Tuck Bridge Turns 20

In its 20 years at Tuck, the Business Bridge program has given liberal arts students across the globe the opportunity to gain business skills they can leverage in their future career.

Shortly after Paul Danos became dean of Tuck, in 1995, he had an idea for an innovative business education program for liberal arts students and recent graduates. It was called the Tuck Business Bridge Program, and it was designed to provide participants with a powerful dose of MBA-style business education before they joined the business world.

The inaugural summer session of Bridge kicked off in 1997 with 85 students, most of whom were McKinsey consultants right out of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The program has come a long way since then. This past year, it educated about 250 students in two summer sessions, 55 students in a December program, and 45 students in the Smith-Tuck program at Smith College.

For Claire O’Brien, who attended Bridge this past summer, the experience was transformational. “Tuck not only taught me tangible business skills, but it taught me to be confident in myself,” she says. “On Day 1 I pulled my car up to Tuck, knowing no one on campus, and nothing about the material. Four weeks later I was presenting a company valuation with a team of four in front of high-level professionals.” Before the session was finished, O’Brien received a job offer from Kantar Retail, in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she currently works with other Bridge alumni.

O’Brien has many colleagues with a similar story. Bridge now graduates more students per year than the Tuck MBA program. The total Bridge alumni count is 4,891, and a significant percentage of them have gone on to top business schools including, of course, Tuck. There are 17 “Bridgers” in the Tuck class of 2018 alone.

To celebrate two decades of innovative and effective business education, the Bridge team is organizing a series of alumni events in major cities across the country, including Boston, New York, San Francisco, and others. For more information on Bridge and alumni events, visit bridge.tuck.dartmouth.edu.