Nearly 40% of the Class of 2012 at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business is made up of international students, and 50 countries are represented. The Duke International Office and the Duke International House offer many resources to assist international students with issues associated with acclimating to, studying in and working in the United States, including visa applications and processing. In addition, the Language Institute at Fuqua is designed to prepare incoming international students for the MBA experience at the school. According to the institute’s site, as part of the four-phase program, which is held before the MBA curriculum begins, “Students are given opportunities to refine their English language skills through practice and experiential learning. Students take part in a comprehensive ten-day program of lectures, case presentations, writing exercises and a variety of assignments that get them ready for the rigors of graduate school. This is followed by five weeks of monitoring students’ progress once they start school, with further opportunities for individualized support and learning.” One first year mbaMission interviewed whose time at Fuqua was his first experience in the United States longer than two weeks said, “We all bonded during the Language Institute and met many classmates who knew what we were all going through.”

For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at Duke Fuqua and 15 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Katherine Schipper (“Financial Accounting”) is the Thomas F. Keller Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Law at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and usually teaches the MBA program’s core accounting course, “Financial Accounting.” Schipper was editor of the Journal of Accounting Research for many years and was also a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board from 2001 to 2006, before joining Fuqua. In 2007, Schipper was the first woman inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame, which has inducted only 85 people since it was established. A second-year student we interviewed who had taken the course “Global Institutions and Environment” with Schipper (co-taught by Professor Jennifer Francis) said, “She was outstanding. It was amazing to have professors of their caliber teaching the first class we experienced at Fuqua.” Another second year told us, “I was really nervous about accounting, but she made it very accessible, and even occasionally fun.”

For more information about Duke Fuqua and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Multiple students interviewed by mbaMission described Campbell Harvey (“Global Asset Allocation” and “Emerging Markets Corporate Finance”), known as simply “Cam,” as an “amazing” professor, and one second-year remarked that “he alone should give Fuqua a place in the top ten as a go-to school for finance.” Harvey has published more than 100 scholarly articles, is editor of The Journal of Finance and serves on both the board of directors and the executive committee for the American Finance Association. His hypertextual finance glossary—which includes more than 8,000 entries and 18,000 hyperlinks—has been covered, linked to, and cited by the New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, CNNMoney, and Yahoo. In addition, Harvey coauthored the book version of The New York Times Dictionary of Money and Investing: The Essential A-to-Z Guide to the Language of the New Market, published in 2002 (Times Books), with Pulitzer Prize–winner Gretchen Morgenson. An alumnus mbaMission interviewed said that Harvey was “one of the best professors I had,” adding that he is “very tough, very brilliant and very good at explaining things.”

For more information about Duke Fuqua and 14 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Fuqua Partners is an organization made up of students’ wives, husbands, and/or other significant others who come to Durham while the students complete the MBA program at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Twenty-four percent of the students in Fuqua’s Class of 2012 are married, and according to a first-year student with whom we spoke, an additional estimated 25% are in serious relationships. According to the club’s Web site, partner members can enjoy “social activities, community activities, and events to develop strong relationships between the Partners themselves and the Fuqua community.” A club officer told mbaMission that attendance at events can vary greatly, explaining that “a manicure/pedicure party may only attract 10 people, whereas a barbecue may attract 100.”

One second-year student with a partner told mbaMission, “Fuqua does a really, really good job of integrating everybody,” and another noted, “Everyone’s invited to everything.” One first year we interviewed commented that the programs and the community support provided to partners were “very important” elements in his evaluation of MBA programs, and that “Fuqua had the appeal that [my wife] and many others’ partners were all coming to the area for the first time, and could build a network together, as opposed to trying to contend with trying to join existing cliques.”

Another married first-year student told us, “The key thing here is the strength of the partners’ network. For example, [at] Blue Devils weekend, which is a ‘sell’ weekend for admitted applicants, I signed in, and my wife signed in separately and had her own bag of goodies waiting for her. [Partners] are really interwoven here; as much as possible, they’re invited to many of the events.” He added that at Fuqua, partners “have their own activities—running clubs and book clubs.” Yet another first-year student told mbaMission he felt that Fuqua is “hands-down the best for partners” of all the schools he considered and that this was one of the two primary reasons he applied.

