Darden Students Flock Peru

Hello and Happy 2011 to you all!  I'm finally getting back in the swing of things here in Charlottesville.  Arrived back in town on Saturday, attended an epic men's basketball encounter between UVA and the North Carolina Tar Heels (sadly, a defeat for the Wahoos), and am preparing myself for the next couple weeks of classes and summer internship interviews.

As if there weren't enough good reasons to come to business school, let me add another: long breaks.  When you're working you don't have time to take long vacations, at least in the US where our companies have stingy vacation policies relative to our European counterparts, which makes the Darden 6-week winter break extra valuable.  Most students take a much-needed breather to visit with companies (I took part in a job trek to Washington DC), see family, and prep for interviews.

I at least did the first two, and also took the time for one of my favorite activities: travel.  A couple Darden classmates and I traveled to Peru, visiting Lima, Cusco, Lake Titicaca, and hiked the famous Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.  An incredible trip!

Me with my hiking classmates Anoop and Michael, in the Peruvian Andes

The top of our hike, 4215 meters (13829 feet) above sea level!

While there we met up with 5 of the 6 Darden Peruvians in Lima, who were tremendous hosts in their home country.  Our classmates introduced us to all sorts of delicious cuisine and were incredibly gracious with their time.

Michael and I surrounded by our Peruvian classmates Antonio, Ariana, Javier, and Jaime

After a wonderful dim sum meal in Lima with Dardenites Jaime and Melissa (Peru), and Michael (USA)

We also grabbed dinner and drinks with a group of Darden SYs (Second Years) in Lima who had just come from Machu Picchu and were reminiscing about their trip.  We ate a great meal at one of Lima's finest restaurants named Rafael and talked about the far more relaxing life of a SY with a full-time job lined up.

Fine dining for Darden students in Lima.  Robert (SY), Michael (FY), me, Hilary (SY), and Danielle (SY)

My group wasn't planning on running into anyone else we knew, so what a surprise we felt when we bumped into another group of Darden SYs traveling in our boat on Lake Titicaca!  They had traveled there from Bolivia and onward to Cusco and Machu Picchu.  At a business school of about 650 students, what are the odds that you run into colleagues in another hemisphere?!  Not high, I imagine, but this experience speaks to the international and globally-minded nature of the Darden student body.  I'm delighted and amazed.

Darden Energy Club nerds (Britt and me) admire a solar energy panel on the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca.

Lunch on Isle Taquile.  Michael (FY), Sarah (SY), Michael (SY), Brendan (UVA law), Britt (SY), and me.

Darden Faculty Profile: Casey Lichtendahl

Welcome to the first of what I hope will become a series of interviews with Darden’s top rated business school faculty!  For my inaugural profile I begin with Casey Lichtendahl, one of the teachers for first-year Decision Analysis.  “D.A.”, as it’s known here at Darden, serves as a rite of passage for many students who had never used a regression or an Excel spreadsheet in their pre-Darden lives.

Casey Lichtendahl

JH: Did you know that you have a fan club on Facebook?

CL: Yes, but I’ve never used Facebook and I’m not a fan of all this social media.  We’re losing out on face-to-face interactions such as what we are doing in this office right now.  It’s as if we are trading baseball cards, but we’re more than baseball cards as people.

JH: So have you also shunned “The Social Network”?

CL: I haven’t seen that movie, but I would like to.  It sounds like a good story about the entrepreneurial experience.

JH: Speaking of entrepreneurial experience, you have some yourself, co-founding Tradewinds Ice Tea in the early 90’s.  Any advice for Darden students looking to become entrepreneurs?

CL: I started Tradewinds with my family.  We recently sold off Tradewinds to Sweet Leaf Tea in Texas, and they plan on distributing it with Nestle so I’m not in the tea business any longer.

Having grown up in and around a family business, I had always found it hard to separate our family life from the work we were doing.  I liked that we were developing a tangible product, ice tea, and I enjoyed designing new flavors and working on labels for the bottles.  Operating in a family dynamic is difficult – you are business partners as well as close relatives.  I think in that environment it is important to find ways to create space to be analytical and objective.  With my father and sister involved with Tradewinds, I found that to be challenging.

JH: Why did you decide to leave your business to become a professor?

