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| FROM Tuck Admissions Blog: What makes Tuck distinctive? Why Tuck? |
![]() 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, through which at least half of all company interview slots are available to students (the other half of the interview schedule is 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. |
| FROM Tuck Admissions Blog: Part I: Recruiting Advice for the Consulting Industry from Career Development Office Expert |
![]() ![]() By CDO Stephen Pidgeon T’07 is an associate director of the CDO and author of the books “How to Get a Job in Consulting” and “Case Interviews for Beginners.” How should someone prepare for fit interviews for the consulting industry? The most important thing is to understand what competencies the companies are looking for. It sounds obvious, but you can’t really succeed in a job interview unless you know what they’re looking for. The good thing about consulting companies is they’re very, very transparent about that. You can go to their website and there’s usually a page entitled, “What We’re Looking For.” The other nice thing is that they’re all really looking for the same type of person, so you only need to do this research once. They want to know: Are you intellectually curious? Are you very driven to succeed? Are you able to work well with other people in stressful situations? Once you understand what they’re actually looking for, then it’s a matter of thinking very carefully about your own experience. All consulting companies that I know of use the competency-based interviewing model. Rather than asking you about your theories, they’re asking you for evidence from the past with questions like, “Tell me about a time when you had to influence someone” or “Tell me about a time when you did something you’re very proud of.” For your answers, imagine that you’re writing a novel or a Hollywood screenplay and use the same techniques that those writers use. Come up with memorable details. If you tell me, “My supervisor called me into his office,” that’s one thing. If you tell me, “My supervisor was a scary person, very intimidating, and his office was on the top floor of a tower in New York and it was all glass and minimalist furniture,” that tells me a lot more about him and it actually allows the listener to remember it and share the emotion that you felt. Also, tell me the ups and downs in the story. Very often, when people tell a story from their past and they know it turned out well, they make it sound easy. I want you to put me back in your shoes at that point when you really thought, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this” or “This is going to fail.” If you give me that sense of threat and peril at the beginning, I’ll feel more empathy with you as we go through the story. To recap: know the job, know your stories, and use storytelling tricks to make the person understand, follow, and remember you. That last one is important. For example, today, we’ve got McKinsey on campus. Every McKinsey interviewer is going to interview 8 people. At the end of a very long day, they sit down in a meeting room and decide who to hire. Your story has got to stay in that person’s memory if you want to get hired, so you want to be the one who’s created the vivid images and impression. Shed some light on technical questions that are asked in the consulting industry. The consulting industry uses the case interview extensively, which, simply put, means you will need to talk through a hypothetical business problem with some actual data to show you can use math. It’ll test a number of things, like your ability to come up with a structured approach. Let’s say they ask you how to improve the profitability of Murphy’s on the Green in Hanover. Even if you’ve never stopped to think about running a bar before, hopefully you could take a minute and think, “Okay, here are the kinds of things I want to talk about: the customers, the operations, the staff, etc.” Then, they’ll give you some data so you can show that you can derive insight from it. They’ll also often have some sort of creative-thinking component that will really push you out of the box, too. The other area, across both the fit and technical questions, is the real question they are asking themselves: “Do I want to work with this person?” So even if you’ve got the great story about influencing your boss and you do really well in the case interview, if you’re not the kind of people person they want on their team or in front of their client, they’re not going to hire you. Whereas on the reverse, if you actually are friendly and they feel that you would do well with their teams and their clients, you can probably make some mistakes along the way and still have a better chance of being hired. So that’s actually the secret a lot of students instinctively know, but spend so long practicing the technical stuff that they forget—to be themselves. |
Success stories and strategies from high-scoring candidates.