Author: Jimena Martinez

In all honesty, it feels like it was just yesterday when I was taking all my business core classes back-to-back. Even though, at this point, I am four short weeks away from my first year as a Full-Time MBA student being over. Somewhere along the way, I learned more about finance, accounting, and operations, without ever having dug deep into the subjects before. At this moment, we are finishing our business lab projects; mine is with Grange Insurance. We are also wrapping up any additional team projects we have had during the semester.

  A very important part of any MBA program is providing its students with hands-on learning opportunities. I believe that Fisher does an outstanding job at doing so. Last semester, we had the opportunity as a class to participate in an internal case competition among all first-year MBA students. The competition was for Local Cantina, a Mexican restaurant located here in Columbus, Ohio. We have had many case competitions as a class, but this one was particularly fun.

As the first semester of school came to an end, I could see how the business acumen of my peers and I had started increasing, and we started looking at different things from a business perspective. At the same time, we all started discovering the different areas in which we are interested either HR, supply chain, marketing, or finance among many others. So, the time of the year when we must pick our electives came around, and personally, I was a little nervous. I value the opportunity to be part of this program because I get to learn from people that are considered leaders in their field.

As my second semester here at Fisher is starting to ramp up, I set some time apart to reflect on some of the lessons I learned during my first semester and more specifically that I learned with my core team.  During the first semester, we got paired up with some of our classmates based on many factors like personality traits, skills, and background.

So far in my MBA journey, I have experienced some of the longest and busiest days of my academic career.