CL: Coming to business school was the change factor for me.  Probably not too many current students here realize this, but I received an MBA from Darden in 1998.  I came to business school wanting to increase my ability to add value to the family business.  Initially, I didn’t have an interest in the course material in just an academic setting.

In my first year at Darden, I took what was called Quantitative Analysis (now Decision Analysis), and was so turned on by the material that at the end of my first year I was thinking about a PhD.  After I graduated I returned to the family business for a year and tried to translate as much of my MBA experience as I could into improving the business.  I then started at a master’s program at Stanford as I needed more of a quant background to apply to doctoral programs, then I did my PhD at Duke, where I taught D.A. for economics undergrads before returning to Darden four years ago.

JH: Quite an unusual path!

CL: I’m actually not the only member of the faculty with a Darden MBA.  Professors Greg Fairchild and Tim Laseter studied here as well.

JH: In what ways has Darden changed since you were a student here?

CL: The focus on recruiting is much stronger now.  It is a bigger part of what students spend their time doing.  There were corporate briefings going on when I was here, but not to this degree.  I estimate there are about twice as many now.

The curriculum was also structured differently back then.  Instead of the term structure which the school has now, a first-year would just start with “Core”, and topics would come and go in the curriculum throughout the year.  All the classes would build on one another, and D.A. was smattered about with all the other classes.

In addition, the school was smaller back then.  We had four first-year sections instead of five.

JH: Do you still stay in touch with members of your learning team?

CL: I actually have had two of my old learning team members stop by my office.  They are both recruiting managers at their companies now.

Thankfully for many, well beyond the level of math needed to be successful in D.A.!

JH: What does Casey Lichtendahl do when he’s not teaching classes?

CL: This is what I’m working on right now.  [Casey pulls out a document from his desk titled “Habit Formation from Correlation Aversion”]

I’m writing this with my colleagues Raul Chao and Sam Bodily.  We’re hoping to get this published in the journal Operations Research.  Stuff like this is important for the school as it keeps the faculty sharp – we keep up with innovations in the field.

I find that I have a good balance here between my teaching load and research.  While I am teaching a class I put my research on hold.

JH: Have you ever had a day in which you wish you were lecturing rather than teaching using the case method?

CL: No, I really prefer doing things the Darden way.  The case method was brought to Darden by its first dean, Charles Abbott, who had been on faculty at Harvard.  Abbott believed that when there is ambiguity in how to solve a problem, you need students to discuss the possibilities in detail.  You need conversation about the problem spilling over outside of the classroom.   Relying on a single set of answers does not achieve the deepest level of learning.

When I was teaching at Duke I found it hard to keep students’ interest while going through a slide deck.  I’m really glad I don’t get to teach that way here.

JH: But there must be some days where you are thinking, “These students just don’t get it.”

CL: As you saw in class, sometimes an appeal to authority is necessary.  Sometimes we need to reach back to the assigned tech note to reexamine the math behind the business idea.  I don’t want deciphering a tech note to get in the way of understanding an important concept in the case.  I think it is fine, for example, to tell students what three or four statistics are most important in understanding the output of a regression.

When not at Darden, Casey enjoys spending time in Grand Teton National Park

JH: What’s the most unusual thing you ever had happen in one of your classes?

CL: There was a time when I ended up on the “Chips & Quips” page of the Cold Call Chronicle.  I was in class trying to demonstrate the Central Limit Theorem with a coin flip example.  I asked a student if he wanted to bet on the outcome of one coin flip, or on the average of two flips.  To make this a little more dramatic, I told the student that if the coin lands “heads” you live and “tails” you die.

The student, of course, asked me, “What is the outcome in the middle?”  I hadn’t really thought through the problem beforehand, and clearly you can’t end up 50% dead – I needed to think of something else.  So I said, “I’m going to punch you in the face really hard.”

Thankfully, I didn’t get to punch the student, but I really hope I never end up in “Chips & Quips” again.

JH: The holidays are upon us now in the United States.  Any shopping tips?

CL: Well, I rely on my wife to do all of the shopping, so I don’t buy too many gifts myself.  Of course, I need to go to the store personally for her presents, and I’m very much a last minute shopper.  I usually buy my wife something from Best Buy.  For her birthday I bought her an iPhone because she’s not very tech-savvy, and she loves that thing.

