Fortunato_NC's Journal: Fuqua CCMBA - Closing Thoughts on Term 1, Term 2 Pre-Reading

Towards the end of last week, our grades finally trickled in, and despite a disappointing performance on my last managerial effectiveness assignment, I still eked out the pair of "SP" grades I was hoping for. So, for the next term, at least, I'll be able to say that I'm carrying a 4.0 average at Duke.

The end of the term also means the beginning of a new term, which means new textbooks and pre-reading. This term, we're tackling Microeconomics and Decision Models, both of which were among my favorite subjects in undergrad. I actually took UW's Microeconomics class for MBA students as an undergrad, so I'm pretty familiar with game theory. I don't expect this to be just a simple review, however, and the pre-reading seems to indicate that we'll be digging a lot deeper in this class than we did at UW. Decision Models, however, looks to cover mostly the same gound as UW's undergrad decision sciences courses.

In addition to coursework, there will be some interesting side activities at our upcoming residency. We're going to attend two Duke football games and do some tailgating. I'm pretty excited about that, even though Duke's football team is pretty bad, and is playing two of the ACC's upper tier teams in Georgia Tech and Florida State. We're also holding an informal meeting of our entrepreneurs board, during which we'll discuss a classmate's business idea, and how early-stage ventures attract customers. I've been tapped to lead the discussion, and hope that it leads to future meetings, and hopefully some future business success!

At the end of the weekend is Fest-of-F's, a "spouses weekend" event where the families of our class join us in attending a football game, downing a few beers, and generally enhancing the sense of community around the program. My wife will be coming up for this, and it should be interesting to see her in the spouse role, when she was the student last year!

Speaking of the wife, she is about to wrap up Term 6 in her program - only 2 terms left! Pretty soon, she'll be making the transition to her post-MBA career, and we'll see how this $85,000 investment pays off. When all is said and done, we'll have $100K+ of student loans in the family, and will be making roughly an extra mortgage payment per month, so we need to see a serious return on this investment.