First up, I’d like to welcome Pete (a.k.a. J.P.) G to the Admissions Blog. Pete is a big character on campus and is a very funny man. (At the recent student board meeting, someone questioned the last meeting’s minutes: “I was marked as both present and absent.” Without missing a beat, JP fired back, “Yeah, the former, physically; the latter, mentally.” Tres bien.) You blog readers have a lot to look forward to from this delightful gentleman.
Now, I’d like to answer an email I got today from a reader of the blog. “What is the one thing you would change about the Tuck program?”
I’ve come up with two things:
Sharpen classroom conduct
By and large, classroom behavior is exemplary. However, from time to time people straggle in late, open their laptops, leave to go to the bathroom, hide in the back because they’ve been too busy with recruiting to read the case. And students are so incredibly polite to each other in classroom debates that sometimes the discussion becomes less entertaining and engaging. I am somewhat of a stickler for this stuff. I think professors should lock doors at the start of class, eject laptop users, talk after class to anyone who has left more than once in the term to go to the bathroom to understand if there’s a reason, cold call frequently and ruthlessly, and encourage conflicting opinions and student-to-student challenge. Yes, we’re all adults; yes, my views are extreme; no, I’m not innocent on all accounts. But I think a stronger focus on classroom mores would only serve to build the collaborative, close-knit community at Tuck.
Core case study
I would introduce a 48-hour individual case study at the end of first year to pull together all the material of the core. The protagonist would be a recent MBA graduate in a general management role who was faced with a business with strategic, operational, marketing, and finance challenges. The student would have to apply multi-disciplinary concepts from across the core all at once. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in Scotland in 2007 and the final exam to qualify took this approach. The scope of the case was limited to finance, accounting and taxation issues, so it was a shorter, 6-hour exam. But the requirement to know the entire breadth of material covered and to be able to synthesize it worked wonders for the effectiveness of my learning. As far as I am aware, no top MBA program deploys this system. By being first, I think Tuck could gain a distinctive advantage in the MBA marketplace. What’s more, the strength of our core curriculum and focus on general management makes me think we would be a great place to try this out. The FYP is set up for this purpose, and is a really useful project, but this would be a great (if incredibly challenging) complement to it.
Read the full article: Time for a change