Sarah Stuart: Terror no excuse for failing to try

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I was terrified. Beaten. Broken before I began. More seasoned students than I bandied the word around like a talisman: Quant.

"Have you done Quant yet?" they'd smirk as I crowed about my latest marketing assignment or the management theory I'd decided was rubbish. "Who have you got for Quant?" they'd ask, a brow crease of concern failing to mask their inner glee.

Quantitative Theory: a subject whose very name I'd had to Google. It was models; formulas, inputs and outputs. It was managerial decisions based on mathematical and statistical techniques. It was born out of military and logistics issues in World War II. It was horrifying and, before the semester began, I lined up a tutor I couldn't afford.

Admission to the MBA necessitated an extensive online maths assignment - 10 modules of algebraic equations, basic accounting and finance. It was designed to get the class starting from a semblance of understanding, to even out the knowledge gaps. I hired help for it and finished knowing exponentially more than I began with, but still far less than everyone I've encountered since. BEDMAS (brackets before exponents before division before multiplication before addition before subtraction when working on sums left to right) was a revelation. I went and purchased a scientific calculator that I spent the rest of the year trying to learn how to work.

I borrowed the class textbook from a friend who'd scraped through the course a year earlier. It said things like "Simple discrete probability distributions" and "the variance is the squared value of the standard deviation". When the night of the first class came around, I was prepared for battle myself. This WOULD NOT BE EASY.

And it wasn't. But to my astonishment, it was doable. The professor, an imposing Indian digital technologies specialist, had the kind of sonorous voice that could lull you into a 7pm snooze. Thankfully, he recorded all of his four-hour evening lectures. Unbelievably, many of us listened to them several times over.

I didn't, of course, grasp every nuance. But I did learn a useful amount about applying market research; knowing if a sample works and to what extent; how to calculate correlations, how to predict and forecast through regressions. I can calculate probabilities and know that deviation isn't just taking a new route home - and that Game Theory and Dominance are not as exciting as they sound.

My fellow students and I studied for that exam like no other before it or since. It required rote learning of many formulas and the ability to apply them to real-life situations. I'd downloaded an online app Statsplus for my work at the beginning of the semester: two days before the exam I worked out it was the wrong version when the answers to all my practice tests were incorrect. Ah, so that's why I was so confused.

The result? A hard-fought for B. The worst mark of my MBA thus far and below the B+ average required to make it through to the second year (those nice wordy marketing, management and strategy courses making up for it).

The sense of triumph was exhilarating. I'd been sneered at by a tribe of young tutors appalled at my lack of knowledge. Endured hours of hearing but not understanding, persevering long enough for the penny to finally drop. It hadn't been easy. It had been bloody hard. But I'd survived, and even learnt quite a lot. Most importantly, perhaps, I'd accepted a truth that I'd never honestly believed before.

You really can do anything if you put your mind to it. Terror is no excuse for failing to try.