Coming from India, I was entirely unprepared for what buying furniture in the US really meant. My bed, desk, chairs, tables and cabinets arrived as separate limbs, neatly arranged in huge boxes complete with nuts and bolts, ready for me to assemble. Setting up home in the United States is no ordinary affair. The country of drive-ins and order-ins is very difficult to move in to! My first few days in Charlottesville, the scenic town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains that is home to the University of Virginia, involved a lot of fitting and fastening. 

So there I was, GMAT taken, admitted to a Top 15 business school, wearing the cap and preparing to buy the sweatshirt with all the correct logos and appropriate school pride, pottering around my room like an eight-year-old playing with Lego. Believe me, it’s not fun, especially when your bed is ready but you still have one piece left that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. It’s almost as if Wal-Mart packs the wrong screws just to mess with your head. My life was built from the ground up, It took almost a week from the time I had arrived. I made a point of showing every guest who entered my home, that I had assembled those dining chairs. I was proud of that.  

After the furniture hassles, I had to tackle the question of transport in Charlottesville, the university town in which I was living. Having arrived with a solid sense of faith in the American public transport system, that bubble in my head was soon popped. I decided to invest in a bicycle. That wasn’t a smart decision. Charlottesville is fully comprised of hills, which plunge as deep as they rise. I pride myself on my level of fitness but, on that bicycle, I was huffing and puffing by the fourth pedal like an 80-year-old man trying to climb Mount Everest. After a short time of this, I gave up and left my bike to happily collected a little dust. A piece of advice to anyone heading to rural Americal: buy a car. It isn’t expensive. For the price of a second hand Zen, you can get a fantastic second hand Accord.

If you decide not to buy a car, you can always join the permanent stream of people jogging everywhere. People ran all the time in Charlottesville -- the weather is good and the environs are beautiful. Charlottesville is ranked No. 1 town in the U.S. for Quality of Life. Even if you wake up at 3 a.m. and look out of your window, you’ll see someone running past. Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia, said, “Give about two hours every day to exercise, for health must not be sacrificed to learning.  A strong body makes the mind strong.” The people of Charlottesville seem to have taken this to heart. But that isn’t surprising, considering the obsession people at UVA have with Thomas Jefferson. There’s an old joke: how many people from UVA does it take to change a light bulb? Three -- one to do it and two to talk about how Thomas Jefferson would have done it.

Slogging Along on Different Slopes

During our First Year initiation at the Darden Business School, the Dean began his address by saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve made it! You’re all going to retire multimillionaires.’ He then proceeded to give us data to back up his statement. It was definitely heartening to hear this, but it was also important. Top B-Schools don’t come cheap. Most people take huge loans to finance their studies. But, at Darden, you’re reminded everyday that it’s well worth it. Simply because the course is so unbelievably, excruciatingly unspeakably hard. The only other school based on a similar system, the Case Method, is Harvard, and even those guys get Fridays off, which we don’t! Outsiders call Darden a Boot Camp. Insiders call it the Real B-School.

We are proud of how demanding our MBA is. Ask me: I know all about it. I’m not the typical MBA student, especially amongst those from India. I’m not an engineer or an accountant and I don’t have typical corporate experience. I’m a media guy, a former CNN-IBN anchor, who gave up math as fast as I could in the Indian school system. But I’m discovering my own value in the MBA classroom. An MBA has math written all over it and an engineer often sees only numbers everywhere. For example, we once studied a case on hospitals, during which an engineer classmate of mine announced that he had come up with an efficient model for doctors to perform nine surgeries a day. Some of us pointed out that this wasn’t very practical. Our professor turned to the well-meaning engineer and asked him very politely if he would like to be the ninth surgery of the day.

An MBA requires some plain old common sense, untrammelled by technical baggage. Darden calls people like me ‘poets’, and the fact that there is a label for it makes me feel much better. But we poets have come a long way in the few months since we joined. If someone had told me in India that I would soon be able to appraise balance sheets and create discounted cash flow statements, I would probably have punched them in the nose. But then again, I would probably have done that even if they’d told me I’d have to assemble my own sofa-set.

Akash Premsen obtained his MBA degree from the Darden School of Business, in the University of Virginia.