In her three years at Bates, Willa Laski ’26 of Bellevue, Idaho, has never once dressed up for classes, but on May 21, the economics major showed up for a test clad in navy blue suiting from head to toe.

The occasion was the culmination of the inaugural Tuck Business Essentials course, designed and implemented in collaboration with Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business specifically for the Bates Short Term.

Laski and her teammates, Jack Kingsley ’28 of Windham, Maine, and Roan Hopkins ’27 of Yarmouth, Maine, also in navy jackets, were presenting as part of a course-long group project intended to demonstrate what they’d learned in this new course. 

“My team actually coordinated on colors so our outfits would look good together,” Laski said. (She didn’t own a blazer, so she borrowed one from a classmate, who then wore it for her own presentation.) The occasion warranted it: “That was an incredibly unusual and special experience for us.”

Intended to teach highly practical business skills, including using Microsoft Excel, and introduce students to various careers in business, Tuck Business Essentials featured an overview of marketing, accounting, finance, project management, and human resources. It was taught by four Tuck instructors in a blend of Zoom and in-person meetings and Peter Friedman ’92, P ’24, P ’26, who earned an MBA from Tuck in 2003 and served as practitioner-in-residence for this Purposeful Work course. 

The course included a group project during which students worked in teams of three on a case study that used real-world data fit into a fictional scenario, as well as an element of time travel. The year was 2009, and a company called Industrial Gas Incorporated — after a rough go during the recession — was aiming to increase its profitability by 25 percent in three years. 

“Tuck taught me the value of embracing a liberal arts background when approaching business ideas, and I think the interpersonal skills that come with a Bates education have really come into play during my networking opportunities.”

Willa Laski ’26 of Bellevue, Idaho

Acting as consultants brought in to help IGI reach its goals, the students prepared business proposals assessing the situation and making recommendations for the company.

“Looking through the lens of the case study grounded a lot of these very abstract ideas, which had felt strange and unfamiliar to a lot of the students in the class,” Laski says. The economics major (with a minor in Spanish) had signed up to improve her technical business skills and gain insight into potential career paths, along with getting herself ready for a summer analyst internship at Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City. 

She was part of a cohort of 30 Bates students — biology, economics, and philosophy majors alike — who signed up for the course. Whatever their prior knowledge of business, the students showed up with critical thinking skills and eagerness to learn in-hand — hallmarks of a Bates education — says Friedman.

“Students were very engaged and interested in the topic, which was great,” Friedman says. “They were strong and very capable. I’m super excited and hopeful that we can commit to having this every year.”

One of five practitioner-taught courses offered this Short Term through the Center for Purposeful Work, Tuck Business Essentials was designed to quickly introduce students to various careers in business and teach practical business skills. Four Tuck instructors — Aram Donigian, Amy Florentino, Patroklos Karantinos, and Conwell Worthington III — took turns teaching subjects that included marketing, accounting, consulting, finance, project management, and human resources, as well as lessons on using software, like Microsoft Excel, and advice on translating a liberal arts education into a business career. 

Tuck offers its Business Bridge program, virtually, for Colby, Colgate, and Trinity during January terms, but Assistant Dean for Tuck Undergraduate Education Lisa Tedeschi said Tuck developed a Bates version, similar but distinct from Bridge, due to the unique nature of Short Term.

She visited campus for the last two days of the course, eager to see how the case study played out in two sessions where students presented their work. The first was a practice run with a group of Tuck MBA students and course instructors and then, for the final version, Tuck alumni who served as “visiting executives.” The feedback Tedeschi got from both groups was that the Bates students exceeded expectations.

“They were just blown away,” Tedeschi said. “The Bates students took a broad view of solving these problems. And they were creative, prepared, and engaged.” 

Senior Associate Dean for Purposeful Work Allen Delong says that prior to the development of this course, about five Bates students per summer typically attended the Tuck Summer Bridge Program in Hanover, New Hampshire. “But not every student can commit that much time or financial resources for that experience,” he says.

The Bates-Tuck Business Essentials Course is an ingenious way to preview Tuck business education for Bates students, he says, and is offered at no additional cost.

“We at Bates are fortunate to have three contributing factors that make this class possible,” Delong says. “We had strong student interest in learning about and developing business-related skills and the existing model of Practitioner-Taught Courses during Short Term. And finally, we have engaged alumni who are generous with their expertise and their financial support. This allowed us to offer a course that is unique to Bates, in collaboration with a top-ten Business School, and that allows students to apply their liberal arts education to the world of work.”

The course was open to students of all majors and class years. Like Laski, Deborah Asiimwe ’28 of Kigali, Rwanda, enrolled to learn more practical business skills. Asiimwe, who plans to double major in economics and environmental studies, hopes to return to Rwanda to contribute to the development of her home country through a career in climate finance.

Of the many new subjects the course introduced Asiimwe to, marketing was her favorite.

“I learned so much,” Asiimwe says. “It was perhaps one of the most challenging things, but also rewarding and one that cultivated so much interest to grow.”

Tuck Business Essentials also attracted students majoring in subjects without immediately obvious connections to business, including Evan Migdole ’26 of Westbrook, Conn. A biology major, Migdole hopes to pursue a career at the intersection of life sciences and business, likely in a financial analyst role.

“As someone that does want to go into business and something within corporate America, understanding how business operates and the different departments was something that was enticing to me,” Migdole says.

Being put in teams of three was key to the real world experience, Migdole adds. “With consulting roles in the real world, you’re typically working with a team. From that perspective, it made a lot of sense that we were working with other people and collaborating to put this together.”

For the case study, Asiimwe’s group suggested that IGI implement a segmentation strategy, dividing its customers into several groups based on their needs and resources. With these distinctions, the company could better understand where their attention was best spent and ultimately attain a wider profit margin.

The presentation itself was a great lesson in learning to tailor information to one’s audience, Asiimwe says, and communicating with peers.

“The biggest problem of communication is the illusion that it has happened,” Asiimwe says. “I learned from my group members to communicate, from the smallest thing to the biggest thing.”

Just as the students eagerly worked to understand the course material, they also had a knack for group work, Friedman says.

“It was really nice to see that they very easily could transition into collaborative, team-based work.”

With their presentations concluded, the Tuck students ended Short Term with new practical skills in their pockets and new ideas about building a business career atop a liberal arts foundation.

“Everyone’s been able to bring their unique perspective and should be able to apply, even if it’s at the most basic level, what we’ve been learning to their career paths, whether it’s STEM, humanities, anything,” Laski says.

“I’m really appreciative for opportunities like this class that round out what we’re doing in our regular day-to-day life at Bates.” 

Equally important to the technical knowledge she gained was the opportunity to meet and network with the Tuck faculty and visitors to the class, including Bates alumni, Laski says, and learn how those with liberal arts backgrounds have applied their skills to careers in business.

“Those softer skills, the critical thinking, the value on interdisciplinary learning — those are things that all of the alumni have said brought them really far in their careers,” Laski says.

Now that she’s in the full swing of her summer internship at Goldman Sachs, how is the Tuck course work translating? The data analytics and business intelligence have been “big themes” for the internship so far, Laski says, so she’s thankful for the technical skills she learned over Short Term. But the lessons in interpersonal connections were particularly valuable.

“I think that the networking element has been the most important skill I’ve been able to transfer from the Tuck class,” Laski says. “As interns we are encouraged to always be networking. Tuck taught me the value of embracing a liberal arts background when approaching business ideas, and I think the interpersonal skills that come with a Bates education have really come into play during my networking opportunities.”