Tuck School of Business

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community?

Background Information: An applicant caught in the battle of his analytical and creative brain finds a match at Teach for America, where he is entrusted to apply his editing skills to keep Grade 1 to Grade 3 students engaged in online study sessions. 

Theme: Creativity

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community?

Background Information: An entrepreneur musician shares the power of music in improving the mood of distressed children, her mentorship, and the agency she started to help upcoming artists. 

Theme: Music, Education, Job Security

Background Information: The applicant notices one person in his team consistently underperforming. His humane intervention to address the personal challenges helped the teammate rise to a star performer. 

Theme: Inclusion, Mentorship

Theme (Explained): Often, mentorship when a peer or a sub-ordinate underperforms need context-setting about the problem.

For the essay, the theme of the intervention is holistic mentorship where the person’s personal challenges are handled sensitively.

Background Information: The applicant – a white male applicant working with a diverse team from China, South Africa, and India for a technology giant, confronts a peer who makes unflattering comments about his international peers on a visit to the US.

Theme: Inclusion, Courage, Xenophobia

Tuck MBA Essay: Describe a time you meaningfully contributed to someone else’s sense of inclusion in your professional or personal community. (300 words) 

Background Information: The applicant proactively offered guidance and mentorship to a junior analyst who was struggling to interpret contracts in an M&A deal

Theme: Inclusion, Mentorship

Theme (Explained): Mentorship to make a peer or a subordinate feel included is the best way to demonstrate your sensitivity to the person’s struggles. 

Tuck MBA Essay: Describe a time you meaningfully contributed to someone else’s sense of inclusion in your professional or personal community. (300 words)

Background Information: In the applicant in charge of leading a team of 20+ associates for an insurance giant witnessed an error in judgment from one of the 5 team leads. Reversing a decision to let go of the person is the ‘risky’ sense of inclusion narrative.

Theme: Inclusion, Ethics, Courage

Tuck MBA Essay: Describe a time you meaningfully contributed to someone else’s sense of inclusion in your professional or personal community. (290 words)

Background Information: A leading YouTube creator in the ‘editing for educational video’ niche narrates a peer’s bout with depression after he faced a stagnation in viewership. The applicant’s encouraging mindset with video collaboration helped the peer feel a sense of inclusion among the creator community.

Theme: Inclusion

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community? (300 words)

1. Family, Upbringing, and Values

The applicant’s talent for pattern matching and logical thinking was rewarded by Amazon. He was offered a position as a catalog specialist in charge of fraud prevention. During his tenure with the technology giant, he developed a Machine Learning algorithm that detected fraudulent sellers. He was also responsible for developing a data identification method that made it easier to flag suspicious sellers right from registration.

The applicant shares an honest perspective that her BA in International studies was not the ideal pre-requisite for a career in Investment banking. However, her answer during the interview on happiness set the scale in her favor.

The applicant had an unusual change in career. Starting in corporate law, the FinTech and cryptocurrency craze of 2017 pulled him into the regulatory framework of the new ecosystem. Articulating the possibilities in law publications and breaking down previous financial reforms in Asia, Europe, and the US, the interest deepened into the startup ecosystem of each region.

In this example, the applicant starts with his unique upbringing. Since his parents worked with UNICEF, the ideals of following mission-driven projects and career paths were ingrained in him at an early age.

In this example, the applicant articulates how he entered the Oil & Gas industry as a project engineer. The experience of working in a large organization, although helped him work on interesting engineering challenges, the snail pace with which the bureaucracy operates limited creative approaches.