I remember the feeling of walking into my first business class at Fuqua. I am a computer engineer. I understand systems, not strategies. Numbers, not narratives. Business school was, to put it honestly, terrifying, not because I doubted the decision, but because I was walking into a world I had never inhabited before.

Fast forward to today, approaching graduation, and I genuinely wish I could add one more semester. The knowledge never feels like enough. That shift, from terrified to insatiable, is the truest thing I can tell you about what Fuqua did for me.

Uncertainty in My Background as an Engineer

Before Duke, I was what transcripts would call an average student. Not at the bottom, never quite at the top. I had accepted that label the way you accept something when you have stopped questioning. What I did not know yet was that the label was never really about me; it was about the environment I had not yet found.

What surprised me first was not how different business school felt, but how familiar parts of it were. My engineering background was not the liability I feared — there was coding, there was data, there was logic. But the application was entirely new. Instead of learning to write code the way I had in engineering, I was learning to interpret the output, to take what the numbers were saying and translate it into a decision, a strategy, a story that a business could act on.

If you are a fellow engineer reading this, I can already picture your face. I know. But trust me when I say that moment of translation, when technical thinking meets business judgment, is one of the most useful things I have ever learned to do.

And then there were the classes that had nothing to do with my background at all, such as Pricing Analytics. I will not bury the lede: If I could come back to Fuqua every year, just to sit in that class again, I would.

Belonging in Unexpected Ways

There is something that happens mid-lecture, when a professor is deep in an idea, and the room is completely still, where you think: This is the best class I have ever taken. I have had that feeling more times than I can count here. Not once, not occasionally, almost every semester, almost every course. It’s because of how people teach here, and because of who is sitting around you while they do.

Fuqua calls itself a family. I was skeptical of that language before I arrived because it sounded like something all schools say. Then I lived it.

You find your people here in unexpected places. For me, one of them was basketball. Duke basketball is something you think you understand before arriving, but I truly did not know what it meant to be a Blue Devil until I experienced it for myself. You are in a room full of people from entirely different backgrounds, industries, and countries — and you are all losing your minds together over the same game. It is a small thing, maybe. But belonging rarely arrives in moments like that.

Rethinking “Average”

What Fuqua revealed to me — and I use that word deliberately, revealed — is that I was never really average. I was just waiting for the room that would ask the right questions. Here, my inputs were taken seriously. In discussions where I had no formal business training, I found that I could think, that I could contribute, that my perspective had shape and weight. A professor builds on something you said, and suddenly you understand: Oh, I belong here.

If you are considering Fuqua, I will not tell you it is perfect, because no place is. What I will tell you is that this is a place that takes you seriously before you have fully learned to take yourself seriously. It will challenge you in the specific way that good places challenge you, by showing you how much larger you are capable of becoming.

Be curious. Be present. Be willing to be the person in the room who does not have all the answers yet. That person belongs here, too. I know, because that person was me.