My journey to Fuqua has been a fascinating one. When I made the obligatory LinkedIn post about moving to the United States to start business school at Fuqua, I was met with mixed reactions. I got hundreds of congratulations (of course!) but also a lot of: “I thought you were going to do a Ph.D.”

Being a policy advisor and researcher working on economic development, inequality, and public sector reform, I also thought the same! I was worried that I’d be the proverbial fish trying to climb a tree if I ventured into business school. However, I’m glad I made the decision, despite the incredible learning curve so far. Here are some of the surprising lessons I’ve learned in two months!

1. Team Fuqua is Real

The best laid plans…not sure how the rest of it goes. While I anticipated the drastic life changes that moving to the U.S. for an MBA was going to bring, I didn’t expect to be faced with health-related developments shortly after I arrived. I was pretty sick my first couple of weeks, missed a ton of classes, and generally had little to no energy to properly engage in the program that I was investing so much in.

Teni Tayo wearing a yellow t-shirt with Mikun, in a matching t-shirt
Mikun and I at Orientation

However, I’m really grateful for how supportive my fellow Fuquans were! Shout-out to my C-LEAD team for really holding the fort and covering for all my absences. They were super understanding of my situation and gave me as much time as I needed to get better. Also, my friend Mikun deserves a special shout-out for really looking out for me during the period. She would always check in when she noticed I wasn’t in class and was there for me the day that I unexpectedly broke down because I was just so tired and overwhelmed. I’m much better now and I hope to pay everyone’s kindness forward.

2. Learning About Business and Myself

I was all set to learn about business at Fuqua but didn’t realize I’d also be learning about myself. Some courses during the summer term, like Leadership, Ethics and Organization, felt like my own behavior was being x-rayed on the slides. I learned, as one example, that my typical approach of repressing my ideas and opinions in team meetings to help the group reach a consensus faster was actually a bad practice and could prevent the team from being effective. Dissent was good and dissent was important. I had it all backwards!

It was also somewhat jarring but familiar to take the Clifton Strengths Assessment for our careers class and find that none of my five strengths were in the relational category (whoops!). This means none of my five top strengths fell under the relationship-building domain. This more or less reflected the fact that I had spent the last few years investing more in problem-solving and professional contacts and had let other things slip away. But Fuqua is the perfect place to push relationship building higher on my strengths list. On the other hand, it was affirming to see that I had strong ideation, strategic, analytical, and execution skills.

A climbing wall at Triangle Training Center
The wall looks even higher than I remember… but I scaled it!

3. I Can Do It — and So Can You!

Really and truly, you get continuously surprised by things you’re eventually able to do during your MBA. Whether it’s learning Financial Accounting from scratch in a space of six weeks or climbing a wall for the very first time in your life. Well, I had to do both! Even before the wall climbing incident, I had only been to a gym twice in my life and once was by mistake. But really, I have found that the MBA experience has pushed me to push myself, and I’ve been surprised by the obstacles I can overcome.

4. Authentic Connection is Crucial

I’d gotten so used to putting my work ahead of my needs and actively being social. For a long time, my social energy had been more focused on networking as opposed to building friendships. Over the years, I developed a useful extroverted persona that I was able to deploy whenever I had to attend cocktails, speak on panels, or participate in networking events. This was reminiscent of one of my favorite lines from a T. S. Elliot poem, “To prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet”. But all these strategies became useless when I had to show up on a daily basis to class. I went back to “factory settings,” and it’s been interesting building a tribe again from the ground up while being my authentic, quiet self.

Business school teaches you a lot — beyond what you expected to learn. From experience, I can say your strengths become magnified but so do your weaknesses, and all for good reason. You’re able to harness your strengths and you’re also able to work on your weaknesses in a special closed system that provides you with immediate feedback. I’m glad I made the move and looking forward to everything that is to come.