Madeleine Livingston

Dartmouth College, Tuck School of Business

“A ruthlessly reflective person with mission focus and a bent for cracking tough problems.”

Hometown: West Hartford, CT

Fun fact about yourself: I spent three years working as a research assistant at the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. Some of our most novel research sought to explain the gap between men and women in terms of financial knowledge, and how that played out over a woman’s lifetime. This work was a catalyst for developing my financial acumen early in my career. During my time at Citi and at Tuck, I have been focused on female financial participation—be it via financial inclusion initiatives or by supporting the female investor and founder community.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Bachelor’s in International Affairs with a concentration in Economics, The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Citibank, Assistant Vice President

Where did you intern during the summer of 2020? June Motherhood, Cambridge, MA

I was the first “corporate” employee of June, a digital maternal care startup launched by three HBS founders. I worked with June for most of 2020, building out product, constructing a data and outcomes roadmap, hiring amazing care providers, and running customer onboarding and strategic operations.

Where will you be working after graduation? Health care—currently evaluating various full-time opportunities!

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Director of the Tuck Social Venture Fund
• COVID-19 Virtual Visit Volunteer at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center
• Flare Capital Scholar
• Amplifyher Ventures Investor Fellow
• Tuck Incubator
• Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital Fellow
• Center for Health Care Fellow
• Visiting Executive Fellow
• Forte Fellow & Merit Scholar
• Board Member of LSA Family Health Service

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? As someone transitioning into health care post-Tuck, I am most proud of the extracurricular time I invested in supporting the future of the industry. Early in my MBA, I spoke with dozens of early stage health care founders and published interviews with them via my Medium blog. Later, I shifted to building and scaling early stage companies. I had an opportunity to work with The Well, Parsley Health, June Motherhood, and Flux Diagnostics in a strategic operations and commercialization capacity. My learning in the classroom was continuously amplified by my concurrent startup work.

Additionally, I worked for the majority of my time at Tuck at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center as a patient experience volunteer. I worked directly with patients to use technology to see their families at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was exposed to many of the challenges that patients, families, and providers face when rapidly adjusting to technology that becomes a critical part of their care pathway. I feel strongly that innovating in health care must come from lived experiences in the patient and provider settings.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I had the opportunity to represent Citi at the One Young World Summit held at The Hague in The Netherlands. One Young World identifies, promotes, and connects the world’s most impactful young leaders from 190-plus countries to create a better world, with more responsible, more effective leadership. I was inspired by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s proclamation that businesses cannot succeed in societies that fail. Following the Summit, I partnered with Citi’s executive leadership to launch a global program to engage employees in Citi’s substantial progress towards the 2030 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The program kickstarted internal conversations on how to better engage emerging talent in Citi’s impact initiatives—I like to think I was a tiny part of that lasting legacy across Citi’s 200k-plus employee base!

Why did you choose this business school? I came to Tuck for the reputation of the Tuck and Dartmouth alumni network, as well as the health care research and business community. At Tuck, you have access to leading scholars via Dartmouth’s academic medical center, The Dartmouth Institute’s seminal research on health care services and accountable care, and The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health. There is a robust health care curriculum for Tuck students led by former hospital executives, physician entrepreneurs, public health scientists, and health care investors. Hanover is a hub for health care entrepreneurship and research, and the alumni base gives generously of their time to support student innovators and aspiring health care leaders. I also spent a few years working for Dr. Annamaria Lusardi, a former Dartmouth professor and colleague of Dean Matthew Slaughter. Her love for Hanover inspired me!

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite business school professor is Dr. Lindsey Leininger. Lindsey is a public health scientist with an expertise in data-driven healthy policy. She is also the CEO of Dear Pandemic, a public health startup dedicated to combating pandemic misinformation. She teaches Health Care Analytics & Society at Tuck, a course that delves into how data is leveraged across all sectors of health care.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I would spend more time getting to know the classes above and below me! I am constantly blown away by the experiences of students at Tuck and know I could have an interesting conversation with every single person at this school. I learn extensively from classroom discussion where people share their take on different cases based on their backgrounds as frontline workers, military leaders, oil and gas engineers, PR strategists, former teachers, and beyond.

