A Day in the Life of a First Year MBA Marketing Student

8:00 – 8:30 am: Wake up! As the first year progresses, you get to pick more and more of your classes and set your own schedule. I like to schedule my first class for 9:40 am. It allows me to keep my usual late hours, but I still get to school at a decent time to maximize the day.

9:05 am: If it’s really cold or there’s some sort of precipitation, this is the time when I rush down to the bus stop. If not, I’ll ride my bike.

9:20 am: Arrive at school, put my lunch in one of our handy refrigerators, and drop my extra gear in my locker.

9:40 am: Head to Class! Today in Strategy we’re discussing Blue Ocean Strategy and the latest Capstone results. Capstone is a computer simulated business competition and one of the final deliverables of the class. Working with our assigned teams of 4 to 5 students, we are running a sensor company with stiff competition – our classmates and the computer.

11:10 am: Free from Strategy and now off to Starbucks (across the street) before I settle down in the library. Hopefully today I won’t drop my drink at the door to the building like I did last week when it was raining (not that I could have salvaged it). It was such a waste of the remaining $3.50 on my gift card.

1:00 pm: Take a study/internship search break to eat lunch. The Owen lunch hour is 1 – 2 pm so everyone is either milling about, heading across the street to Panera or Mellow Mushroom, waiting in line for a microwave in the 8:10 Café, or dashing off to a meeting.

2:00 pm: New Product Development with David Owens – probably one of my favorite classes in b-school so far. We’re currently working with Griffin Technology to develop an iPad peripheral. The class takes you from the brainstorming session through prototyping and launching a product. At this point, we’ve already built a prototype of our iPad bag, but haven’t yet settled on a name. Today in class we’re learning about product costs and included watching a video of a guy to estimate material and component cost.

3:30 pm: Done with class! And now I’m off to the library for about an hour to work further on my deliverables for tomorrow’s classes: Survey Design and Managerial Accounting.

5:00 pm: Meet with my Strategy team to discuss Capstone and make our business decisions for the day. Every day at 8:00 pm the instructor will progress the simulation 1 year and we find out how our strategies paid off. But for now, we have a few hours to make our R&D, production, marketing, finance, HR, and TQM decisions.

7:00 – 8:00 pm: Head home. I’ll either walk or ride my bike (or convince an unsuspecting fellow student to give me a lift). One day it was snowing really hard and the traffic was so bad it took people 2 hours to drive 1.5 miles. I walked home in 20 minutes. Therefore, walking > driving. Once home, I’ll finally eat dinner and take a much needed break.

8:01 pm: Check the Capstone simulation results and email my team incessantly.

8:30 pm – 12:00 am: Finish stuff for tomorrow, scour internship postings, write cover letters, reach out to Alumni via email, go to the gym, pay my bills, do laundry or take care of whatever other pressing issues remain that day.

Finally, 12:00 – 2:00 am: I’ll put away my books, get ready for bed, Skype with my family and friends in far off time zones, and hit the sack.

Then I’ll get up tomorrow and do it all again.