and you, the beloved sorting hat. Each school has some core values (they don't even try to hide it - it's right there on their websites). All that you must do is sort the schools based on the traits that you glean from them. Now once you have that “sorted” (my post MBA goal is definitely not stand-up comedy) you need to sort your stories the same way. You are a complex being (not the number kind, you are very much rational) so it's only fair that you have stories that span a multitude of traits. Let's take Fuqua for example. You hear Fuqua and immediately think “Team Fuqua”. Not only will your cohort be collaborative but also compassionate, genuinely investing in your success even if it isn't convenient for them. There’s no “I” in this space, and if you wish to be a part of this community you should be a similar person as well, so tell them about it. Maybe you were asked to train new employees during COVID, but you saw that some of them really struggled to adapt, so you initiated some personal conversations with them for additional support (hmm, oddly specific example. I wonder why). As long as you are able to think beyond yourself and try to go above and beyond sometimes, you’re probably what Fuqua is looking for. Also here is an in-depth analysis of the school and its values from a licensed nobody, if you want to read.
In the end I shall leave you (yes, it’s finally happening ) with just one note. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were you. You are being asked to condense your entire life’s journey into a few hundred words while demonstrating both your fit for the school and your aptitude. My two cents? Mean every word you write. Take a glass of your favorite beverage, set the ambience, and just open your mind to fall in love with the school. Then channel that inner Jessica Faye Carter and put it all on paper. If you find yourself going down a rabbit hole, take a beat and then come back to it. You will realize how awesome you are, and THAT is when the words will flow.
I wish you are able to capture your unique essence into these application components. Afterall admissions readers do really want to get to know you, and it never hurts getting to know yourself better in the process. And, like I promised, I hope I convinced you that whatever be your dream, you deserve to give it your best shot. All the very best on your journey!
If you're reading this, then you might have decided to apply to the Fuqua School of Business, or you might be trying to find out more about the school to help you make a decision. Either way I wish you the best of luck on your journey. What I intend to do here is pen down my experiences, my thoughts and my learnings along the way. This is not a success story by a long shot. I am still hopeful for upcoming decisions and equally scared of what comes next. No, this is a story about knowing what you want and finally setting out to achieve it. Rather than telling you HOW to get in, I want to help you figure out that you deserve to get in.
I fell in love with Fuqua as soon as I heard about it. Not just the school itself, but what it stood for. The history of how Duke University extended a helping hand to Fuqua’s namesake when no one else would, it just stirred an emotion in me. It is a story of how believing in someone can be vital for their success. And that is precisely why you should believe in your potential for success. You must have heard of Achilles’ heel, his vulnerability, his undoing. I believe that is an injustice to Achilles. Why do we not remember that knowing just how vulnerable he was, he still chose to battle - and won countless times, not letting his weakness define him? I have felt a lot like Achilles in the past few months. I tried desperately to cover up my shortcomings, and put my best foot forward. Now at a crossroads, I’m in search of a way out of this limbo. I scoured the internet ways to guarantee my success, to mold myself into the “perfect candidate”. In all this haze of trying to be someone they would want, I lost sight of who I truly am. We’ve heard it time and again, “be authentic”, and you’re probably thinking to yourselves - here we go again, regurgitating the same things we have heard in countless webinars and read on every single school page - and you’re right. I can give you no extra information or juicy tidbit that will give you an edge, but what I can give you is insight on what it means to be truly authentic.
Know yourself before you tackle the application.
We are the ones who have known ourselves the longest. But we are also the most blind to what makes us special. Knowing yourself is not just about what strengths and weaknesses you have; it's also about the opportunities and blind-spots you may face (a little SWOT Analysis never hurt someone). Take my example! An Indian male, from an engineering background, who doesn’t have a 750+ GMAT and isn’t in an MBB consulting firm. I spoke to numerous consultants, who all gave the same advice, “Apply if you want to, but know that it will be a reach for you to actually get in”. Were they right? Probably! But did that deter me? No. I took the time, a good 6 months really, to get my affairs in order. Can I take the GMAT again to get a 750+ score? (I tried, believe you me, it just wasn’t my ballgame) Can I take on additional impactful responsibilities at work? ( I thought I could, so I did, and voila, got promoted!) Can I do something that will automatically make me one-of-a-kind? Let me know if you have the shortcut to becoming an olympic gold medalist! Everyone believes that once you have the right stats, you’re golden; and rightfully so!
