B-school life is busy, so how do students manage their schedules? McCallen Moser,
Balancing My Extracurricular Commitments
By McCallen Moser
Fuqua provides an endless list of extracurricular commitments students can get involved with during their MBA. There are opportunities to build leadership experience, serve the community, develop personal skills, and much, much more! Often times your first year is spent experiencing a wide variety of these opportunities, and your second year is focused on a shorter list of areas where you’d like to ‘dive deeper.’
Getting your MBA provides an opportunity to explore different interests and build on existing skills. The challenge is weighing the desire to be busy and explore new opportunities with maintaining a healthy balance in your life. For many students, this is a struggle, myself included! Here are three of my main extracurricular commitments during second year and how I worked to balance them.
Marketing Club Co-President
As one of the co-presidents of Fuqua’s professional clubs, you are responsible for overseeing the club’s events, resources, and sponsorships. Together with your co-president and cabinet, you build a strategy for the organization to ensure that the right opportunities are provided to club members. This role is a great way to get leadership experience and give back to the school. For me, I relied heavily on my cabinet members to be successful. This was a great lesson in leadership and delegation because there is simply not time to do it all.
Board of Visitors Student Representative
Each year, two students are selected to sit on Fuqua’s Board of Visitors (BOV) as student representatives of their class. These student reps are charged with being the voice of the students in advising the BOV and administration on important matters. At each board meeting, we host a student panel to address a key topic pertinent to the student body. We spend about three months preparing for this panel by conducting student interviews, preparing our presentation, and working closely with the administration.
FCCP Fellow
Fellows for Fuqua’s Client Consulting Practicum (FCCP) are second-year students who make a year-long commitment to assisting first-year students who are enrolled in the program. As fellows, we are responsible for client diligence, mentorship to our teams, and recruiting student participants. In this position, I learned the importance of communicating often with my teams to stay informed. Keeping myself informed allowed me to prioritize when I needed to step in and when the teams could manage on their own, which allowed me to balance my workload accordingly.
While it is challenging to balance a variety of commitments, it is absolutely possible to engage in everything you want while still maintaining time for personal activities like recruiting and socializing. As you can see with my primary commitments, I learned how to delegate, prioritize, and stretch my focus across various areas. This allowed me to get the personal growth experiences I wanted during my two years at Fuqua while still having time for recruiting, building relationships, and classes.