What is the biggest myth about your school? I think there’s historically been a misconception that it can be hard to recruit and network for competitive jobs in cities while in Hanover. I never found that to be the case across my network, and I also think that COVID-19 has changed some of the norms around recruiting and working. We also had the good fortune pre-COVID of hosting visitors for a few days at a time so there were multiple breakfast, lunch, and dinner opportunities to get to know companies and visiting executives. We’ve continued this tradition virtually, which I lead as a Visiting Executive Fellow at Tuck.

What is one thing you did during the application process that gave you an edge at the school you chose? I spent time really getting to know the current Tuck students and I spoke extensively with Tuck alumni! My in-depth conversations with students and alums came through during my interviews and in my essays. Call me old-fashioned, but I also wrote handwritten thank you notes to Tuck Admissions following events I attended in New York City!

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I most admire Gunnar Esiason, a fellow T’21 and dual MBA/MPH candidate. He is a Cystic Fibrosis Patient Advocate and he fights every day to make the health care system better for rare disease patients. I am endlessly in awe of his vigor, his reading list, his intellectual horsepower, and his hope. He’s the type of person who inspires you to use your precious time to build, advocate, and reimagine the future of health care.

How disruptive was it to shift to an online or hybrid environment after COVID hit? Tuck did a great job of guiding students through the transition to virtual learning. Professors rapidly adjusted to teaching and were open to feedback on how to replicate the in-person environment to the best of their abilities. In many cases, professors were almost more available to students as they offered up Friday morning coffee chats and stayed long after class to help you work through a concept or provide guidance on a case competition. One COVID silver lining was the incredible line-up of speakers presenting in classes that would have had difficulty getting to Hanover in the winter. That being said, Tuckies do love to show off Hanover and we certainly missed having the opportunity to share a glass of wine with speakers at the Hanover Inn or to chat over coffee on a cold winter day in Stell Hall.

Who most influenced your decision to pursue business in college?
I studied International Affairs and Economics in undergrad but a few of my peer mentors eventually transitioned from community health programs to business school. My friend and mentor Julie Bailey, a graduate of Columbia Business School, inspired me to apply to business school and kept me motivated during the application process. I also attended the Forte Foundation’s MBALaunch program, which gave me a fantastic group of peers to bounce ideas off while preparing to apply.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

* I really enjoyed the time I spent serving as the President of the LSA Family Health Service Junior Board. I look forward to future Board of Director leadership opportunities in the nonprofit world. It is a privilege to be able to work with nonprofit teams to set and execute on a strategic and mission-based agenda.

* I would love to attend and present at the World Economic Forum’s Davos event in the future! I am passionate about any opportunity for cross-cultural collaboration and to learn from the experiences of the world’s economic, business, and healthy policy thought leaders.

What made Madeleine Livingston such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2021?

“Madeleine Livingston lives Tuck’s mission of developing wise, decisive leaders who better the world through business—in her case, through the business of health care.

She arrived at Tuck with a vision to pursue a career in health care, and I have been fortunate to spend significant time partnering with and supporting her as a Tuck Center for Health Care Fellow. Co-creating learning opportunities with Madeleine for herself and fellow students has been a privilege. She radiates enthusiasm for developing and sharing knowledge, for building a network in health care for herself and others, and for contributing to the Tuck community.

Madeleine has taken full advantage of the health care resources available to her and actively shares her passion and insight for innovating in health care delivery in the classroom, with fellow students, faculty and our alumni community. Madeleine is a clear leader in our Tuck Class of 2021. Selected for numerous leadership roles across Tuck, she has delivered on each and every one. Her time management, focus, and energy are amazing and set an example for how to develop a personal plan for learning, leadership, and professional development.

In addition to her campus leadership, Madeleine has sought opportunities for professional development and service outside of Tuck. Her active and consistent service as a volunteer with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, first in palliative care and during the pandemic as a Virtual Visit volunteer, stand out. Sharing her compassion and commitment, her service to the community combined with her insight to learn by doing sets an example for others. She is an invaluable evangelist for health care at Tuck and her contributions will be lasting and ongoing. As she graduates, I cannot wait to see her impact, continue to learn from her experience, and to share with future Tuckies her path through Tuck as an example of how transformative an MBA experience can be.”

Suzie Rubin
Executive Director
Tuck Center for Health Care

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