In honour of your admission, I would like to present Julie's Official Do-Before-Darden Starts guide.
- Relax and enjoy life. Get in a trip you've been thinking about, enjoy a hobby, spend time with your friends, read all the books you've been thinking about reading.
- If you're still working, DON'T throw in the towel and coast until your end date. I finished my job on July 17 and had a few weeks off and was immediately thrown into stressing about my internship when International Student Orientation started on August 10. What you want to do while you are still at work is find ways to create measurable improvements at your workplace. You'll want resume bullets that fit the STAR format (Situation/Task, Action, Results... with results quantified wherever possible), so make sure you view the rest of your time at work with a view of building up these resume bullets.
- Follow all the stuff on the Darden checklist. I can't remember it, but all the logistical details are taken care of with that list. For things like housing, there is some incentive to take care of it sooner than later. My roommate and I got the sweetest building in the complex because we signed our lease as soon as we could.
- Relax and enjoy life. I say it again because it's the most important. Darden first year, and especially first semester, has been described as drinking from a fire hose. They are changing up the program next year to make the structure a bit more manageable, but I went the first couple months without reading any non-Darden books, scrambling to find time to call my friends and family back home, and dreaming of time that I could go hiking. It's all worth it, but I just want to emphasize that now is better spent relaxing and enjoying life than attempting to learn everything you possibly can about accounting.
Hope that helps. Congrats again!
1 comment:
The Admissions Office did a great thing in sending an email to applicants with links to current students' blogs. I don't know if other B-schools do the same for their applicants but this has been really helpful to get some insight about the program. As I understand it, the GBEs are optional both first and second year but the locations available are different from one year to the next. I read about the Barcelona GBE in a couple other students' blogs and it sounds like an incredible opportunity. Any thoughts on how the program could add a more international component to the coursework? Do you think there are any benefits to how UVA divides up the year?
-Chad, applicant 2010
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