Prospective students, current students and former students gathered at Tuck Business School this weekend for the second annual Women in Business convention, which aimed at fostering connections between aspiring businesswomen and the school's alumni. The program featured two keynote speakers, several panels and a "Tuck 'Tails" event in Cohen Great Hall.
Some of the panels aimed at current students espoused the importance of the mentor-mentee relationship and networking skills while other panels described careers in finance, consulting, general management and marketing. For prospective students, the panels described life at Tuck and offered advice for interviews and essay writing.
The first keynote speaker, Audrey Kania Tu '90, has worked for a chemical company, a small toy-making business in Boston, The Walt Disney Corporation -- where she helped turn the Winnie the Pooh brand into an international business -- and the World Poker Tour, where she served as the executive vice president.
"I'm standing here as living proof that even if you don't go into banking or consulting you can still pay off your student loans," she said.
Kania recounted some of the celebrities she met during the course of her career and shared anecdotes from her professional experiences. Since graduating from Tuck, Kania met former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and actors Ben Affleck, Mimi Rogers and Matthew Perry.
In one story, Kania described losing $15,000 of her own money to poker professionals in a game in Las Vegas causing Annie Duke, a professional poker player not in that game, to scream at the players for "taking advantage" of Kania's inexperience. The episode at least gave her an opportunity to bond with Ben Affleck while Duke berated the poker players, she said.
Kania began working for the World Poker Tour after a fellow Tuck alumnus who proposed televising poker. When the World Poker Tour went public and needed to hire a public relations firm, she also selected a Tuck alumnus to oversee the operation.
"To me the Tuck and Dartmouth alumni networks are the greatest resources I've had in my career and it was well worth the tuition," Kania said.
The author of "The Networking Survival Guide and Networking for Career Services," Diane Darling, gave the second keynote address at a dinner on Friday night that marked the close of the two-day event.
Sonali Aggarwal Tu '07 and Hilary Halper Tu '07 began planning this year's event soon after last year's conference ended. They said they hoped this experience would provide the launching point for long-lasting relationships between students and businesswomen.
"We hope you will continue to build on the connections you've made after the conference comes to a close," they wrote in a pamphlet given to the event's attendees.
