You dream of this moment, but you aren’t sure how it’s going to play out. You’ve spent months avoiding your friends and family so you can focus on GMAT problems, write essays, check MBA rankings and compulsively read Poets & Quants articles as well as B-school blogs. You whittle down the list of awesome schools you’d like to attend and spend time zoning off on the train self-interviewing about 1) Why the MBA 2) Why now and 3) Why XYZ school? Your “vacations” from work line up with school visits, diversity weekends, or business school fairs. Then boom, application deadlines arrive and then you wait to learn your fate …

If you are considering business school, or are in the midst of the application process, the above is probably what your life will be like or has been like for a few months. That certainly was how I spent 2010. Now I can hardly believe that I’m a fully matriculated student in my first year at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

After graduating from Brandeis University in 2005, I started my career at Goldman Sachs, but knew I wanted to go to graduate school at some point in the future. That time is now … and my business school journey is well under way.

I’m currently knee deep in my first quarter at Fuqua. Duke kicked off its program with an Orientation on August 1st and follows it with a pre-term of two classes, team activities, and parties. With a total of 445 students in my class there are a lot of new people to meet. Right now, I’m trying to remember what it’s like to be a student. What clubs will I join? What careers will I look into? How will I fare in all of my classes? How When will I make a fool of myself? All of this and more will be coming up.