Over winter break, Colgate University sophomores and juniors participated in the inaugural three-week Colgate-Tuck January Business Bridge Program with the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. Students worked alongside faculty from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and took classes such as Business Communications, Financial Accounting, Corporate Finance, Managerial Economics, Marketing and Spreadsheet Modeling. The program culminated in a capstone project in which students worked in groups to analyze and value a real-world business. They then presented their findings to Colgate alumni on campus for evaluation.
“Through the years, many Colgate students have attended Tuck’s summer business bridge program on the Dartmouth campus,” University President Brian W. Casey wrote when the program was announced Aug. 30. “We think it will be exciting to have Colgate students complete this program on our campus, with a cohort of Colgate students and engaging Colgate alumni.”
Coursework began asynchronously in December, followed by in-person sessions in January taught by remote Tuck faculty. The program was designed to finish in time for sophomores to also participate in Career Services’ 13th annual SophoMORE Connections weekend, which featured alumnus and Chair of the Board of Trustees Tony Buzzoto ’96 as a keynote speaker.
Sophomore Cate Abate participated in the Colgate-Tuck program and shared her experience as a STEM major interested in business.
“I’m a neuroscience major with a general interest in business, so I really knew nothing going in, and everyday I found myself learning so much,” Abate said. “I thought it was really cool to get an introduction to all of these different subjects from the Tuck faculty who were just really amazing, and then being able to apply it in a group setting and looking at it for the specific company. It really helped you look at marketing and analyze the company more to see how what we’ve been learning applies in the more general, real-world application.”
Sophomore Gabrielle Bohan also participated in the program. She highlighted the lessons taught at Tuck that apply to the business world and other aspects of her life and emphasized the positive experience she had with the Tuck and Colgate staff.
“I’m on the women’s tennis team here, so I have definitely done a lot of team-building activities, but at Tuck, I had the experience of working with an accomplished team-building professor who taught me lessons I can bring back to my team,” Bohan said. “The Tuck faculty and the Colgate staff also made this an amazing experience and answered any questions we had.”
Abate commended the program’s ability to encourage students to form close bonds with new people and connect with alumni.
“I think it was an eye-opening experience that really introduced me to the world of business,” Abate said. “In working in small groups, it was really great to grow those bonds and strengthen connections with people I’ve never met before. And being able to do the capstone project in front of alumni, that was really cool because we got to show everything we’ve been learning and working really hard on for the past couple weeks.”
Bohan described the connections she made in the program.
“I made new friends who I had never met yet at Colgate — two of them lived in my building,” Bohan said. “It was also great to have the experience of standing up in front of a group of extremely accomplished panelists and presenting our findings.”
Bohan recommended the program to those interested in business.
“Overall, it was an amazing experience that I would highly recommend [to] anyone who even thinks they are interested in a business career,” Bohan said. “The connections with both students and alumni I made will last me a lifetime.”
Decisions were announced in late October after students submitted applications throughout September. 10 students who applied to the program were offered full financial support by Career Services through donations from alumnus Giovanni Cutaia ’94 and Maree Cutaia.