One rule I go by is: The more utilitarian the gift, the less romantically appealing.  You might be thinking about buying your loved one a weed eater…NO!  Absolutely not!  No kitchen gear, no appliances, no pots and pans, no knives!  These gifts are insulting on many levels.

JH: My mother loves those types of gifts.

CL: I doubt you have a romantic relationship with her.

Happy students celebrate passing Term 1 D.A. with "x hats" and "dummy variables"

JH: If you could pick only one theme of Decision Analysis that your students would remember in the business world, what would it be?

CL: The most important thing to remember in any decision analysis is to frame the decision properly.  Make sure you lay out all of the alternatives, the uncertainties, and the values of different consequences downstream from the initial decision.  Often when you do this you find you don’t even need to crank through the numbers to decide.

For instance, you might frame your choices as A and B, but downstream of B you might be able to make another decision which offsets the effect of a bad outcome, should it happen.  Now B completely dominates A.  By considering the big structural properties of the problem, you’ve cut short any analysis.  You don’t even need to build a spreadsheet model or do any hardcore number-crunching.

If you can’t make this tradeoff in your head after you’ve talked informally, but rigorously, about the decision, now you can go to the spreadsheet.  If you’re doing any numerical analysis, you need to synthesize your conclusions into pictures.  You need to look at the data graphically.

Hard to believe that we've come to the end of the first semester at Darden!  Most of the students are gone now and an unusual cold snap has descended upon Charlottesville.  I will be away for a couple weeks (follow me on my travel blog if you like), but back blogging to all of you in the new year.  Happy holidays!

Black November -- Pitch Black or a Shade of Gray?

"This shirt is black...NOT!" ~ Borat

About a week or two into my Darden experience I first heard mention of the phrase "Black November", initially mentioned casually by members of the Career Development Center, then in my conversations with second-years. The implication seemingly was that we needed to prepare for some sort of business school apocalypse, with recommended courses of action including writing all of our cover letters and networking with all possible company contacts in September, stocking up on canned foods, boarding up our windows, and assuring our friends that just because we wouldn't be speaking to them for 30 days didn't mean we were dead.

In a way, they all were right. First of all, Darden does lie in the Northern Hemisphere, meaning that it is literally darker these days. Today saw a mere 9 hours and 45 minutes of daylight in Charlottesville, and extra gloomy daylight at that as we had overcast skies and drizzle all day today.

If I took a measurement right now on the Darden intensity meter, where:

1 is "still going to the gym and buying my own groceries"
5 is "down to 6 hours of sleep a night"
10 is "keeling over from physical pain"

...I'd estimate that most first-years right now are at about a 7 or an 8. The last four months have seen a gradual cranking up of this dial to the point where now we face a crush of deadlines related to exams, job searches, and the end of the calendar year. I do see my friends on the town a fair bit less now than I used to. Our old Thursday night social activities have greatly diminished. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I spent most of my time at home catching up on emails, coursework, and other unfinished school tasks, much to the dismay of my parents and siblings. Throw in my 10-year high school reunion and my family didn't see much of me at all.

This is not to say that Darden wasn't intense at the beginning. I received an email recently from a former coworker asking me if I was "surviving the Harvard-Bootcamp-of-the-South", and his portrayal of Darden wasn't entirely inaccurate. Darden's reputation is that of a very hard working business school, and with this reputation I definitely agree. The beginning of Darden felt very intense too, but in hindsight we weren't yet confronted with that many obstacles. You get acclimated to the intensity over time, at which point the Darden first year throws more at you and you frantically struggle to keep your head above water.

My walk home from Darden now looks rather dismal

Having survived this month, however, I don't think November was entirely black. Or as Borat might joke, "This month is black...NOT!" The simple truth is that business school is what you make of it. If you de-commit from joining activities, shun the ever-present corporate recruiters, refrain from networking your butt off to make job interview closed lists, and content yourself with average grades, you're unlikely to be overwhelmed here.

And I don't think that packed schedules are unique to Darden students. The holidays are a stressful time for many people, not just those at Darden. At other top-tier business schools, my friends all invariably seem to be busy, busy, busy. Business school is like a good buffet -- you walk through continually piling delicious foods onto your plate, but once you reach the end of the line your plate is overwhelmed by a mountain of stuff, and you're now sad that you haven't left room for dessert. You're going to need to leave something unfinished because there is no way you can eat everything you've selected.

