Tuck & Sustainability: It’s A Green Thing

For tomorrow’s business leaders, understanding energy and sustainability isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s a prerequisite. 

At Tuck, the question now isn’t if they will engage with sustainability topics during their MBA—but where they will start. 

Teaching Future Sustainability Leaders

Sustainability principles are integrated throughout the Tuck curriculum, but students can also push their learning further with specialized electives on topics ranging from energy finance to agriculture. 

Current offerings include Business and Climate Change with Professor Anant Sundaram; Sustainable Marketing, taught by Adjunct Professor Liana L. Frey D’92, T’98; Current Issues in the Global Food Systems, led by Professor José Alvarez; Wicked Problems: Health, Wealth, and Sustainability, taught by Professors Ron Adner, Matt Garcia, Doug Irwin, and Lindsey Leininger; Energy Economics, taught by Professor Erin T. Mansur; Financing the Clean Energy Economy with Adjunct Professor Curtis Probst; and the ESG Investment Practicum with Professors Ramon Lecuona Torras and William Martin.

Other courses, such as Corporate Responsibility, Impact Investing, and Social Entrepreneurship, address sustainability within the broader context of corporate responsibility and social impact. 

Additionally, Tuck students often work with clients on Environmental, Sustainable, and Governance (ESG)-focused challenges during their First-Year Projects: recent examples include work to refine wind turbine manufacturing processes and size the market for carbon dioxide removals. And through Global Insight Expedition (GIX) courses, which in 2024 included Climate Innovation in South Africa and Sustainability in the French Agriculture Sector, students see how sustainability issues play out on a global scale. 

Centering Sustainability & Social Impact

Tuck’s Revers Center for Energy, Sustainability, and Innovation and the Center for Business, Government, and Society (CBGS) are open to students with every kind of sustainability background—or none. The Revers Center’s work is anchored in energy, while also covering broader topics and industries that intersect, including climate tech, mobility, decarbonization, and aspects of corporate sustainability. Within energy, student interests range across power, renewables, oil and gas, energy efficiency, and more. The CBGS advocates for a collaborative approach to global challenges that draws on the business, government, and nonprofit sectors. Centers regularly host panels with leaders in the field, lunch-and-learn sessions with industry alumni, and small-group workshops. 

About a third of incoming students joined the Revers Center’s Energy 101 workshop last summer for a day-long dive into energy technology, systems, and markets, and the Trends in Energy Finance workshop that Jon Fouts T’92 leads is one of the most popular sessions each year.

The Centers also welcome all Tuck students on many of their off-sites, like the Revers Center’s recent tour of BETA Technologies’ next-generation electric aviation production facility in Burlington, Vermont. Last summer CBGS and the Tuck Center for Entrepreneurship brought first-year students to Portland, Maine, to explore the city’s marine sustainability startups. 

Joining The Global Conversation

Both CBGS and the Revers Center also look far beyond Hanover. For the last 15 years, they’ve sent a Tuck delegation to the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP, as part of a specialized sprint course. Participating students have credentialed observer status at the conference, allowing them to access everything from startup presentations to high-stakes negotiations. 

Conversations about how developing countries can adapt to climate change were particularly salient for Lauren Adamson T’24, who attended COP28 in Dubai. 

“Typically, COP has been more focused on climate change mitigation—which is important, but we know that climate change is happening,” she says. “This year, there were more conversations around adaptation and about who should be responsible for helping developing countries.”

Adamson, a Revers Fellow who previously worked in private equity in Mongolia, also played a major role in organizing the 2024 edition of the Revers Center’s annual Fellows Trek, which gives participants a chance to explore energy issues in unique ecosystems. This year, the Fellows went to Georgia, where they learned how the post-Soviet state, which just a few decades ago experienced frequent blackouts, liberalized its energy market. 

“Eighty percent of Georgia’s electricity now comes from hydropower,” Adamson explains, “which has reduced their reliance on neighbors like Russia. We chose Georgia because we wanted to explore energy security issues as well as hydropower systems and financing.”

