Lulu Carter

Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

“Striving for compassion, courage, community, and deep belly laughs.”

Hometown: Hopkinton, NH by way of New Orleans, LA

Fun fact about yourself: I am deeply passionate about (read: obsessed with) growing women’s professional sports and access to sport for women and girls in the United States.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Dartmouth College, BA in History

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Trepwise, Senior Associate

Where did you intern during the summer of 2021? Major League Baseball, Strategy & Analytics Team

Where will you be working after graduation? DICK’s Sporting Goods, Senior Manager of Strategy

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Awards:

• Forte Fellow, 2020-22
• Len Morrissey/Holland Scholarship 2020-21 recipient—Awarded to a Tuck student with a non-profit background, non-profit board experience, or interest in non-profit activities
• Top 3 finisher in the Turner MBA Impact Investing Networking & Training (MIINT) 2021 competition with classmates from Tuck
• Dale-Theurkauf Freedom Scholarship 2021-22 recipient—Awarded to a second-year Tuck student who demonstrated the qualities of citizenship, responsibility, and leadership

Leadership Roles:

• Director, Tuck Social Venture Fund
• Quality of Life Chair, Tuck Student Board
• Co-Chair, Tuck Athletic Club
• MBA Fellow, Center for Business, Government & Society
• Co-Chair, Tuck Women in Business Conference
• Co-Captain, Tuck Tripod Ice Hockey
• Co-Founder, Tuck Student COVID Taskforce

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Mentors, faculty, and peers all warned me upon matriculation that it is easy to get swept up in what others are doing at business school. It is not a discrete achievement, but I am proud of my ability to chart a path at Tuck that has been specifically mine, focused on the intersection of athletics and gender.

Where there were structured opportunities to pursue my passion for women in sports, I took them—from completing a First-Year Project with Under Armour focused on high school female athletes to conducting a five-year demographic analysis of baseball attendance as an intern with Major League Baseball. Where there weren’t structured opportunities, I made them—from interviewing Tuck alumna and chief marketing officer of the NBA Kate Jhaveri for Tuck’s Women in Business Conference keynote, to pursuing an part-time internship during my second year with Futures Sport + Entertainment—a leading research and consulting agency. From our orientation, Dean Matthew Slaughter has emphasized that it is up to students to “co-create” our Tuck experience. I am both proud that I have done so and grateful to those that have supported me in my journey.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? After graduating from college, I joined a boutique growth and innovation consulting firm in New Orleans called Trepwise. While there, I partnered with our director of growth and managing director to design and implement the firm’s corporate responsibility platform—Trepwork for Good. Through this platform, we created a framework to guide the firm’s social impact activities across our philanthropic efforts, our own double-bottom line, and our long-term investments in the community — all through a lens of investing in Black and traditionally disenfranchised entrepreneurs from New Orleans. Through Trepwork for Good, the firm was able to allocate significant financial and in-kind support to entrepreneurs across the city prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit, the framework was flexible enough for us to quickly pivot our activities to the most impactful avenues possible, while helping us to keep Black and traditionally disenfranchised entrepreneurs at the center of that work.

Why did you choose this business school? Humans are pack animals, and I firmly believe that the most important thing we do in our life is create and foster relationships with others. When I was looking at business schools, I knew it would be important for me to find a community where I could find my pack, give back as much as I received, and feel supported while trying new things, taking risks, and enjoying opportunities that MBA programs provide. As an undergrad at Dartmouth, I remembered seeing Tuckies around Hanover and thinking “Wow, they are all so old and seem to like each other so much.” While I now take issue with the “so old” piece of that thought process, I can say first-hand that the Tuck community is both what I perceived it to be when I was 18 and what I hoped it would be when I chose Tuck.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Professor Ella Bell Smith is an icon. I would follow her anywhere. She has built a career on advancing women of all races, has published two books on the topic, and teaches Leadership Out of the Box — one of the most personally enriching and challenging courses I took at Tuck. Ella also designed the Tuck Global Insight Expedition I joined in November, where a group of students and faculty explored structural racism and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, traveling from Washington, D.C. to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama. I am now working with Ella on an independent study focused on race, gender, and class in corporations, and she is a wise and supportive teacher to whom I am immensely grateful.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? As a women’s sports junkie, participating in Tuck’s tripod ice hockey league is one of the best experiences I’ve had at Tuck. In true New Hampshire form, Tuck’s tripod hockey league is a thriving tradition that brings together first-years, second-years, and partners across our fall and winter terms, and it combines my favorite things: community building and athletics.

