Last week, we honed in on researching business schools, an important step from the previous week's "getting started checklist." Today, we narrow our focus even further to talk about something everyone around here is pretty passionate about...Tuck! Reading Tuck360 is a great way to start getting a feel for our community. However, the best way to truly discover what makes Tuck distinctive is to experience it. Connect with students and alumni, take advantage of our on-campus visitation/interview program, and meet the Admissions Team when we hit the road later this year. In the meantime, if you have any questions about our blog posts, please don't hesitate to leave a comment!
Let's start with the basics. What makes Tuck distinctive? Why Tuck?
Broadly, there are two reasons that make Tuck a true transformative educational experience and distinctive among top business schools. The first is our community. Tuck is known the world over for its close-knit and supportive community. As a direct result of our personal scale (with a target class of 280, ours is a small program relative to our peers), you will get to know everyone—from peers to professors—and they will get to know you through your study groups, the residential nature of the campus and our location.
The second is the access that our personal scale allows—access to our leading faculty of scholar-educators, access to recruiters from the most prestigious global firms, access to visiting alumni and CEOs. And of course, access to your classmates. It is an intense, 24/7 experience carefully designed to prepare you for a lifetime of responsible leadership. All students live on or near campus. Faculty joins students for informal coffees, meals, golf games and bike rides. When visiting execs come to Hanover, they immerse themselves in campus life, sharing meals, conversations and classrooms with students. All of these components differentiate Tuck from schools in large cities, where everyone scatters at the end of the day.
What sets Tuck apart academically?
During your first year, Tuck’s broad and integrated first-year core curriculum provides every student with a rigorous foundation in all aspects of business, with a special emphasis on teamwork and leadership. We believe a leader in today’s world needs to be someone who can see across functions, borders, and cultures. Someone who has a deep understanding of themselves and others. We also believe the best leaders are also collaborators, and you will further develop your team skills in small, intimate settings with your first-year study group.
During your second year at Tuck, you can chart your own course, choosing from more than 100 cutting-edge elective courses that reflect the complexity of business today. This means students get to customize the program to target their particular areas of interest with a wide range of electives, independent study or our innovative research-to-practice seminars.
Throughout everything – your study groups, team projects and travel opportunities, our innovative seminars – you will hone your ability to work with other people. This is one of the hallmarks of a Tuck education and we owe much of it to our community.
Another critical aspect of the Tuck experience is the strength of our faculty. Tuck is committed to having a faculty of “balanced” or “dual” excellence—meaning faculty who are both skilled researchers and dedicated and caring teachers. We have more than 50 full-time faculty members at Tuck and all of them teach in the MBA program. They’re here at Tuck because they love to teach and the size of the school really lets them get to know students individually and interact with them inside and outside the classroom.
People pursue an MBA to enhance their career or switch careers. So as careers go…why Tuck?
It comes down to our scale relative to our peers and, again, to access—access to incredible resources dedicated to helping you in your career search. And access to recruiters from the world’s top companies. Tuck has fewer than 300 students per class competing for interview slots and networking opportunities. At other top schools, that number can grow to as many as 900. Tuck is a place where you can stand out during your job search.
Some applicants worry about Tuck’s location and the impact it has on recruiting. But these are, in reality, great strengths. Tuck has deep and longstanding relationships with the world’s most prestigious recruiters of MBA talent. The best part: our students have incredibly personal access to them. While they’re here, they’re a captive audience: they stay all day, have dinner here, interact with students during office hours.
Furthermore, Tuck’s career counselors are industry specialists with direct industry experience. And many are MBAs themselves, so they know exactly what you are going through because they have been there themselves. Our scale ensures that they will get to know you personally and work closely with you on your career search.
Especially beneficial to career switchers, Tuck offers a bidding process to first-year students, through which a portion of all company interview slots are available to students (the other slots are filled with candidates selected by the company). This allows students with non-traditional backgrounds to get a foot in the door.
Several times, we’ve mentioned Tuck’s small size. How does this play out in the alumni network?
The alumni’s enthusiasm—for Tuck and for each other—is unrivaled and is part of what makes our community so unique. There’s no better measure of this than annual giving. Tuck’s annual giving rate has exceeded 70 percent for several years in a row, nearly triple the average participation rate of other top business schools. This shows just how satisfied our alumni are in their Tuck experience and how deeply committed they are to ensuring others share in such a transformative experience.
Tuck alums are personally involved and accessible to our students. You can always count on them to return your call and provide extensive help when needed. This kind of responsiveness takes some students by surprise, and we constantly hear students express their gratitude for the generosity of our alumni.
As far as the size of our alumni network, Tuck is definitely smaller than peer schools. In the 2014 Economist ranking of our alumni network, we were #91 in size. We were also #1 in terms of effectiveness.