As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent last weekend visiting the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Since there’s a lot of things I want to share and remember, I’m going to split the event into a couple of posts.
On Friday morning, I took a red eye out to DC, this time flying into Reagan National (DCA) instead of Dulles. The advantage of flying into DCA is that the metros goes directly to College Park. No fuss and cheap. From the CP-UMD metro stop, I took the campus shuttle (free) to the student union (The Stamp) which is in the middle of campus. I stopped by the technology building to scope out the laptop prices and bought Chick Fil A at the food court. From there I walked to the the Mariott which was about a 10 minute walk.
My first official AWS event was a 1 on 1 meeting with a financial aid staff member. We (Dustin and I) basically went through the odds and ends of financing an MBA. After the financial aid session, I walked back to The Stamp to buy some Terp schwag. I ended up buying a turkey sandwich instead from the hippy co-op store and carried it back half exposed to my hotel room.
Later that night, I went to HH where I met about 6~7 of the prospective students and a couple of first and second year students. We caravanned down to Route 1, the main strip in CP, to RJ Bentleys. This was pretty much the start of the whole get to meet new people phase of things. Where are you from? Have you decided? What do you want to do? Where do you live? Etc, etc. To my suprise, I thought I would have gotten tired from meeting so many new people but I was genuinely interested in all the people that I met. If I’m going to go to school with these people, I better get to know them learn what they’re all about.
The prospective Smith students I met that day also gave me a glimpse into the diverse set of backgrounds that I’ll be part of. A guy from Arkansas who works in Honduras. A strong safety from Duke. A guy who works in Japan but grew up in CP. All this diversity should make for good times in the classroom.
Besides meeting the other prospective students, we also drowned the current students with every question we could ask. What are the good places to eat? Where are the cool places to live? How’s the commute? How do you like school? What did you do during snowmageddon? It was very informative and informal. If anyone is looking into a school, get in touch with a student because they are the ones that are most likely going to give you the most shpielish answer.
After HH concluded, I went back to my hotel room and decided to eat dinner down @ the bar/lounge. Long story short, I waited for 45 minutes without getting my food and ended up walking 15 minutes down this cold and lonely road to some hole in the wall restaurant. The day could have ended better, but the positive tones I got from mypotential future classmates and the current students let me go to sleep in peace.
Oh, and I got my decision from Vandy. In. 