It gives me great pleasure to have for the first time on AST, Luke Pena, Executive Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Luke earned his bachelors in PR and business at USC in 2006 and cut his admissions teeth at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication. He subsequently earned a joint MBA/MA in Education at Stanford GSB and joined the GSB’s admissions staff in July 2012 as an Associate Director of MBA Admissions. He rose to Director of MBA Admissions in October 2015 and moved to Hanover, New Hampshire to become Tuck’s Executive Director of Admissions and Financial Aid in July 2017.

For those listeners who aren’t that familiar with Tuck’s program, can you give an overview of it, focusing on its more distinctive elements? [1:36]

I’d love to start with the mission of the school, which is to educate wise leaders who better the world of business. This emphasis on wisdom is integral to the fabric of Tuck. Wisdom encompasses essential aptitudes of confident humility, empathy, and judgment. These aptitudes align with our core values of being personal, connected, and transformative. Confident humility requires students to bring their full sense of self to the community, empathy requires sharing your breadth and depth with other practitioners of leadership and embracing their perspective, and good judgment is fundamental to transformation.

On a practical level, Tuck builds a distinctly immersive learning community with our scale, focus, and place. Our scale is deliberate, with 285 classmates, all of whom know you, challenge you, and support you. Our focus is the fulltime MBA program – we don’t have other masters or PhD programs. The two-year, fulltime program is it, so the focus is on you, from faculty, alums, and visiting execs. Hanover is the place, which offers the opportunity to wholeheartedly immersion, away from the distractions of a major market, which we think is integral to successful transformation into a wise leader.

Tuck’s mission is to “educate wise leaders to better the world of business.” What are “wise leaders,” what does Tuck mean by “bettering the world of business,” and why limit it to business? [4:32]

“Better” is deliberate and intentional, and it means achieving superior outcomes by practicing the aptitudes of wise leadership. It encompasses not only the what, but the how, leading with an orientation towards both results and values. Within the community here, the “better the world” piece means doing well by doing good. We believe that as our global economy continues to become more dynamic and more diverse, the call for wise, values-driven leaders, the kind Tuck creates, will continue to grow louder. With your specific question about “business,” we are a business school, a management program, and while we believe the business sector is increasingly being called upon to exert leadership in all different kinds of industries and career paths, at the core of what we do is train leaders and managers who impact the world through business.

Any advice for Tuck’s essay questions, specifically #2 about wise leadership? [6:11]

There is a belief that essays all by themselves will swing the admissions decision, and I just don’t find that.