Tuck MBA has a relatively small class – 294, with the campus located in the New England town of Hanover. Tuck attracts candidates who truly value the brand. The admissions team also wants to ensure that the candidates are analytically strong, balanced in accomplishment – professionally and with extra-curricular, self-aware, and collaborative.
The school attracts candidates who experienced the power of communities and understand the value of the Tuck MBA curriculum and the support the career service team and alumni offer.
1) Smart – Curious and Engaged
The average GMAT score for the latest class is 734, and GPA is 3.4. The school clearly values intellectual rigor demonstrated through standardized tests and college performance. Like most top schools, Tuck also believes that your previous academic performance is an indication of your future performance in the class. The essays should hint at your intellectual rigor. Balance it with a narrative on your drive to learn from others.
‘Engaged’ is a key differentiator for a strong Tuck MBA candidate as the admission team seeks to fill the class with those who seek self-development by engaging with the community, the class, and the faculty. Curiosity and skills in articulating and defending a point are vital to learning in a collaborative learning environment.
2) Accomplished – IMPACTFUL and Principled
Principled leadership is an easy narrative to preach but tough to follow through. Your accomplishments should be presented through the prism of IMPACT and principled decision-making. Winning and competing are important for Tuck but demonstrating the integrity of your decision-making within the context of your job function and industry is essential.
One way to articulate the quality is by citing the stake of a decision – the expected vs. principled.
For a candidate entrusted with redesigning the incentives of an organization’s purchasing department, the challenge was in decoding the behind-the-scenes deals happening between the purchasing manager and the suppliers. Gifts were never declared, nor were the heavily discounted vacations in some resorts. A closer examination revealed that the autonomy that was integral to the company culture had led a few bad apples to ruin this unique USP.
The decision to let go of the bad apples was not easy as they had a huge influence on the relationship with critical suppliers. But the candidate’s recommendation was accepted, and the worst fears didn’t materialize.
The candidate also recommended a policy that required that for any purchases higher than $1,00,000, a committee of three highly regarded executives sign off. With low-ticket purchases not incentivizing the suppliers for backend deals, the corruption stopped immediately.
3) Aware – Ambitious and Purposeful
The Why MBA essay clearly requires you to articulate the journey that led to the goal you have now. It could be a combination of academic, extra-curricular, and professional experiences that eventually helped you develop the goals.
A purpose statement is essential if you want to go beyond the cliched job function, industry, and geography narrative in your Why MBA essay. It could be a vision of a compelling future that requires collective effort and persuasion. The higher the chance that you can’t achieve the goals alone, the more IMPACTFUL will be the vision statement.
A large percentage of non-profit candidates enter Tuck with a common narrative thread – a collaboration with the government or a highly bureaucratic organization is disheartening. An MBA was essential to change track.
Being aware of your current situation, your strengths, and weaknesses, and the potential of the career path post-MBA is important.
A process of self-reflection, assessment, and verbalizing a future is highly valued in the application.
The Who, Why, and How triad will summarize the motivation for the Tuck MBA program.
The Who you are shouldn’t be crafted with an idealistic persona in mind. This is the #1 cause of rejection. The narrative all feels like coming from the same person. You must brainstorm without, or with the help of a consultant, on what makes you unique.
The Why should be driven by your purpose statement. It should include the specific value you would offer in a job function or industry, but the long-term goal should be inspiring.
The How is the least important part of the narrative as the admissions team has hinted that the Tuck Why MBA Essay should be more about the Who and Why. But if you found something valuable from the Tuck curriculum, include them. Keep it to one to two elements/courses.
4) Collaborative – By Encouragement and empathy
In a hyper-competitive corporate environment where your productivity and contributions are measured by the second and benchmarked against the best, it is not easy to give credit to your peers or celebrate their success authentically. Tuck is searching for an outlier quality – authentic self-confidence.
Many applicants fake self-confidence as a defense mechanism to mitigate the skill gap or to survive the stress of team dynamics. But truly confident professionals are centered and know their position in an organization. They are also aware of the career opportunities that lie ahead.
This leadership quality of self-assurance, self-reliance, and compassion is a rare combination. The spirit of collaboration through encouragement and empathy comes from an understanding that unless the team grows, a person rarely reaches their true potential as an individual contributor and a leader.
The quality is also an indication of superior emotional intelligence essential to being a great leader. Like schools where leadership development is the primary selling point, Tuck focuses on building the skills for authentic communication, managing people by aligning incentives, and managing the organization in a holistic manner. A big part of the Tuck experience is the mentorship offered by 2nd-year students and the guidance alumni provide during the internship and full-time job search.
If you have a history of mentoring and helping peers grow, you are a natural fit for the Tuck MBA program.
5) Community Engagement
With 9% from non-profit/government and extra-curricular engagements a critical selection criterion for admissions, supporting communities is an important narrative for Tuck MBA Admissions.
The first data point that the admissions team evaluate is the consistency of your engagement. A pattern that is too common among applicants is the strong engagements in college and the fizzing out when entering a full-time job. You must demonstrate a consistent commitment to the communities where you resided.
If your passion is in one niche – education, entrepreneurship, cleantech, poverty alleviation, or finance, multiple engagements in the niche over the past 5-10 years would confirm the commitment.
Community engagements can be broadly classified as information campaigns, consulting, consensus building, collaborating, and empowering.
Most of the value that Tuck MBA applicants, in particular, offer is in the Information Campaign and Consulting engagements. A rare few are in a position to empower the community by engaging with them for more than 5 years and going through all the phases of community engagement. Such applicants are clearly strong candidates for Tuck and other top Business Schools. If your engagement was meaningful in informing or consulting, include the challenges, the solutions, and the potential long-term impact your involvement had on the communities.
Crisis
Another narrative that helps applicants demonstrate leadership skills is the response to the crisis. COVID-19 disrupted multiple facets of life, education, and livelihood.
If your passion is in Educating the underprivileged, how did the disruption to in-person sessions affect the education milestones of the children?
Include the sobering facts and the measures you and your organization took to address the problem. Any solution with a quick fix is never believable. Some regression in achieving milestones must be included to improve the believability of your story.
If you are a career switcher entering Consulting with experience in offering consulting solutions for small businesses, COVID-19 was a big opportunity to assist small businesses in your neighborhood. The solution might be around refinancing, integrating technology, developing new marketing channels, or building strategic partnerships. Include the specific solution that you had created.
If your day job is in IB and your goal is to enter PE, include a narrative on refinancing or acquiring a small business before helping the brand reposition itself in the community.
The crisis is not limited to the pandemic. There are a staggeringly large number of public-private partnerships that go overboard in budget and build deliverables without the end beneficiary in mind.
Your competence in interviewing stakeholders, redefining the metrics, and ensuring that the implementation of the solution is within budget is another narrative that will stand out for the Tuck MBA application.
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