Darden students choose to be busy. They choose to pursue lucrative investment banking and consulting jobs, knowing well ahead of time the rigors of these recruiting processes. They choose to network endlessly to build a group of professional contacts which will get them a step ahead in building careers. They choose to join clubs and get involved with volunteer projects. They choose to be prepared for case discussions and exams.

The overwhelming part about November is that all these activities converge simultaneously to demand extraordinary amounts of your time. Choosing which to pass up becomes very difficult. You still want a great summer job, but you still want to be prepared for the cold call, but you still want to raise funds for the local food bank, but you still want to sleep. Deciding which to eliminate can, at times, feel like choosing which of your sons to kill. Most students still try to do it all (except the sleep part, I think we've all given up on that).

Keeping a long-term perspective, though, I think we'll find that all this difficult work was worth the struggle. One look at the refreshed second-years here reveals that these hectic times do pass, and the wisdom we learn this month will help us focus our priorities in the world of business. Darden's mission is "to improve society by developing leaders in the world of practical affairs," and this time management crash course will be a valuable, practical developmental lesson for all of us.

Time for Your Questions!

Reaching into Ye Olde Mailbag to answer a few interesting questions I recently received from a prospective Darden student:

Can you tell me more about the classes, clubs, and culture at Darden in respect to your experience and interests?

First, a little background on me for those who didn't read my first Darden blog post.  I came to Darden after working for six years at an energy trading company in northern Virginia, and prior to that attended MIT where I studied economics. My background is heavily analytical but in a narrow sense of analyzing the risks and returns of financial contracts in North American power markets.  I wanted to expand my breadth of knowledge in an MBA program.

Darden has always been known for its very strong general management curriculum.  In fact, this year the Financial Times ranked Darden #1 in the world in the general management specialty, ahead of an ivy-covered school up in Cambridge, Mass.  I didn't want to specialize deeply at business school and I find that Darden discourages this, at least in the first year, by sending all of its students through a rigorous curriculum of core classes.  Darden strongly emphasizes a holistic approach to managing an enterprise.

In addition to wanting breadth over depth, I also was drawn to Darden by its superlative faculty.  In my undergraduate experience, most professors only emerged to lecture, then retreated back into their research labs.  By contrast, the professors here are extremely approachable, and most keep an "open door" policy over in the faculty building.  Without question, their top priority is to help you learn, and students commonly preserve relationships with faculty well after classes.  You even will see faculty show up to Darden Cup events.  No surprise, then, that Darden's high-touch faculty were ranked #1 in this fall's Princeton Review ranking.

Furthermore, I was drawn to Darden by the case method.  Admittedly, it's an inefficient means of learning, requiring more preparation than other approaches, but I find it equally if not more effective.  I have a "learning by doing" style and tend to lose interest with a lecture approach.  In fact, while visiting a competing school I actually fell asleep in a dry post-lunch marketing lecture.  The case method forces me to stay on my toes and find a way to contribute to the class discussion.  The most rewarding learning experiences here come when either I'm able to convince a student of a better approach to a business problem or when another student corrects my mistake.  You won't get fooled twice when you see a similar problem in the real world!

Culturally, Darden is a very tight-knit community, I think by virtue of being in a smaller town and also due to the types of students who get admitted here. Students at Darden are very interested in helping one another, be it with schoolwork, recruiting, or just helping with personal issues -- you should see how much free food my roommate has received after having his leg wrapped in a cast.  During my undergrad I felt that MIT was a cold, harsh environment, and I thrive on the support I receive from my classmates at Darden.  The environment here resembles a friendly town in the Midwest, like those near where I grew up.

Finally, there are many students here who share my interest in the energy industry.  The Darden Energy Club draws in speakers from industry who teach students about energy topics, and Net Impact actively engages the student body on sustainability issues.  Both set up opportunities for students to meet important industry players in a small setting. For example, Net Impact arranged a meeting for a group of interested students with the CEO of Gevo, maker of a next-gen biofuel / ethanol killer.  Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.  Right now the two clubs are working jointly to set up a Sustainability and Renewable Energy forum at Darden in February, and so far I've been able to bring in an associate at enXco and an executive director at NextEra, both Darden alums.  Again, pretty cool!!

