MBA Quant Experience

Anne Turchi writes last year in her BusinessWeek MBA Journal  about on-campus quant prep and the importance of confidence at University of Washington in Seattle:

Math Camp (AKA Jumpstart) was a weeklong introduction to accounting and statistics. I was pleasantly surprised with my performance. I had expected a very full, serious week trying to get us up to speed in these very difficult subjects. Instead, it ended up being a relaxing confidence builder. I found myself exclaiming, "Hey, even I knew that!" Seriously, we spent time calculating the mean and median of a list of data.

Math Camp's message was clear: "Hey — you can do this!" I finally understood that this layer of confidence in my own abilities was far more important than any mathematical or statistical principle that I would learn in a week. The message was, "This is going to be hard, but it's going to be hard for everyone. Don't let your lack of confidence in your abilities limit you." This is only my third weekend in business school and by Monday morning I'll have put in over 16 hours of coursework. Pre-Math Camp, I would have excused myself from the difficult quantitative stuff. Now, I'm intrigued.