The Tuck School of Business Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire 1968 – 1970

THE FIRST YEAR

Martha Fransson T’70

This essay is of necessity written by one woman and is based on her experiences beginning in the fall of 1968 and ending in the spring of 1970. I was that woman and there are several dimensions to my story. The first and most important issue was of course my decision to choose the Tuck School as the environment that would be the most congenial to me as I pursued a course of study to earn an MBA. The second most important issue was the decision made by Dean John Hennessey, and supported by the faculty, to admit me as a member of the MBA Class of 1970. The third issue was the quality and collegiality of faculty interactions with students, and the fourth was the availability of on-campus housing. The fifth was the leadership shown by the members of the Class of 1969 as they communicated to the faculty that they believed that I would be accepted by my peers in the Class of 1970. Each of these five issues played a critical part in my decision to choose Tuck.

In January of 2020, I cleaned my Mac, and on the hard disk, I found a copy of a video that had been made 10 years earlier during our fortieth reunion. It brought back an incredible number of memories. Yes, we are all older now. Yes, there have been a number of deaths since 1970— useful lives cut short due to illness or tragedy. Not everyone is on the video. We had about 40 attendees out of a class of about 100 who graduated in 1970. Out of this number, about 10 to 15 were returning veterans of the US Army (the Vietnam War was still hot.) Offsetting the returnees were the members of my class who were draftees. They numbered between 20 and 30 as I remember. More important than the numbers was the sense of desperation as some of my classmates scurried to enlist in Reserve units. Worse yet was the news that dribbled through from time to time that someone had been killed or injured. I had a made a number of friendships in my class, working on group projects, and so the losses in the second year were palpable. But I am ahead of myself. Let me go back to my first days at Tuck.

I had never worked on a paper that was a group project before I became a student at Tuck. My undergraduate papers had all been solo efforts. At Tuck, we were formed into small groups of three to five students. Mostly we chose our own teammates. Someone would stick their head up and start recruiting a few others. It became an important skill to be fairly quick at identifying who I wanted to work with on the project or paper. I personally found that it paid dividends to listen closely in class. Most of the professors taught by the Socratic method, asking questions and puncturing trial balloons. Class discussions were the most fertile source of information as to who knew what, who was sharp, and who was someone I could probably get along with.

(Yes, there were a few guys who were somewhat uneasy with this idea of a woman doing a man’s job. I learned quickly the discussion markers that warned me of someone who was unsympathetic to the idea of women managers. I also learned quickly that it was just easier to go around them than to try to change their minds.)

When I started at Tuck, I was open to working in lots of different areas within a company. Our first-year courses included accounting, operations, human resources (AKA personnel management), financial management, marketing and product design, general economics, etc. All of it was new to me. Not only was the subject matter unknown territory, the pedagogical methods being used by the faculty had been unheard of in the lecture halls of Harvard. Asking a question as an undergraduate implied to your peers that you were stupid. Professors were never wrong, and rarely did we discuss whether or not ahistorical personage had made a wise or unwise decision in a specific context.

In short, I went from a world of known knowledge, to a world in which experimentation and exploration were vital to the future existence of the organization. I went from a world which usually considered group work as cheating, to a world in which group work was required to solve problems. The emphasis changed from demonstrating that the student alone had acquired a store of knowledge to demonstrating that the student could perform tasks in a group endeavor that would help the group achieve its goals even when it was working in previously unknown territory.

I loved it. It was so interesting.

One of the issues I had to face was, what to do about meals? I lived in an old house, now torn down, with 11 or 12 other women graduate students. About half of the group was medical students at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. These women were very focused and they spoke their own language. Since Dartmouth Medical School had only a two-year program during the time I was there, they were in a grind that would require them to leave before earning their degrees. Concerns about transferring to an institution that would grant an MD degree were real.

There were a few graduate women students in the liberal arts, history, etc. They were not a cohesive group. Meals were taken by most of the women in the kitchen of the old house. At that time, many young women wore wooden clogs around the house. There were rooms available on the first, second, and third floor. This meant that students living on the first floor had the pleasure of listening to their colleagues on the second floor trotting around in their clogs. Likewise, students on the second floor could listen to the clogs of those of us on the third floor. Yes, of the four of us on the top floor, about half wore clogs. When I discovered the negativity attached to clogs, I gave them up.

The meals problem was fairly easy to solve. I bought meal tickets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner Monday through Friday. That way I got to know everyone. (Most of the men were friendly if I asked if I could join them, and at the nod of approval I sat down.) Yes, there were a few moss backs who didn’t really approve of women at Tuck. I didn’t have time to argue.

Weekends were more difficult as the Tuck Cafeteria was closed after Saturday lunch. So I bought more meal tickets and went to meals with the undergraduates. Yes, I was allergic to cooking and food management. Very occasionally I was able to borrow a car from one of the med students and drive over to the closest grocery store and buy myself a steak that would last for two days, a box of cereal and some milk, and some fresh fruit. Weekends tended to be lonely unless I teamed up with one of my Tuck student colleagues and we would go for a walk, or in winter I would hop on the student bus and go out to the Dartmouth Skiway on a weekend. Very occasionally, I could borrow one of the med student’s cars and drive east out of Hanover or across the Connecticut River to explore the upscale towns in eastern Vermont.

I was mostly busy with school work, and that meant group discussions and work on papers and projects, and getting some exercise. Even if “exercise” meant walking around the Hopkins Center or the Hood Museum of Art. Often “exercise” meant a walk around Occom Pond.

Classmate Jean-Pierre Gorgue T’70 sent in an interesting paragraph for me to include in this write-up. Here it is, unedited:

“I recall partnering with Martha and a couple of other guys in a group for the first year Production course for the infamous ‘widget project.’ The idea was to develop a quick production process, including simple jigs, to assemble the things (some kind of wire clamp for use on junction boxes if I recall correctly). The assembly included 2 teeny screws and Martha’s smaller dexterous fingers were a great help for our trial and error process. She claimed the said fingers were getting bloody in the process, and was known for a time as ‘bloody fingers Fransson,’ but the nickname did not stick! Fifty years later, this incident still makes me giggle!

Greg Berquist, Chee Woo Chow, and I made a good three person team. We worked together on and off during both years. We were friends as well as colleagues. Greg managed us as a collaborating group. He was gifted at that task. Chee Woo could make a computer sing and dance. (Those were Greg’s words, I have never forgotten them.) We had very different personalities, but we were the most effective team that I was ever part of. Our strength was in our ability to collaborate in a highly efficient way. One person would toss out a problem and the other two would go to work figuring out what to do about it. We did a lot of collective brain-storming. Chee Woo was brilliant at a computer; I was good at figuring out the best way to present the work; and Greg was a terrific organizer.

There is room for more anecdotes here. If you are reading this and think to yourself, ‘Hmm, I wonder if she would like to hear about …’ The answer is YES!

Over time I built up a circle of classmates upon whom I could rely for good critical thinking, honest discussions, and sharing the work when it came to a project, of which there were many.

If I have to say what my principal role was in all these group projects, I would say that I served as an editor, of ideas and the written word. I usually ended up preparing the final version of the report or paper. Yes there were times when my colleagues wanted different language and we argued, and those arguments were useful. That was the time that we honed our arguments, written plans, and the language that would persuade the reader that we really knew what we were doing. I loved it. And editing became one of my life-long skills.”