Enter the high-powered, high-pressure, high-caffeine world of the most prestigious MBA program in the country in this real-life account of a typical student's first year at Harvard Business School.

Robert Reid had spent two years working for a major consulting firm before enrolling at Harvard. Once there, what he found was a combination of country club-like settings and sometimes draconian academic traditions that combined to make Harvard's MBA one of the most sought-after and potentially lucrative advanced degrees in the world.

From the grueling application process and the anxiety surrounding classroom seating assignments, to the fierce jockeying for professors' attention and the bizarre courtship rituals leading businesses use to lure Harvard enrollees, Reid chronicles the heady and exhausting experiences that every HBS student faces. Along with his own story, Reid follows other students, showing us what HBS offers to its increasingly diverse student body: women, foreign students, the star performers, and the strugglers.

The threat of being challenged into class discussions by professors, the demanding daily preparation of case studies, and the occasional sharklike behavior of fellow students alternate with the pampering of a spalike athletic facility, meetings with legendary business world figures, and expensive nights on the town with corporate recruiters.

HBS's highly paid and influential faculty appear in all their glory and humanity, surrounded by awed students and occasional controversy about their teaching styles and business theories - as well as their grading policies and uncompromising rules about class attendance. For anyone interested or involved in the world of business, Year One gives you an inside look at the breeding grounds where many of America's most powerful and influential business figures get their real start.