Tuck Compass: Taking the Transformative Power of Tuck to the Next Level

An optional offering for students, Tuck Compass consists of three primary components working in unison to give participants the tools they need to reflect on and identify their personal goals—and then chart their distinct path accordingly.

The first, a Personal Board of Advisers (PBA), builds on the unrivaled strength of the Tuck network. PBAs are comprised of Tuck alumni, a career services adviser, an MBA program adviser, a leadership coach, and other mentors that provide counsel to students, share wisdom and expertise, support decision-making, and offer accountability on the path to larger goals. Students can invite others to their PBA—including classmates, and professional colleagues—and are provided with frameworks, prompts, and optional workshops to help them optimally use their board.

The second major component of Compass—The Pathways App—is a digital tool that will serve as a centralized, single source for students to track their course enrollment, attendance at co-curricular events, recruiting events, club engagements, and more. The app will allow participants to record their activity so they can identify how their engagement at Tuck maps to the goals they have set out to achieve. Users can log activity-specific reflections, and have the choice of whether to share their goals and activities with one another on the app.

Finally, an array of curricular and co-curricular options will be available for students wishing to deepen their learnings and reflections from Tuck Compass. In particular, students who opt in and participate throughout their two-year Tuck journey will have the opportunity to engage in one or more culminating capstones.

Tuck Compass springs from a multi-year engagement with design-thinking firm, IDEO, exploring how the school could further the power of its unique MBA experience.

With Compass, we are enhancing the personal, connected, and transformative qualities that distinguish Tuck from other top business schools, says Dean Matthew Slaughter. Our scale, community, curriculum, and culture of co-creation make Tuck uniquely positioned to create and deliver this sort of innovation.

This past academic year, under the leadership of clinical professor Daniella Reichstetter T’07, dozens of students and alumni collaborated to develop, pilot, and refine the three key components of Compass.

The biggest benefit I got from my board was clarity about what I wanted my time at Tuck to look like, what I want my career to look like, and what I want my life to look like, says pilot participant Alison Tilson T’24.

This summer, Tuck will launch Tuck Compass for the incoming first-year students from the class of 2025. In September, interested T’24s will be onboarded and, in the years to come, T’23s will have the opportunity to participate as alumni serving on students’ Personal Board of Advisers.

I am excited to officially launch Tuck Compass with the class of 2025, and to continue to learn and iterate together as a community in the upcoming academic year, Slaughter says.