Tuck's Intensive Numbers Crunch

A mathematically challenged reporter attends PEP, a boot camp for MBA hopefuls needing help with calculus and other scary stuff

by Megan Tucker

By the time I start, I'm already behind. As I slip into a seat in the back of a very full classroom on Dartmouth's Hanover (N.H.) campus, professor Peter Regan is lecturing on bond pricing to the group of students about to enter the Tuck School of Business MBA program.

It's the second day of the Tuck pre-orientation math-refresher program, familiarly known as math camp. On Day 1, they had already gone over the basics of financial math and Excel skills. Having skipped the first class meeting, I'm at something of a loss.

Labor Week

I glance around conspiratorially, but everyone else seems to be working intently on the problem set at hand. It looks as if they actually know what they're doing. But my classmates have been business-school students for only a single day: Did they really already absorb this stuff? I quickly take stock of my aisle seat, close to the exit, just in case.

The Pre-Orientation Program (PEP) at Tuck constitutes a crash course in MBA math skills. Think introductions to spreadsheets, finance math, accounting, microeconomics, calculus, statistics, and decision science, all compressed into the week before Labor Day. Students invited to PEP often come from less-analytical backgrounds than their soon-to-be classmates, and the week is intended to get them up to speed. Open to interpretation are the questions: How are those five days defined? And are they a summer camp—or boot camp?

I joined Tuck's preenrollment program for three days, right in the middle of the week, as former marketers and air force pilots began to reinvent themselves as elite B-school students. A few years ago, at my own college graduation, a dean leaned forward over her lectern and gravely declared, "You know that recurring nightmare, the one where you're in a math exam and you've forgotten to study? It never goes away."

Burning the Midnight Oil

I know that nightmare well. Occasionally it involves Spanish class, but mostly it has been math. I imagine many people, even aspiring B-schools students, also haven't been able to shake that nightmare, or at least the numbers-induced creepy feeling that accompanies it. Could math camp be the cure? I figured I would give it a try.

PEP, in its current incarnation, was designed as a low-stress experience. Previously, first-year course professors gave lectures in the morning and then left problem sets for students to work on in the afternoon. In 2000, a faculty committee found that some students were staying up late into the night laboring over their PEP assignments. "It was as if the students were already working in their first-year courses. It had a real boot camp feel," says Regan.

Tuck recruited a group of professors, deans, and even a psychologist to restructure the program. "We decided that we were going to teach high intensity and targeted content with the goal being to help them survive the first two months," says Tuck professor Steven Powell, who helped design PEP. "That, almost by definition, meant math."

MBA-Specific

Powell should know. He teaches an analytics-intensive decision science course to first-year students. "If you're weaker in analytical things, you would have trouble in my course," says Powell. "First year at Tuck, everything is required. If you're weak in one course, you're weak in a lot of them, and you can't attend every review session. It's the intensity of Tuck that we're trying to help people deal with."

Tuck's review of pre-term led its committee to reorganize the PEP workload to take place entirely during the day. They also handed the teaching reins to Regan.

Of course, math at B-school isn't the math you knew (or didn't know) in high school. It targets specific skills that graduates of MBA programs are expected to have.