by Adam Sylvain
Sep 24, 2025
A hallmark of the Tuck MBA curriculum, the required First-Year Project (FYP) course provides a unique opportunity for students to put their leadership skills and classroom knowledge to the test.
During the intense nine-week course, student teams work together to solve a timely business challenge for clients ranging in size and industry—from early-stage companies and nonprofits to market-leading retailers and Fortune 500 businesses. Teams can also complete an entrepreneurial FYP (eFYP) to develop a student’s own venture.
“Every year, the FYP offers a crash course in what it takes to tackle a high-stakes business project, from initiation and planning to execution,” says Executive Director of the FYP Becky Rice-Mesec. “The experience really sets the stage for students as they prepare to make an impact during their summer internships.”
This past spring, T’26s assembled 59 distinct FYP teams, with 50 client-sponsored projects and nine eFYPs. Addressing a complex business problem on an accelerated timeline requires a high degree of focus and the ability to effectively navigate ambiguity. The experience also creates a supportive environment for students to apply their learning, take calculated risks, and receive real-time feedback.
“A lot of the work for [FYP] teams early on is figuring out what exactly is the challenge we’re trying to address,” says Tuck Clinical Professor Scott Anthony who served as faculty adviser for four FYP teams this past year. “You’re often beginning with a pretty unstructured problem and one of the great things about FYP is you can really feel the core curriculum in the way teams come together to diagnose and solve challenges.”
Here’s a closer look at three FYPs from the 2025 academic year:
Raven, RA Capital’s Healthcare Incubator
The Raven project was one of 31 FYPs referred by a Tuck or Dartmouth alum, or completed for an alumni client, during the past academic year. The FYP partnership sought to address an emerging challenge in the health care space.
The health care industry is grappling with surging demand for cell and gene therapies (CGT) which have the potential to transform how doctors treat many types of cancer, genetic disorders, and rare diseases. Unfortunately, a complex, costly, and resource-intensive accreditation process has created a backlog for companies looking to start their clinical trials, a key step in bringing more of these therapies to market.
“Our charge was to size the current and future backlog of therapies, and to assess accreditation standards, costs, and timelines to better understand the feasibility of setting up more accredited sites for clinical testing,” explains Laura Kolstad T’26. “We also calculated the monthly burn rate, or the monetary loss a company might face as they await participants to enroll in its clinical trials.”
Kolstad had previously worked in management consulting, with a focus on health care, and was excited to deepen her exposure to the industry’s challenges while working with founders and early-stage companies on the leading edge of innovation. Last fall, while networking with alumni in the health care space, she met T’21s Gunnar Esiason and Anish More who later became her client leads at Raven.
The team’s faculty adviser Marc Aquila T’07, who has worked with more than 20 FYP teams in the past six years, notes there are multiple advantages to partnering with alumni clients.
“Alumni, especially those who have completed an FYP themselves, understand the high bar and expectations that are set in terms of the work students produce,” says Aquila. “At the same time, they recognize the value of FYP as a transformative learning opportunity for students to hone their skills and stretch themselves as a leader.”
As Kolstad and her teammates got started on the project, an initial challenge was figuring out how to break the problem down into manageable workstreams. While they each brought different backgrounds and perspectives to the table, they all shared a driving interest in health care and a passion for the problem which Kolstad believes helped them work cohesively and purposefully.
“It was especially rewarding to gain such valuable experience while also making an impact in this high-need, high-growth area,” says Kolstad. “We were thrilled to learn that they’ve been able to use our work to support some of their ongoing projects.”
One of the great things about FYP is you can really feel the core curriculum in the way teams come together to diagnose and solve challenges.
— Scott Anthony, Clinical Professor of Business Administration
Equity Edge (eFYP)
T’26s Grey Sylvester and Olivia Greif were on their way to NYC for Tuck’s annual Wall Street Trek when they had a shared epiphany.
“Writing out flash cards and quizzing each other during the five-hour drive, we both felt there had to be a better way to prepare ourselves for the recruiting process,” says Greif.
As Sylvester and Greif discovered, entry into the investment banking world requires extensive knowledge of technical concepts related to M&A, leveraged buyouts, and valuations, but resources for learning about these concepts are scattered and often out of date. With their eFYP Equity Edge, the pair hoped to launch a comprehensive digital resource offering detailed modules, extensive practice problems, and customizable study plans to help students prepare for finance recruiting in a more systematic way.
