One of the most frequently heard phrases when you get here is ‘Team Fuqua.’ At first I thought, ‘Okay, so people here must work in teams a lot.’ But as I’m in my third term, Team Fuqua is beyond just working in teams.

You have two teams during the whole year. You work with your first team for two terms. Then you work with your second team for the remaining three terms. And because almost every class has team assignments, presentations, etc., whether or not you’re used to working in teams, you absolutely have to learn how to collaborate and deal with diversity.

I had a lot of team projects in my undergraduate years, but let’s be honest, Korea isn’t the most diverse place on earth. So the mere diversity of students on my teams is amazing. This was my team in undergrad: Koreans. This was my first team at Fuqua: a Lebanese guitar player/amazing marketer, an Indian student who already had a law degree, a Duke lacrosse player, a sweet/caring Chinese, and me, the only Korean girl in the program.

Also, while I did collaborate in teams during my undergraduate studies, there was no ‘helping each other out.’ We mostly took the classes that we wanted to, and we all had similar knowledge and interests about the subjects we were learning, so there was really no reason for one member to contribute substantially to other members. But here, you HAVE to rely on each other.

I only took one course in accounting during undergrad. In the MMS quantitative business analysis class, I did not know anything, as I was an international studies major. But one of my team members was nice enough to sit down with me and teach me quant. There are also peer tutors, students who volunteer to teach others.

So in the MMS program, you really learn not just how to work in teams, but how to deal with people with different working styles, personalities, interests and backgrounds. There is also that Team Fuqua atmosphere – we all try to help each other out and do our best.

Go Team Fuqua!