Can you speak to the career opportunities?

Very broad.  A who's who of Fortune 500 companies have appeared on Grounds this fall, ranging from General Electric to Google to Proctor and Gamble to Amazon to DuPont. And of course there's all the big name consulting firms and I-banks.  Even though the overall job picture in the US still looks pitiful, from what I've seen MBA recruiting has been strong this fall.  If you want to land that big marketing job with the big boys, Darden can certainly help place you in a position to nab it (with a lot of hard work on your part, of course).

The Pillsbury Doughboy visits Darden!
(thank you General Mills)

If you're like me, focusing on smaller renewable energy companies, the Darden alumni network has been very helpful.  My focus has been primarily off-grounds with alumni who have been very willing to spend 30 minutes on the phone talking about what they do.  I'm pleasantly surprised at how simply I've been able to build up a network of industry contacts, which should pay off when my job search becomes particularly intense.

Broadly speaking, any application tips?

For any business school application, not just Darden, you need to think deeply about how you fit with the school and its core values.  These schools at the top of the heap are just so darn competitive that if you aren't able to demonstrate that fit in your application, your application gets tossed quickly into the "no" pile.  I don't care how high your GMAT score is or how great your past experience is -- you just won't cut it.

For Darden in particular, I think you need to show how you fit in with what Dean Bruner calls "high touch, high tone, high energy".  The dean can describe this more eloquently than I can in his blog (and this blogger also has a clear characterization), but I'll summarize as follows: you must show through your past experiences how you took action to build a stronger community.  Darden wants driven people, but not those driven to excel at the expense of others. Darden needs students who will give much of themselves for the sake of the group, and you must express a genuine interest in being actively involved here.



(Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  Feel free to keep the questions coming.  I can be reached at HarrisJ12@darden.virginia.edu)

Feels Like "CEO Month" at Darden

One of the cool aspects of being at a top business school that often gets overlooked is the exposure you get to "C-level" executives* in big business. These titans of industry descend upon Charlottesville to teach lessons about general management which just don't come out on paper. There's a different feel to a case discussion when the chief protagonist is in the room!

In my little world before business school, I sat everyday in a suburban office building, analyzing the movements of power markets.  It was good work, but the world of corporate America felt remote.  At Darden, this is certainly not true!

Tomorrow's speaker: Kevin Sharer from Amgen

This month at school has been packed with business leaders:

• First, Eric Spiegel, the President and CEO of Siemens, the biggest little German electronics manufacturer you've probably never heard of (only a mere $98 billion company), who spoke about his transition from being a lifetime consultant to overseeing the operations of 405,000 employees in 190 countries.
• Next, Wendell Weeks, Chairman and CEO of Corning, who spoke to students about managing breakthrough innovation at one of America's last-standing technology manufacturers.  A very candid speaker who provided a refreshing long-term perspective to investment in a world which often seems to value quarterly earnings more than great products (let's just say Wendell doesn't like Fidelity).
• The following day, Kevin Plank, CEO and Chairman of Under Armour.  Kevin told the remarkable story of a man who 15 years ago turned an idea for a non-cotton athletic undershirt into a business operated out of his mother's basement, then transformed it into a multinational company crossing $1 billion in sales this year.  Their advertising also pumps you up..."We Must Protect This House!"
• Today, Bill Hawkins, CEO of Medtronic, the world's largest medical device manufacturer.  He shared his lessons on leadership (start by surrounding yourself with a smart, diverse group people) and personal fulfillment (have fun!), and also talked about his company's challenges in continuing to develop life-saving products in the highly politicized health care industry.  A Darden alum!
• To cap it off, tomorrow we have Kevin Sharer, Chairman and CEO of Amgen, the world's largest biotech pharma company.  Today he and Bill grabbed lunch together at Darden -- to be a fly on the wall for that discussion!  Tomorrow's chat is titled "Healthcare, Leadership and Life".  Should be great!

In my first three months at Darden, we've also received top executives from Target, American Express, Samsung, Cargill, and DuPont, just to name a few top companies.

Preparing for cases can get a little dull sometimes, and it's a treat to take a break to hear the perspectives of these guys.  Their lessons might sound like common sense -- follow your passions, take risks, step out of your comfort zone, believe in yourself -- but clearly they work!

