The Darden community celebrated graduation with the Class of 2012 and their families last weekend. Peter Vanderloo, EMBA Class of 2012 and elected commencement speaker, reflected on his time at Darden in his blog post — “My Executive MBA Commencement” — on the Poets & Quants website.
He wrote about how he and his classmates were able to apply lessons learned in class directly to their jobs:
As we rolled into Term 1 then into Term 2, we launched each new skill into our workplace as we learned them. I’ll never forget the thrill of being able to take a financial model for a deal I was working on, cloning it, and tinkering with the assumptions to do my own analysis of the deal. […] For every case we did in our learning teams and the classroom, we replicated that learning many times over in the workplace. After studying Accounting, suddenly the footnotes to a company’s financial statements made gripping reading, which was helpful in a discussion at work of the credit capacity for a deal. After learning that skill in Decision Analysis, I would routinely sketch a decision tree to help me evaluate possible future outcomes when I was at a decision point in life.”
And how the program positively impacted their careers:
Our experiences at Darden also commenced more positive momentum on our careers. During the program, nearly a full half of my class used their Darden skills to take on new job responsibilities. A dozen were promoted, a decade used their business skills to take new jobs and we had a hat trick of entrepreneurs starting new companies. Personally, with three terms of leadership under my belt, I was given new responsibilities to manage a team of people responsible for company-wide contracts workflow. As we rolled into our second year of classes, filled with confidence from the Darden curriculum, I was ready to commence any project. Brimming with confidence, I saw the potential for a cultural change initiative at work, and successfully pitched my CEO to lead it.”
