Tuck's Intensive Numbers Crunch

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Changes at Stanford?

"The beginning years of a lot of jobs have a certain amount of quantitative work," says Regan. "You're handed tasks and you need to have the skills to complete them. But over time, it's more about how you interact with other people, manage, and delegate. Other talents become very important, and it's less quantitative. Schools select students who have great potential in the full scope of their careers. The challenge becomes how to support them for the quantitative demands of the curriculum."

Many other schools, including MIT's Sloan and Penn's Wharton, offer their own interpretation of math camp.

Programs are tailored to the individual school's specific needs, often including different social and academic components. They also vary greatly in terms of duration, timing, and the students targeted for enrollment. Stanford, which has long had a math camp, is currently reevaluating the need for one as it revamps its entire curriculum.

Tutoring One Another

The start of math camp this year marked Regan's 14th first day of school in Hanover. He earned his undergraduate biochemistry degree from Dartmouth in 1985. Regan went on to earn a PhD in decision and risk analysis from Stanford University. After working in consulting, he returned to Dartmouth in 1998 to fill in at Tuck while Powell went on sabbatical. A knockout hit in the classroom, Regan was invited to develop his own course, and later to contribute to the B-school's PEP redesign.

In 2004, Regan launched PEP's companion Web site, MBAmath.com, part of a for-profit venture which he himself owns. The next year, he made it available to students outside of Dartmouth on a subscriber-basis. This year, Georgetown's McDonough School of Business purchased subscriptions for all its incoming students. As of this fall, B-schoolers from a total of 54 additional programs had registered. Annual revenue is in the "tens of thousands," Regan says.

On campus at Tuck, program directors carefully tweaked the pre-term class size until they found a sweet spot. For past enrollments, Tuck had included anywhere from 20% to 80% of the incoming class. This year, about 70 out of 250 students were invited. (And for those of you who aren't quick at calculating percentages, that's 28%.) This size incorporates students who can help their classmates as well as those who are truly insecure about their math skills.

Seriously Prompt

"What I notice is there are some students who need it all, but most students have at least some knowledge about one of the areas," says Regan. "So while they might be on the receiving end of a lot of peer help in one section, when we switch from finance to accounting, for example, the roles reverse, and they're helping the people who were helping them earlier in the week."

Tuck may have designed math camp to be low-stress, but it's nothing if not exhausting. Class begins promptly at 8:30 a.m. three days a week, at 8 a.m. the other two days. And when I say promptly, I mean promptly. One morning, I arrived exactly on time, without a second to spare, and found the entire class already attentively seated and Regan starting announcements. Apparently, top-notch students get to B-schools like Tuck by instinctively knowing to show up 10 minutes early—and not just for entry-level job interviews.

Energy-generating snacks, such as apples, granola bars, and coffee, are placed just outside the classroom, all day long. Regan does an even job of lecturing, sliding around chalkboards, clicking through computer-run presentations, and giving students an opportunity to try out the skills themselves before they lose focus.