Why Tuck?

My reason for coming to business school was to learn. It’s what I love and where I am in my career: I wanted to learn new tools, new ways of thinking, new ideas. When I was getting to know the different schools, I felt Tuck took the learning and development of its students really seriously, and that stood out to me. The core curriculum was really coherent, and professors seemed really accessible. I came for the opportunities and recruiting successes, but primarily for the chance to really learn and expand my intellectual horizons.

Favorite course 

Energy Economics is the toughest class I’ve taken, both because I have no background in energy, and because the way the professor runs the class: he expects you to keep up. So in terms of the content and the professor’s expectations it’s really challenging, but I feel like a learn a lot every time I’m in class—new knowledge and new frameworks. We do a lot of simulations. We just wrapped up an OPEC simulation—imagine business school students in teams of three trying to keep the cartel together. It’s fun.

Meeting David Chemerow T’75

My parents were visiting that weekend, and I brought them to the meeting with Chemerow, who funded a scholarship that I received. My parents felt a lot of gratitude for the scholarship, and being there made them feel like they could participate in the Tuck community. David is also just incredibly warm and very accessible. He talked a lot about his experiences after Tuck. I remember him saying that in the long run, it’s all about how you can mentor others, how you can lead a team, guide people, and that’s the kind of skill you begin building in your first-year study groups.

First-Year Project in Cote D’Ivoire 

Cote D’Ivoire has a standardized test comparable to the SAT, and if you pass it you graduate from high school and get into college. If you don’t pass it, you can’t do either. The pass rate is about 40 percent, which really limits opportunities for people, so our thinking was if we could increase people’s success and open up that bottleneck, we would be creating opportunities for individuals and society as a whole. I hadn’t really traveled internationally before the trip, so it was eye opening to see different norms for conducting business, and it was really humbling to not speak the language and to rely on my team and the kindness of strangers. All of that challenged my preconceptions of not only Cote D’Ivoire but myself and what I think leadership is. It was a great experience.