But no one ever talks about how difficult it is to actually bring yourself up to that mark. All you see are success stories that you fail to identify with and the failure stories that you successfully look away from, but no one talks about the struggle stories. The stories that aren’t quite done yet. But they all boil down to one question, “Did you try?”. Did you try to get a better score? Did you try to build your quantitative proficiency? Did you try to do your best with the opportunities that you were given? Did you try to push past your comfort zone? From the perspective of application essays, I invite you to consider this. Your successes and strengths and uniqueness will definitely make their way into the 25 Random Things essay. But those struggle stories? Those make the optional essay. Not everyone has these struggles, but if you did, they only add a dimension to your story. Were you handling odd jobs to make ends meet, is that why you have a low GPA? Were you juggling multiple responsibilities and packed calendars, is that why you couldn’t study well for the GMAT?
Honestly, I had no such compulsions or hardships. I have a low GPA because college was the first time that I had freedom to choose what I wanted to do with my time. I tried out for every college sports team there was. I joined 7 clubs that interested me. I took up academic and research projects that I thought could help the world! I could have very well stayed put studying in my dorm and used all the time I had to graduate with distinction, but I made the choice to be open to everything college and life had to offer. And that helped me. Now I know the kind of person I am. One who doesn't just sit and wait for things to come to him. No, I get up and chase what I want, more often than not failing, but never giving up. My diversified endeavors make me who I am today, and while in hindsight I could have handled things oh-so-much better, I do not regret the choices I made.
You know who you are, now how do you actually get in.
How do I work with the hand that I have been dealt? Like in any game of Poker, confidence is key (though unlike poker I might suggest avoiding the bluff - the penalties far outweigh the rewards!). The application has a diverse range of questions, meant for you to use to bring out the best in you. The AdComms want to know your story, so give them what they asked for. Build a brand for yourself. Have a vision (long term goals), mission (post MBA goals), value proposition (what you bring to the table, or in this case, the classroom), and probably even a differentiating hook story. Something that I realized after writing these hooks a dozen different times is that simplicity is best. “Have your heads in the cloud and your feet on the ground” I read somewhere, aptly describing the way you should tackle these questions. I hope you know where you want to go, but do you know what you need in order to get there? Have you invested the time and energy to sit with yourself and chart out what it is you want to do and why? Yes the bags of money you rake in are a definite reason, but there has to be something more than that. Being rooted in practicality is great, required even, but where would the world be without dreamers? Even if you need to be rich so that you can become Batman and fight crime, it works! (though with the current economy, you’d need to start investing at the age of 10 or have some generational wealth). But your dreams have to be bigger than you.
Look at Fuqua’s 6 principles: “Authentic Engagement” (Are you intrinsically motivated to do better?), “Supportive Ambition” (Do you dare question the status quo with your passion?) “Collective Diversity” (Are you sure you’re not a closeted self-centered bigot?), “Lifelong Learning” (Do you have the humility to learn, even from mistakes?), “Common Purpose” (Will you share your ideologies, learnings and even failures, with those around you?) and finally “Leadership Development” (I mean, do I really need to explain this one?). These traits do not require you to be a superhero or an outstanding high-achiever. Most of you are already living similar values! The only effort you need to put in, is to find where you have these traits stowed away.
You’ve learned to work with what you have, but how does that make you unique.