For Adamson, both international experiences—as well as courses like Financing the Clean Energy Economy, and an internship at Colorado’s Clean Energy Fund—reinforced her belief that sustainability literacy is critical in every sector.  

“As my friend Jack Vann T’24 pointed out, when computers were first rolled out, only people in specific roles used them,” she says. “Then, they became part of everyone’s job. The same thing is happening with sustainability.” That’s why, she notes, she’s focusing on impact, rather than industry, in her job search. 

A Social Venture Fund, Right At Tuck

One of the most ambitious student-run projects is the Tuck Social Venture Fund (TSVF), which second-year student directors run with support from Tuck faculty, the Center for Business, Government, and Society, and the Dartmouth Investment Office. The fund offers seed investments (typically $10,000 to $50,000) to early-stage for-profit companies that deliver measurable social impact and financial returns.

For TSVF director Claire Kadeethum T’24, an engineer who previously worked in the Canadian oil sands, the fund has offered a pathway into a field she first discovered when she took Impact Investing: Capital for Social Impact with Professor Curt Welling D’71, T’77, who also advises the TSVF. Within the fund, Kadeethum assesses climate tech ventures, an experience that has opened her eyes to the complex calculus impact investors have to perform. 

“One thing that fascinates me is the concept of differentiated impact,” Kadeethum explained. “I came to Tuck assuming that any climate tech company is an impact investment, but Curt [Welling] reminded us that that is not the case. Investing in a technology that removes less emissions than a competing technology means you are not necessarily making positive impact.” After graduation, Kadeethum—who is also a Revers Center Fellow, Director of the Tuck Student Initiative for Decarbonization, and Co-Chair of Tuck Sustains—will apply that perspective to an energy-focused role at Bain & Company.

It’s clear that Tuck students care deeply about sustainability—but why do they choose an MBA over a degree explicitly focused on energy or climate policy?

For Adamson, the answer is simple: the public sector can’t tackle the climate challenge alone.

“The private sector is good at getting things done—and going forward, even roles that aren’t obviously about sustainability will have those considerations,” she said. “If an operations leader decides to invest in solar for a manufacturing facility, that has huge energy impacts. Making those decisions over and over again will be how we achieve the green transition, and an MBA from Tuck offers the tools to be part of that process.”

Recent Tuck MBA Alumni Making An Impact

 

Kaitlin Horan T’22
Product Manager, Synop

What have you been up to since graduating from Tuck?
After graduating Tuck, I joined Synop, an early-stage company that provides fleet charging and energy management software to help commercial electric fleets scale and optimize costs. A recent project of ours—and one not too far from Tuck in Vermont!—aims to unlock school bus electrification by enabling buses to send power back to the grid (Vehicle-to-Grid technology). 

You attended COP as a Dartmouth-Tuck delegate. What was the experience like?
I especially appreciated the opportunity to observe live climate negotiations. There are incredibly important but complicated decisions to make around financing in particular and it was valuable to spend time considering those intricacies while at the conference. The stakes have only grown, and I am hopeful that we will see increased action and collaboration towards driving emissions reduction. 

What advice do you have for prospective Tuck MBA and incoming Tuck MBA students who are interested in exploring energy, sustainability, and the social impact space?
Spend time chatting with Tuck alumni. There are many opportunities to get involved in the climate and sustainability space and I found it helpful to engage with alum as I made decisions about where to focus both while at Tuck and after graduating.

 

Tobin Krieg T’21
Principal, Falkon Ventures

What have you been up to since graduating from Tuck?

I am passionate about protecting our planet and I believe that tackling our world’s greatest challenges are also opportunities for deep tech startups to catalyze systemic change and drive lasting impact. Since graduating from Tuck I’ve been working in climate tech venture capital, where I have partnered with early-stage entrepreneurs that are equally driven to make the world a better place. It has been a fun adventure working with a smaller but emerging fund where I’ve been able to build the foundation for us to become a top tier climate tech investor. I’ve been fortunate enough to do this from Portland, OR, where I can revel in beautiful natural surroundings and mix in plenty of trail running, snowboarding, and cooking in my downtime.

