Most of our second-year students make use of Tuck's independent study option to customize their educational experience, another benefit of our small scale and curricular flexibility. Unlike an internship, independent study isn't a rehearsal for your next job. Instead, it's a means to explore and develop new insights that you can bring to a new career.

Independent study projects are grounded in the established fields of management but they can cover a remarkable range of topics, from health insurance reform to airline scheduling protocols and data-envelopment analysis to sustainability reporting. Each study must be approved and supervised by two faculty members and graded at its conclusion.

Some of the topics explored by students in the past include:

• Venture investing in CleanTech
• Leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln
• Private equity industry in Brazil and India
• Impact of ebooks on traditional publishing industry
• Self-regulation in the sustainable tourism industry
• Strategic plan for container labs to improve access to lab services in rural Haiti
• Business ethics in dermatology
• Succession planning and liquidity strategies for family-owned enterprises
• Business issues surrounding establishing offshore ports to meet national security objectives
• Impact of craft brewing on the US beer market
• B corporations and L3Cs: modification to corporate governance models