Tuck’s Next50 Fellowship:
A Seed for Change

Next50 is a student-led organization and Fellowship program at Tuck advocating for more diverse case protagonists in MBA curricula so that every student can see themselves in the business leaders they study.

It was founded in October 2020 by a small group of female Tuck students eager to see a more diverse set of leadership voices showcased in the classroom. Since then, we have expanded to a diverse team of 12 Fellows and 15 Associates who are working with Tuck faculty, administration, students, and alums to make Tuck a leader in diversifying the MBA casework and academic experience.

We support the goal that by 2025, 50% of case protagonists in the business cases taught in Tuck’s curriculum include gender, racial, and/or nationality diversity.

We hope to achieve this not only through the selection of cases taught throughout Tuck’s Core and elective curricula, but also through building infrastructure for the creation of original cases. As part of this effort, Next50 will be hosting Tuck’s first case-writing competition next year in Winter 2023.

Why Does This Work Matter?

Being able to see oneself in the business leaders we see, read, and learn about matters.

Not only do these case studies help us as students explore how to approach different challenges and opportunities, but they also help us imagine ourselves as future leaders who will confront similar challenges and opportunities as we progress in our careers.

Colleen Ammerman, Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, wrote this in an article about why the gender gap in cases matters: “Cases send a broader message about what leadership looks like. When the leader archetype is very narrowly defined, it not only hinders the ability of students who don’t share those characteristics to identify with the protagonist, it also reinforces stereotypes about who ‘real leaders’ are.”

What We’ve Done This Year

We are proud of what the Next50 team has accomplished in our first full year as an organization. Included in these accomplishments are the following:

• Established Next50 as a Fellowship and Associate program with support from the Office of the Dean as part of Tuck’s DEI initiatives, and brought 22 more voices onto the Fellows’ and Associates’ teams.
• Created a faculty advisory board to collaborate and partner directly with Tuck professors
• Ran a case-writing workshop in April 2022 as a pilot for our first-ever case competition next winter.
• Wrote our very first original case study featuring SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell (in partnership with Deans Joe Hall and Brian Tomlin), which will be taught in Core Operations in 2023.
• Hosted our first school-wide sponsored event, featuring Professor Ella Bell Smith and Dr. Stella Nkomo.

Get in Touch With Us!

Interested in the work Next50 is doing? We’d love to hear from you.

• Ross James T’25, Co-Chair
• Emma Allen T’25, Co-Chair
• Marina Shtyrkov T’25, Co-Chair
• Dean Dia Draper, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Alumnae/i