Day one of the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and Frank Madden T'10, in town as part of an eight-member student delegation from Tuck, is feeling the chill. The students were granted official observer status for the climate summit, but so far on this raw December day there's not a lot to see. In an epic case of overbooking, the U.N. issued 45,000 permits to representatives from nongovernmental organizations and held their main event at the Bella Center in downtown Copenhagen, a venue with room enough for 15,000. In the end, however, the students were rewarded for their patience: More than half of the group managed to get in.

You got to see how the process works and how hard it was to reach a consensus from hundreds of viewpoints."Stephen Parks T'10

Never fight a land war in Asia, and never hold a December conference in Scandinavia," wrote Madden in a blog updating readers on the progress of the Tuck contingent, the only group of MBA students in attendance at Copenhagen. Though blighted by poor planning—at one point, exasperated Danish police officers suggested the students scale a fence to get into a presentation—it's hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor for one of the most complex issues confronting the world today. "It was eye-opening," adds Stephen Parks T'10, also part of the Tuck delegation. "You got to see how the process works and how hard it was to reach a consensus from hundreds of viewpoints."

The highlight for students, however, was their meeting with Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC received significant media attention in the fall, and not all of it good: Much was made of a series of emails stolen from the center that appeared to suggest IPCC scientists had been selective about data. "Obviously, a lot was written about Pachauri and the IPCC in the past few months," says Madden, who, together with the rest of the Tuck delegation, joined the Nobel laureate for drinks one evening. "It was fascinating to hear his take on the hacked emails, how politics and science have become so intertwined, and how they were trying to address the public's concerns."

In addition to such unprecedented access, the Copenhagen trip had, in effect, taken the students to the nexus of business and society, a crossing Tuck's Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship helps prepare MBA students to navigate. That Tuck was the only business school to send a delegation to the climate summit—arguably one the most important events of its kind of the last 10 years—speaks volumes about the work of the Initiative, whose mission it is to ensure that the changing issues at the intersection of business and society are a key component of the Tuck MBA. On the eve of its 10th anniversary in 2011, the Allwin Initiative is delivering students a wide range of enriching experiences at that juncture—both in and out of the classroom.

In 1998, Jeffrey Halpern D'90, T'95 was overseeing the Ariel Halpern 1959 Memorial Endowment, created in the mid-'80s by his father, Ariel D'59, T'60, to foster the discussion of business ethics at Tuck, when he was approached by adjunct professor John Vogel to see if he would help fund visiting speakers for his nonprofit management class. Halpern agreed, and when Vogel reached out to then-director of student affairs Pat Palmiotto about adding a day of community service to Tuck's Orientation week, the pair formed a partnership that, with Halpern's help, laid the foundation for the Initiative. "Students in the '90s were volunteering at Tuck," says Vogel, the Allwin Initiative's associate faculty director for corporate citizenship. "But it was like they were volunteering in spite of being at Tuck, rather than because they were here. We were actually sending a strange message: all that community service that had made them the perfect MBA candidates went into the background once they got to Tuck."