*For those of you who don't know what "C-level" means (as I didn't until about a year ago), it's corporate lingo for the Chiefs: Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), etc.

Feel Better Aaron!

In case those of you at Darden haven't noticed, my roommate Aaron picked up a not so pleasant injury at Darden Cup football on Saturday...

Ruptured Achilles tendon.  Ouch!  And he wasn't the only one.  Monday morning's walking wounded also included a dislocated finger and a wrapped up hand with some bone chips potentially locked inside.  Not to mention the other three first-year students already on crutches, and we have something of an injury epidemic on grounds.

Make sure to look out for one another so we don't have any more mishaps, particularly as we enter the high cocktail season around the holidays.  Clearly we're all not 21 years old anymore, so make sure you warm up properly before you exercise, especially as the mercury drops in the thermometer.  Also, if you see someone who took a knock, offer a helping hand.  I'm sure your kind gesture will be appreciated!

Everything I Needed To Know About Time Management I Learned In My Operations Course

I enjoy being able to extend the lessons from my coursework to the mundane details of my everyday life. Perhaps this is just the inner nerd in me thinking creatively while getting bored doing something else, but I think there is a personal benefit to such thinking. If I can break my course material out of the theoretical business context within which it resides in the classroom, I'm able to master the material better. Just how my mind works.

Professor Raul Chao

Recently in Term 2 I finished a required first-year course in Operations, a study of the underlying processes by which firms create and deliver value. Like nearly all classes at Darden, we were taught by a great member of the faculty, Raul Chao. Raul excelled because he insisted that his students get their heads out of their spreadsheets and understand the processes at a high level.

A day or two into the class, I realized that I could model my life as a process. Rather cold, perhaps, but let me explain. A process is defined as the method by which inputs are transformed into outputs. At a manufacturer, a process might take raw materials and convert these into widgets. By making this process more efficient, the manufacturer could produce more widgets in less time.

Let's extend this to my life by analyzing my daily "bed-to-school process". My alarm rings, I take a shower, brush my teeth, shave, get dressed, eat breakfast, and walk to Darden. I've been able to make this process more efficient in several ways. For instance, I pack my bag before going to bed at night so I'm not stumbling around looking for all my notes in the haze of the morning. I also eat a quick breakfast of yogurt, fruit and cereal. One of my roommates eats eggs every morning, but I don't know how he finds the time to cook them. I'm not one to hit the snooze button...need to get every minute of sleep I can! I don't check emails before leaving as I can read them on my smartphone while walking to class.

So I'm fairly efficient at getting from home to school, especially after I've consumed my first morning cup of coffee. But what about the rest of my life? You realize quickly at business school that the experience is what you make of it -- you can't possibly make enough time to do everything. You can study your butt off, you can socialize your butt off, or you can try to balance. The key is to not waste time on the little things so you have enough time to dedicate to the priorities which are most important to you.

In Operations, you persistently attempt to identify the "bottleneck" in your process, the element which limits the capacity. In my life, the bottleneck is pretty clearly...me. I can only read and understand cases at a certain rate. If I spend more time studying then I have less time to go to the pub and make new friends. Both studying and socializing get in the way of finding a summer job.

Operations managers also spend a substantial amount of time on inventory management. If I become less efficient at processing the tasks in my life, stuff piles up. "Inventory" in my case might mean emails to send, companies to research for summer jobs, cases and tech notes to read, or friends and family to call. If I take on too many projects at school, my utilization increases and more things wait to get accomplished. As the unpredictability of arrival of tasks increases, the inventory level increases. Basic queuing theory!

Yesterday's schedule

You spend a couple days in Operations learning some Japanese. "Muda" is waste, non-value-adding activity in the process. "Kaizen" is the idea of continual improvement in the process. A "kanban" is a scheduling system which manages information and material flow in the process. In my case, the muda could be the time spent walking home between school and learning team. If I bring the next day's cases with me to Darden, I save 20 minutes to study and catch up. My Outlook task list serves as my kanban, making sure that I prioritize key to-dos. My learning team embraced kaizen when we decided to split the labor of preparing cases...there just isn't enough time in a day to individually prepare all the cases AND do all the networking, socializing, and exercising you need.

Proper time management is essential in business school. Make sure you've mastered your own system before you apply.