CONSULTING AT TUCK
Tuck, too, tops many leading business schools in terms of the percentage of its students who pursue consulting gigs post-graduation. For the second consecutive year, consulting beat out finance as the top choice for graduates from the Hanover school. Just over a third of the class (34 percent) opted for consulting jobs this year, a tiny dip from last year’s 35 percent.
Complete employment figures are public for the Tuck Class of 2014, revealing an average base salary of $130,723 for consulting grads, a median base salary of $135,000, and an average signing bonus of $27,508. Statistics for the Class of 2015 look even stronger, according to Jonathan Masland, director of Tuck’s counseling and recruiting in career development, who in a November interview shared that consulting firms this year paid a median base salary of $140,000, up $5,000 from last year.
In an article on its website yesterday, Tuck confirmed that a full 18 percent of 2015 graduates seeking jobs—44 students in total—went to positions at the consulting holy trinity of McKinsey, Bain and BCG. The school did not provide a specific breakdown of how many grads each firm hired.
How Tuckies Train to Be Consultants
Tuck professors teach using a range of methods, but the small size of Tuck’s class makes class discussion a vital component no matter the chosen teaching method. Many Tuck professors also ask students to complete a significant group project at some point during the semester, which means that by the end of their time at Tuck, students have learned to work with multiple diverse groups to product high-quality work, which prepares them well for consulting.
Three of Tuck’s core courses are particularly relevant to students interested in consulting—”Competitive and Corporate Strategy,” “Leading Organizations” and “Analysis for General Managers”—and together they provide an introduction to the field of strategy, the identification of business problems and leadership within small groups and large organizations.
In “Competitive and Corporate Strategy,” students learn to identify and analyze a business’s options and then apply their skills as part of month-long group project addressing a strategic situation of interest to group members. “Analysis for General Managers,” meanwhile, teaches students how to integrate diverse functional perspectives to reach a better understanding of a business’s challenges and opportunities. Finally, in “Leading Organizations” students use articles and case studies to examine the structural roots of employee behavior problems and how interpersonal interactions affect organizations. The course’s focus on understanding the organizational roots of employee behavior provides a foundation for future consultants to think about corporate structures and organizations.
Tuck does not offer pre-designed majors, but it does suggest a cluster of courses for students interested in strategy and management. These courses cover more advanced topics than the core, addressing issues of strategy from military, game theory and other perspectives.
Tuck MBAs also all complete a First-Year Project (FYP), which is a team consulting exercise to culminate the first year. Students choose their own teams and may propose projects or work on projects sponsored by an outside business or nonprofit organization. Each team’s project requires analysis of strategic and competitive issues and focuses on developing a new business, product, service or market. A faculty advisor is assigned to each team, with additional faculty members available to advise on marketing and communications issues.
And in their second year, many students interested in consulting opt for an elective called Tuck Global Consultancy (TGC). Since its launch in 1997, TGC teams have worked with almost 100 organizations to complete almost 150 projects across over 45 countries. Consistently one of the most popular elective courses at the school, the course takes place in either the spring or fall semesters, with teams of students beginning by defining their projects and determining their scope. Each team travels to the international host site in either August and September or November and December to conduct research and analyze their results. While on site, the teams report their initial findings to the client’s management; within four to six weeks of returning to Tuck, they present final recommendations to U.S.-based management or via videoconferencing.
A Tuck professor with consulting experience provides oversight to each team. Past client companies have included Citibank, Johnson & Johnson, Nike and Unilever. The program itself is revenue-neutral both for the school and for participants—students are not paid for their work, but client companies pay all travel expenses.
Tuck’s Strategy and Management Professors
About one-fourth of Tuck’s full-time faculty members are affiliated with the school’s strategy and management academic area, and several of these professors have prior experience working in a consulting firm and as full-time consultants. Other Tuck professors are involved in ongoing private consulting work with national and international companies.
Professor Vijay Govindarajan, a world expert on strategy and innovation and chief innovation consultant at General Electric, teaches aspiring consultants in a range of courses, including “Implementing Strategy: Management Control Systems.” The skills in this course are particularly important to consultants as clients increasingly ask consulting firms to extend their engagement through implementation.
Another Tuck professor, Richard A. D’Aveni, was nominated three times by Thinkers 50 as one of the most influential strategy management professors in the world. He teaches a course called “Advanced Competitive Strategy,” which he hopes will teach students to use rule-shifting strategic frameworks that help differentiate them from other MBA graduates using traditional tools and concepts.
Consulting Prep at Tuck Beyond the Classroom
The Tuck Center for Leadership provides personalized coaching to help students develop their leadership skills. Integrated into the first-year core curriculum, especially the “Leading Organizations” course, it combines peer- and self-assessment activities designed to help students learn to apply theories, explore solutions and create a vision for their future as consultants.
The Tuck Consulting Club organizes events each fall to help students understand the work and role of consultants, which give way over the course of the semester to opportunities to meet with representatives of consulting firms and consulting interview prep workshops. The club also hosts panel discussions with Tuck graduates who work in the consulting field and brings first-year students together with their second-year peers to discuss the consulting internship experience over brown bag lunches. Finally, the club organizes an annual trek to Boston over fall break to connect aspiring consultants with generalist and boutique firms.
The Tuck Student Consulting Service, or TSCS, is a popular choice for students who want hands-on experience while in school. Through TSCS, Tuck students work with local businesses and nonprofits on short-term consulting projects addressing questions such as how to increase profitability, whether to expand and how to improve customer retention. TSCS organizes a series of workshops each all to prepare students to work on these projects.
