Academics

Educating leaders

Without question, Tuck offers a challenging curriculum designed to prepare you for business leadership—to give you both in-depth knowledge and broad perspective. But you may be surprised at how Tuck's collaborative, intellectual environment will help you become both a stronger leader and a more valuable team player.

Tuck's personal scale gives you significant access to outstanding teachers at the forefront of their fields. All our full-time faculty teach in the MBA program. Our curriculum is closely integrated and refreshed by new insights from our expert faculty, visiting business leaders, and accomplished alumni.

Required Curriculum

Business leaders need a general management foundation of functional knowledge, practical management skills, and the ability to identify and analyze problems from multiple perspectives by using a variety of approaches.

Tuck’s integrated core curriculum provides rigorous coverage of key functional areas and disciplines: statistics and decision science, corporate finance and capital markets, managerial and global economics, marketing, organizational behavior and personal leadership, strategy, communications, and operations. The courses build on and complement each other and are carefully integrated. Students who have extensive previous background in a particular discipline may opt to exempt out of a specific course and take an elective course in its place. 

A variety of teaching methodologies are used and practical management skills are developed through active learning, group projects, and simulations. The First-Year Project course challenges you to apply your classroom learning to a client’s real-world business problem or develop a business plan for an entrepreneurial venture. 

A lot of your course work will be accomplished working in a team, a study group made up of five or six classmates selected for diversity of skills and experience.  You share your knowledge and perspective and work together to learn and complete assignments.  Your study group will help you understand your own strengths and limitations and how to work effectively in a team.

In addition to the core courses, students are required to satisfy an ethics and social responsibility course requirement at some point during their two years. 

Core Curriculum Overview

Elective Curriculum

With the core curriculum as a foundation and more than 80 electives to choose from, you can tailor your Tuck education to meet your individual needs and interests. The depth and breadth of our elective offerings allow students to focus on specific areas of study within the context of the broad perspective and cross-functional knowledge required in top management positions.

Behind each elective is the expertise of one of our thought leading faculty.  And our faculty’s expertise covers key disciplines in depth.  Our Marketing group has experts on marketing communications, database marketing, pricing, marketing strategy, branding, global marketing, new product development, and consumer behavior. Our Finance, Accounting, and Economics group has experts on investments, corporate governance, international economics, asset pricing, auctions and game theory, capital structures, portfolio management, management controls, corporate valuation, and private equity finance. Our Strategy and Management group has experts on innovation and technological change, organizational design, hypercompetition and commoditization, leadership, mergers and acquisitions, and negotiations.

But Tuck provides the opportunity to go beyond today’s theories and knowledge by exploring an important managerial issue right alongside a professor and learn how to acquire useful new knowledge.  Through one of our research-to-practice seminars you will have the unique opportunity to explore an important managerial issue right alongside a professor and learn how to acquire useful new knowledge throughout your career.

More than one-third of our students participate in an independent study working with a faculty advisor.