You are finally asking the right question! Have you ever seen a post online and thought “that is so me”? Well so do a million other people. Your “unique like a snowflake” element is not in what happens to you, but in how you deal with it. Don't follow? Drawing from personal experience (because why not), I met with an accident that left me in a wheelchair for a year. I don’t have exclusive rights to wheelchairs, or to injuries. There are others who have had similar experiences, but how it shaped my life is unique to my story. Frustrations while recuperating motivated me to pursue a career in healthcare, working towards eradicating access and quality barriers. Another person might have taken this opportunity to advocate for differently-abled rights, or to design better safety protocols, or maybe just to grumble about how unfair life is (not that I was a ray of sunshine that year). No one knows your lived experiences better than you and no one comes close to understanding how they shaped you. “But what if I don't have interesting experiences, or if I come from a life of comfort and privilege?” Well if privilege is what you were given, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is still up to you to decide what you make of it.
A simple trick that I used was the “So what” tactic. Imagine you are talking to a teenager (oh the horrors), and try to emulate their indifference towards your point. “Hey I teach underprivileged kids” you say. “So what?” retorts your inner demon child. “Well, it's a pretty big deal because an alarmingly large number of these students graduate without any working knowledge of what they have learnt, they simply assimilate information through rote and spew it on the test papers” you huff back. “So?” the devil spawn (probably based on that one annoying cousin) snaps back. “I try to mitigate the aptitude issue by training them on mental ability, helping them with scholarship exams, and taking them one step closer to pursuing a higher education” you say agitatedly. “So-” the manifestation of all your self doubts starts, right before you silence it. You now know the actual impact of your actions, and you are able to drill down to your motivations and your thought processes. Now all you have to do is repeat this exercise a couple of hundred times and ta-da!
I got all my impactful stories, but how do I choose what to use.
The selection of what you put down is by far the most challenging task that lies in wait for you, on this journey. In the immortal words of people I see on TikTok, you must align the “vibes” of the school. What does that mean in english? Well simply put, imagine each school is a student at Hogwarts and you, the beloved sorting hat. Each school has some core values (they don't even try to hide it - it's right there on their websites). All that you must do is sort the schools based on the traits that you glean from them. Now once you have that “sorted” (my post MBA goal is definitely not stand-up comedy) you need to sort your stories the same way. You are a complex being (not the number kind, you are very much rational) so it's only fair that you have stories that span a multitude of traits. Let's take Fuqua for example. You hear Fuqua and immediately think “Team Fuqua”. Not only will your cohort be collaborative but also compassionate, genuinely investing in your success even if it isn't convenient for them. There’s no “I” in this space, and if you wish to be a part of this community you should be a similar person as well, so tell them about it. Maybe you were asked to train new employees during COVID, but you saw that some of them really struggled to adapt, so you initiated some personal conversations with them for additional support (hmm, oddly specific example. I wonder why). As long as you are able to think beyond yourself and try to go above and beyond sometimes, you’re probably what Fuqua is looking for. Also here is an in-depth analysis of the school and its values from a licensed nobody, if you want to read.
In the end I shall leave you (yes, it’s finally happening ) with just one note. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were you. You are being asked to condense your entire life’s journey into a few hundred words while demonstrating both your fit for the school and your aptitude. My two cents? Mean every word you write. Take a glass of your favorite beverage, set the ambience, and just open your mind to fall in love with the school. Then channel that inner Jessica Faye Carter and put it all on paper. If you find yourself going down a rabbit hole, take a beat and then come back to it. You will realize how awesome you are, and THAT is when the words will flow.
I wish you are able to capture your unique essence into these application components. Afterall admissions readers do really want to get to know you, and it never hurts getting to know yourself better in the process. And, like I promised, I hope I convinced you that whatever be your dream, you deserve to give it your best shot. All the very best on your journey!
iabhish1509
Joined: 09 Jan 2024
Last visit: 01 Feb 2026
Posts: 125
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 200
Location: India
Schools: NUS BU (A$) Simon '27 (A$$) Tepper (A$)
GPA: 8
16 Nov 2024, 14:17
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This is the best journey cum guide I have ever read. I was looking for some guidance on this part, and then, you dropped a value bomb. Thank you so much!
I have few more questions to ask. Can we connect?
I have few more questions to ask. Can we connect?