For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at Duke Fuqua and 14 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

1. Describe your vision for your career and your inspiration for pursuing this career path.

In many ways, Fuqua’s essay questions one and three constitute the components of a classic Personal Statement. And, because Personal Statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge, via our online store. Please feel free to download your copy today.

All of that written, you will notice that Fuqua does not explicitly ask about your short- and long-term career goals but instead asks about your “vision for your career.” Short- and long-term goals can be somewhat confining, but Fuqua instead offers you some flexibility and allows you to provide a broader and more reasoned compendium of your objectives and the path you hope to take to reach them. In some ways, this question is more challenging than a traditional “goal statement,” because you will need to be less practical and more profound in discussing your future.

2. How will your background, values, and non-work activities enhance the experience of other Duke MBA students and add value to Fuqua’s diverse culture?

This essay is broad and sweeping in nature, so it allows you to strategically showcase a mix of your greatest community and personal strengths. You should attempt to select a diversity of experiences and present them in such a way that you will be able to relate them back to your ability to contribute in a variety of areas—for example, in the classroom, study teams and the community at large. A successful essay will not only detail your personality/experiences, but also clearly illustrate how you will “enhance” Fuqua—meaning that it will demonstrate your intimate understanding of and connection to the Fuqua culture/experience.

3. Why Duke? (If you are interested in a specific concentration, joint degree, clubs or activities, please discuss how you would contribute to these in this essay.)

Please consult our analysis of essay one as it encompasses a response to essays one and three. For a thorough exploration of Duke’s academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Students and administration members alike sing the praises of Fuqua’s “fun” and “engaging” marketing professor Gavan Fitzsimons (“Marketing Strategy,” “Entrepreneurial Marketing,” and “Consumer Behavior”), who recently spearheaded the creation of the Duke/Synovate Shopper Insights Center for Leadership and Innovation (January 2011). Fitzsimons is the R. David Thomas Professor of Marketing and Psychology at Fuqua; his work, which focuses on the ways in which consumers are subconsciously influenced, has been published and popularized in prestigious academic journals and media outlets from the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research to NPR, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. Fitzsimons serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.

For more information about Duke Fuqua and 13 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Every Friday evening, students, professors and administrators at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business meet for drinks and snacks at the Fox Center for Fuqua Fridays. One second year told mbaMission, “Fuqua Friday’s a really great way to bring everyone together in the same place. It provides a chance to unwind.”  Fuqua Friday is the primary regular event where everyone comes together—one-half to three-quarters of the student body usually attends. Some Fuqua Fridays have themes, such as Casino Night, a version of television’s “Top Chef” or “Iron Chef,” an International Food Festival and Green Week.

At the end of each term, students let off steam at an End-of-Term Party organized by the MBA Association—including a Halloween party, a luau and a black-tie optional party. These events sometimes draw as many as 500 attendees, if not more. One second-year student told mbaMission, the “end-of-term parties are crazy. [They’re] a huge part of our fabric, and a way to spend social time bonding with people you might not see outside of class. They’re a huge reason why I love this school.”

For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at Duke Fuqua and 13 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Professor Dan Ariely’s “Behavioral Economics” class is reportedly a popular one at Fuqua—“It always has the longest waiting list,” said one second year we interviewed, and an alumna added, “He was wonderful.” Another second-year student told mbaMission that because of the high demand for his class, Ariely offers it only to second years. The course explores how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they might act if they were being completely rational. Ariely is also author of the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, published in 2007. An alumna told mbaMission, “He got us to think about everyday things in a totally new way,” and a second-year student commented, “Everyone takes his course. Everyone. He’s our rock-star professor.” With dozens of comments on each of his blog posts, almost 11,000 Twitter followers, more than 4,000 “likes” on Facebook and 1,300 YouTube subscribers, we would say he is a rock star, indeed.

For more information about Duke Fuqua and 13 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.