Before enrolling in the FYP course, they were able to pressure test their idea in the elective Entrepreneurial Thinking, co-taught by Clinical Professor Daniella Reichstetter T’07 who would go on to serve as their eFYP adviser. During “E-Think”, Sylvester and Greif validated their problem through structured interviews and surveys with classmates who shared their frustrations with the finance recruiting process.
“Talking to our peers, and other MBA students and undergraduates, it was clear there is a lack of availability, and in some cases, access to high quality prep materials,” says Greif.
The Equity Edge eFYP team ultimately included Sylvester, Greif, and three of their classmates who had also gone through the finance recruiting process. One of the group’s primary goals during the eFYP was to build a minimum viable product (MVP) they could use to get early feedback on the tool’s content and user experience. Initially, they hoped to tap into resources at the Thayer School of Engineering for help building the prototype but after attending a vibe coding event hosted by Tuck’s Center for Digital Strategies, they learned about an AI platform that could build the coding infrastructure using language learning models (LLMs). This breakthrough allowed the team to stand up a prototype in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise.
Reichstetter says the Equity Edge team was the first to incorporate vibe coding into the eFYP and is hopeful their success will inspire other teams to use it going forward.
“We are in an era where you don’t need to rely on coders or a CTO to get an initial prototype up and running,” says Reichstetter. “In a matter of weeks, they were able to build something they could test with potential users and receive really important feedback.”
After returning from their investment banking internships this summer, Sylvester and Greif plan to run a pilot of Equity Edge with the T’27s in the fall while taking additional steps toward commercializing the platform in the spring.
“We’re excited to get this tool in the hands of more students so we can continue to refine it and make it the best resource it can be,” says Sylvester.
Club Glove (a Titleist Company)
Prior to Tuck, Zach Davies T’26 spent four years in consumer goods at P&G. His recent FYP with the Titleist-owned business Club Glove was a strong step toward his ultimate goal of pivoting into sports retail.
Market-leading golf brand Titleist had acquired Club Glove, which specializes in golf travel equipment, in 2023 and was seeking insight into how they could grow the business internationally in Canada and the U.K.
“About 97 percent of Club Glove’s business has been here in the U.S.,” says Davies, who self-sourced the FYP with Club Glove after reaching out to Senior Manager of Strategy and Development Michael Cronin. “Our task was to dial in on the consumers in these international markets to understand what products, pricing, and marketing strategies will resonate.”
The team executed a two-phased approach to the project. Phase one—led by T’26s Tanner Dasso, a Marine Corps veteran, and Christina Uhrig, a former senior analyst at Disney—focused on primary research with golf course professionals. During phase two, Davies led the development of customer segments and teammate Patricio Doig T’26, who previously worked at Nike, helped the team build a financial model to quantify the opportunity.
As they dug into their research, the team was particularly struck by the differences between the average golf consumer in the U.S. in comparison to these other markets.
“We quickly learned how incorrect some of our assumptions were,” says Davies, noting that he and several of his FYP teammates are avid golfers. “You learn about the Scottish golfer who lives in a small town and golfs everyday with his friends and it’s $10 to play a round of golf. It was important to be grounded in the data to understand what the experiences of these consumers actually are versus what we might think they are.”
The work the Tuck FYP team delivered went above and beyond our expectations. We’re pressing forward with our go-to-market strategy and their contributions have been foundational in that process.
— Michael Cronin, Senior Manager of Strategy and Development, Club Glove
By the end of the nine weeks, the Club Glove FYP team presented company leadership with four key deliverables, which included: a survey analysis, a market-sizing model, a strategy framework for the U.K. and Canadian markets, and a summary of more than two dozen unique growth ideas.
The presentation left a strong impression on the company, including Cronin.
“The work the Tuck FYP team delivered went above and beyond our expectations,” says Cronin. “We’re pressing forward with our go-to-market strategy and their contributions have been foundational in that process.”
The successful FYP experience also proved to be the perfect springboard for Davies’ summer internship in golf merchandising at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Coming off the FYP and gaining this richer understanding of the golf landscape really set me up well to hit the ground running,” he says.