Maria Herold | Classmate Experience at Smith

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Hi, my name is Mary Harold and I am a current second year student in the full time NBA program at Maryland smith. Soon to be an alumni as I'm graduating in less than a month and really excited for that. Well, one thing that I will miss and I have relatively missed during the past pandemic school year is my classmates. The Maryland smith program is such a close knit um, and you know, such a positive community for me coming from, you know, working experience, you have work friends maybe, and definitely teammates that you get close with. Coming into grad school, I didn't expect that I would find really close friends who would support me and who I'd be able to support. You know, that's really important for me is having that sort of mutual relationship with my classmates in this NBA program. They have areas of expertise that I don't have, and I have areas of expertise that I can, you know, provide uh, help help them with their classwork or with any of you know, any areas that I can help them with. Some of the classmates that I have that I've gotten really close with aren't necessarily the ones that I have classes with at this point. Something that's really great about the program is that you're in these core classes in your first um well throughout the whole program, but especially in your first year, you're in some core classes that teach you very core business concepts. Um And so you don't break out into specialties at that point, you know, sit with everybody, you learn with everybody and you really get a good chance to get close to your classmates and you know here about their experiences and through that those core classes, you know, you made really good friends with the classmates that you have those classes with. Then as you guys break off and specialized some people in a dual degree program, some people just within some of the concentrations within the M. B. A. Program, you still stay close with some of those people who aren't necessarily in your classes in later semesters. It's really great to be able to hear what different experiences they're having in their different classes, how, you know something they're doing in a marketing class, ties in with your finance class and how you're able to learn and grow from connecting with in speaking to them. So I really love the interactions that I have, my classmates even in a virtual setting. We do zoom chat there, zoom socials, you know, ways to still stay connected. You know, since more vaccinations have happened, we've been able to kind of get together again um and in smaller groups of course, but you know, it's really great to get an opportunity to seeing my classmates and friends in person and, you know, get to connect more on a face to face level about the classes were taking about, the opportunities were excited about. You know, how tough this past year has been. I think it's really important to be able to have, you know, friends as a resource to lean on in these trying times. Um, yeah, I've made some really great friends in the NBA period.