Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog

I believe there is one thing many of us have in common: We come to Fuqua to think seriously about our careers.

To understand more about their career journeys, I posed the same question to these Fuqua alumni working in MES: What’s been the most challenging or unexpected part of building a career in MES, and how did you navigate it?

When I arrived at Fuqua, I understood that AI was becoming more important, but I had little firsthand experience using it in a meaningful way. Over the course of my first year, that began to change as I became one of the first students to test new AI-enabled classroom and a system that provides custom feedback on how my classmates and I collaborated in our team meetings.

While I expected to learn about business in an emerging market, I did not expect the Global Academic Travel Experience (GATE) to South Africa to challenge my assumptions as deeply as it did. Over the course of two weeks, I encountered a country that was far more complex, dynamic, and hopeful than I had imagined.

As we open the 2026–2027 Duke MBA application, we are introducing several updates designed to support applicants, provide greater clarity, and create additional opportunities to engage with Fuqua.

The F.M. Kirby Impact Prize awards $150,000 annually to a social enterprise with proven impact and a credible path to scale.

ETA means making a commitment to showing up every day and making decisions, often imperfect ones, in service of your customers, your employees, and your business over a long period of time. 

I was drawn to the idea of owning and operating a business, especially in health care, so entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) felt like a natural fit.

The MBA is a lot of things at once: an academic experience, a career accelerator, a social community, and, depending on where you are in life, a personal challenge that runs parallel to everything else happening at home.

As I celebrate graduation, I am proud. Proud of the community I found, the perspective I contributed, and the person I became here.