What was your biggest takeaway from attending COP as a Dartmouth-Tuck delegate?

My biggest takeaway from COP25 was the urgency and importance of building greater collaboration between business leaders and policymakers. When viewed from a systems thinking lens, strengthening the connectivity between ecosystem stakeholders is critical for understanding complex problems and how to solve them. The ecosystem of a single country is complicated enough, so international policymakers working across the entire globe is a monumental task. We have scientists with data that can highlight critical challenges and prioritize areas of focus, we have entrepreneurs and business leaders that are driven and ready to scale solutions, and we have a tight timeline that should engender a better balance between short- and long-term results. Policymakers are at this intersection trying to build consensus, and we look to them for a north star to rally behind—the faster they determine the frameworks, goals, metrics, and tools, the sooner we can align our efforts.

What advice do you have for prospective Tuck MBA and incoming Tuck MBA students who are interested in exploring energy, sustainability, and the social impact space?

There are opportunities across all areas of the impact space! Pick a few of the specific areas that are most important to you and that drive you—then focus on those. Talk to alumni in those areas and learn as much as you can about the ecosystems surrounding those impact areas and where opportunities are emerging. Do an independent study and write a white paper on a topic that you want to learn more about. That will help you be more effective in your career, and you can use the exploration of that white paper to build the network you’d want post-Tuck. By being curious and engaging about a technical area of interest, you can have conversations that are not recruiting related calls, but about building real relationships with the firms you want to collaborate with, post-Tuck.

 

Cristian Molina Cornejo T’21
Associate, NextEra Energy Investments (NextEra Energy)

What have you been up to since graduating from Tuck?

Since graduating from Tuck in 2021, I’ve worked at Modern Energy, investing structured capital in early-stage project developers, and am now working at NextEra Energy, where I am investing in companies of strategic value for the company.

Since graduating from Tuck, are there any changes you’ve made, either personally or professionally, to help address the climate change crisis?

After Tuck, I was reinvigorated to find a role that intersected at my interests of emissions reductions and investments. I think that personal decisions and carbon reductions are important, but if we truly want to make lasting changes we need to focus on the massive, systemic emitters and invest in technologies, companies and/or processes that will meaningfully drive emissions down. 

What advice do you have for prospective Tuck MBA and incoming Tuck MBA students who are interested in exploring energy, sustainability, and the social impact space?

Prospective MBA students should have as many explorative conversations as possible, to gain a broad and introductory insight into the various opportunities in the sustainability space.

It sounds incredibly simplistic, but there are many, diverse functions, across verticals and geographies, which differ immensely. I think there are meaningful activities such as contemplating what you love doing and matching that with the overlap area of your interest within functional role, industry vertical, and geographic location. For example, I’d posit that a project finance role for solar in Florida is relatively similar to a project finance role for solar in New York. However, if you are not that interested in tax equity (look it up) and don’t want to live in New York, then that role might not be for you. 

Incoming MBAs should have a working hypothesis of what they want to do—but I would vehemently implore that you also budget some exploratory time into your recruiting and networking time. Admittedly, I am guilty of exploring perhaps too much, and too unfocused, however, that time in exploration made it incredibly easier for me to say no to opportunities that were too far away from my initial hypothesis and therefore I felt empowered to appreciatively pass on those.

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Amy Mitson is director of admissions, recruitment and marketing, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and has been at Tuck since 2000. Amy serves on the admissions committee and leads recruitment and diversity-focused initiatives. Her student services and admissions experiences have helped acquaint her with Tuck’s operations, history, vibrant campus, and alumni community. Amy’s favorite aspect of Tuck is the people; working with current and prospective members of the Tuck community is a consistent source of motivation and inspiration.