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.

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.

I was ready to start my MBA when I received life-shattering news.

Champions of Team Fuqua who choose to invest a lot of energy into the community are the reason we really believe in our ability to thrive in the long term.

As I navigated the admissions process, I felt that Fuqua had a better infrastructure in place for students interested in recruiting beyond the traditional paths.

We got involved with Net Impact because it was a community of like-minded individuals that we could learn from while gaining access to more relevant recruiting and professional resources.

Each role I held gave me a lesson that didn’t just prepare me for an MBA — it clarified why an MBA was the right next step.

Before AI became critical to my work, Fuqua had already taught me a lot about leadership, patience, failure, and resilience.

I’m thankful to learn alongside others who understand that business and climate cannot be disentangled.