Thank you for excellent suggestions. Contributing what Rory suggests is precisely how we will make the collaborative work and the boot camp reach its potential.

We know the Tuck program well, having been involved in it from its origination, and with Middlebury being the second largest feeder school after Dartmouth. Both it and the Stanford program focus on "hard skills," and in Tuck's case, the financial services sector in particular. These programs now accept something like a third of their applicants for each of two sessions every summer.

I am particularly excited by the "find a world class Excel modeler....." Yes! Who in the group has a suggestion... including yourself?

Glad to hear that this initiative is under discussion. The suggestion that Midd prepare students for advanced Excel modeling is a wonderful one. For the last two years, I've been working heavily with Excel in a consulting capacity. Here are a few thoughts I've compiled about how best to integrate Excel with any Middlebury Business bootcamp:

1. In my experience, Excel is best learned by being thrown 'into the deep end.' Learning Excel in a classroom or in a low-pressure situation rarely yields meaningful results. This is because classroom learning is typically proactive, and it's difficult to predict when, how, or why a specific Excel functionality will come in handy. Most of my Excel learning has come in reaction to a specific business need, where my desire to avoid an all-nighter forced me to learn one of the many useful Excel shortcuts.

2. To that end, I'd tilt the focus of the class away from teaching Excel, and instead put students in a position where they must learn to depend upon Excel. Different students may learn different features/functionalities that best cater to the specific problems they encounter.

Hope my two cents come in useful. I've used Excel in both i-banking and consulting jobs, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is the single most important skill a young professional can hold in their arsenal of abilities. I'll keep a lookout for people who may be interested in such a role if the need materializes.

I agree, Bryan. Thank you for tossing some very pertinent observations into the ring. Here is one question in response: as we are targeting students drawn from the general student body – supermarket shoppers as it were – might the challenge reach beyond building Excel skill sets towards numeracy more broadly conceived?

I so often find myself dealing with truly gifted students who are incredible around qualitative analysis, but who really stumble when challenged to reason and synthesize disparate threads of ideas and argumentation using numbers and facts.

How would you suggest we go about helping such students build their comfort and skills around data-driven analysis and modeling?

One way for students to bridge the gap between the qualitative and the quantitative is to create more 'frameworks'. I've been surprised by how much space exists in between the realms of qualitative and quantitative. And equally shocked by how few people are able to fill that space. One of my favorite managers used to make me draw, with a pencil and paper, the exact framework that I was going to perform in order to turn a qualitative recommendation into a quantitatively-proven one. Perhaps the qualitative argument was framed with a single, but carefully conceived graph. Perhaps it was about having two data tables that prove a particular relationship.

Remember that clients and consulting managers rarely look at an Excel document. They look at the single power point slide that comes out of it. One can spend 90 hours crunching numbers, but if the resulting summary table doesn't "tell the story", it's all for not.

"Excel jockeys" don't make it to the top at my company. The people who make Partner are masters when it comes to "telling the story". They spend a week meeting with client executives, figure out the problem, then come to me and say "this is the graph I want to create". If I make the graph, that's par for the course. If I turn to the Partner and say, "wouldn't it tell a better story if we studied average customer spend instead of total customer spend" -- that's how I get a great performance review.

That's the space between qualitative and quantitative, and it's a space that Middlebury students are poised to eventually fill. Maybe when you give students a case study, you can remove all the graphs that accompany it. See if they can tell you what graphs should have been there...

My 37 years at Middlebury gives me a full appreciation of the power and correctness of Bryan's plea for frameworks. However, while Bryan correctly targets the Excel-driven story, I see his thesis having much broader application. Yes, it is all about telling the story in a credible, even intriguing manner. Indeed, in some ways -- and perhaps unfairly to some -- some people just intuitively understand how to translate even mediocre analysis into a great story, and leap ahead of their class in a course or their peers on the job.

To that end, video taping followed by de-briefing sessions will be ubiquitous during the boot camp. Bryan's value add, and it is huge, is to remind us that most of us cannot intuit the framework that bridges from the number crunching and modeling to the story teased therefrom. Students need, and will benefit greatly from, explicit guidance and hands-on exercises in building and then applying frameworks before they test their stand-up skills in front of their peers, mentors and teachers.