What is the biggest myth about your school? I don’t know how common this myth is, but I had the preconception that everyone at Tuck would be going to consulting or finance, and that I would be an outlier in my athletics-meets-gender-meets social impact path. While there are plenty of consultants and bankers (some of my closest friends, no less!), I have been thrilled to find communities of fellow alternative career path explorers.

What surprised you the most about business school? That this history major who also studied women’s and gender studies and American poetry would be finishing Tuck’s Management Science and Quantitative Methods option, reflecting my completion of more than 15 elective credits in data analytics strategies and tools.

What is one thing you did during the application process that gave you an edge at the school you chose? I don’t know if I could have been more candid about my excitement for Tuck. When asked why I wanted to go to business school by my student interviewer, I remember saying “I don’t want to go to business school, I want to go to Tuck.”

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? This is an impossible question, as the more I learn more about my classmates, the more I find to admire. I’ll highlight my dear friend Lieutenant Blair Bloomquist. Blair served for four-and-a-half years as an active-duty Emergency RN with the US Navy prior to attending Tuck. As a student, Blair has remained a member of the Naval reserves while pursuing her passion for health care and acting as a co-chair of the Tuck Veterans Club. A member of my first-year study group, I can say that Blair is an unparalleled model of humble leadership and dedicated work ethic. She puts her people first, knows what is truly important, and those of us who know her are blessed beyond measure.

Who most influenced your decision to pursue business in college? My grandfather, Dr. Thomas Halpin, is a family champion for education. He practiced obstetrics and gynecology for over fifty years and conducted clinical research that resulted in 17 publications. My grandfather, or “Boo, as we grandchildren call him, was a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UMass Chan Medical School for several decades and served as president of the medical staff three times. My earliest memories of him are those where he is either reading to me or starting his mornings with coffee and the New England Journal of Medicine. Throughout my life, Boo has encouraged me to pursue my education, whatever the focus, to the highest level.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? I would like to work for a professional women’s sports league or team, and to be a part of making women’s professional sports in the United States streamed during primetime on major media channels.

How has the pandemic changed your view of a career? The pandemic has made me feel even more confident in the career path I have selected. The last few years have underscored the importance of caring for your community, working effectively in teams, and caring for both your physical and mental health. These are lessons taught through sports and modeled by athletes who are successful at any level, and it is important to me that we continue creating opportunities for women and girls both to participate in sport and to practice these skills.

What made Lulu Carter such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2022?

“It is a privilege to recommend Lulu Carter. The first thing you notice about Lulu is her never-ending positivity. She is a natural problem solver, always looking for ways to advocate on behalf of her fellow students.

In fall 2020, during the early days of COVID life at Tuck, she co-created the Tuck Student COVID Taskforce. She was—and continues to be—a champion for the student perspective. She sought clarification, change, and transparency at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity. I met with Lulu and the other task force members every week and her dedication to managing and maneuvering through these challenging times was unwavering. Through her efforts, Lulu and her team were able to establish great working relationships and strong communication with senior leadership at Dartmouth and Tuck.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an important part of Lulu’s Tuck experience. She has been committed to furthering our community’s support and knowledge of DEI as co-chair of the annual Tuck Women in Business Conference, participating in our groundbreaking Global Insight Expedition Freedom Riders 2021: Unpacking Systemic Racism in America and Its Impact for Leadership, and working with Dean Matthew Slaughter and Professor Ella Bell Smith on an independent study focused on corporate inclusivity.

Lulu also served as Tuck’s Quality of Life Chair. This elected position suits her outgoing and engaging personality perfectly. She thrives on bringing our community together—students, partners, kids (or, as we say, Tiny Tuckies), faculty, and staff. It has been challenging at times but Lulu, with her warmth and generosity and kindness, has been able to not only keep alive some of the most heralded Tuck traditions but worked with her classmates to create new, hopefully long-lasting traditions that reflect some of the experiences of the class of 2022.

Leadership for Lulu means collaboration and caring. She is one of the most thoughtful people I know.  These two years have been incredibly challenging for many and perhaps even disappointing for some. Not so for Lulu, who has never wavered in her dedication to her classmates and her Tuck community with everything she does. She has gotten everything out of this experience and helped create a community where her classmates could do the same. I will miss her.”

Sally Jaeger
Associate Dean, MBA Program

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