Briefs
- Exec Ed Draws Students from Spain
- Accounting, Anyone?
- Salbu Earns ALSB Excellence Award
- Today's Athletes, Tomorrow's Leaders
- Web Portal Connects Students and Clients
Exec Ed Draws Students from Spain
Texas Executive Education, in partnership with Spain’s ESADE School of Business, recently hosted a program for thirty-six ESADE Executive MBA students. The week-long program, Building the Learning Organization in the High Tech Industry, was held in Austin at the McCombs School. ESADE, with campuses in Madrid and Barcelona, is ranked a top 10 European business school by the Financial Times.
The ESADE EMBA students, executives in a broad range of
businesses from multinationals to local Spanish companies,
explored themes representing pressing business issues currently
facing U.S. managers, such as global market trends, strategy
implementation,
macroeconomics of the high tech economy, and vital communication
tactics.
McCombs’ professors Jim Fredrickson and Phil Zerrillo
provided the ESADE EMBA students with valuable insights into
doing business in the U.S. The educational experience was
further enriched with company visits to Dell Corporation, BMC
Software, and HEB in
San Antonio.
Accounting, Anyone?
Twenty-eight Texas high school students hailing from El Paso to Mesquite participated in the tenth annual Accounting Career Awareness Program (ACAP) this past July.
Geared toward minority students interested in the accounting sector, the program featured mini courses in financial planning, budgeting, savings and investments, and credit. McCombs accounting professors taught the courses along with professionals from Ernst and Young and the National Association of Black Accountants, who co-sponsored the camp.
Participants interviewed accounting professionals, toured E&Y’s Austin office, and gained insights from UT’s CFO Kevin Hegarty and E&Y partner Brad Lindholm. Campers’ group presentations at week’s end reflected their enthusiasm for the subjects they had explored.
“This interest often translates into an eagerness to
build upon the ACAP experience,” says Cece Ridder, ACAP director and
assistant director of undergraduate programs at McCombs. Seventy percent
of college-bound ACAP attendees ultimately choose to major in business.
Salbu Earns ALSB Excellence Award
The Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) presented McCombs Legal Environment of Business professor Steve Salbu with the 2003 Senior Faculty Award of Excellence. The distinction, presented at the ALSB convention in August, is a national award based on nominations and recommendations from academic peers. The Academy praised Salbu for his excellence in teaching, research, academic service, and mentorship.
Today’s Athletes, Tomorrow’s Leaders
This spring, a select group of student-athletes from universities across the country were invited to attend the NCAA Leadership Conference in Orlando, Florida. Among the attendees was Tomer Feingold, a finance major at the McCombs School.
Recognized for their accomplishments in both academics and athletics, the conference attendees learned how to make a difference on their campuses and in their communities and how to be more effective leaders. “The chance to meet and converse with other campus leaders was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” said Tomer. “It was like a week in a dream.”
A former commander in the Israeli Navy Seals, a member UT’s swimming and
diving team, and a business school student who learned English his first
year at UT, Tomer knows first-hand the qualities that make a leader, as
well as the importance of a successful balancing act. “I’ve always
wanted to be part of the best,” he said. In fact, it was his search for
the combination of the best swim program and the best business school
that led him to the University of Texas.
“The most important thing I learned at the conference is to listen, because of our differences, because of race and religion,” he said.
Tomer immediately began applying the lessons from the conference to his life back at UT. He is preparing for the 2004 NCAA Swimming Championship, and feels the confidence he gained at the conference helped land him an internship at Goldman and Sachs. He plans to accept a job offer from the company after graduation.
Web Portal Connects Students and Clients
What if there was one place online where Austin-area businesses of all stripes and sizes could converge to get help from the brightest young business minds in the country? And what if this streamlined, interactive, user-friendly site could help those bright young business minds find valuable internships and great jobs after graduation from one of the premier business schools in the nation?
Thanks to the collaborative efforts of several members of the Department of Management Science and Information Systems (MSIS) at the McCombs School, concept and plan are now a reality, and the site exists.
Designed as a kind of virtual congregation area where MSIS students, faculty, and businesspeople can interact, the “project portal,” as the area on the MSIS Web site is called, allows companies to submit project proposals for select MSIS classes. Faculty members can review those submissions online, accept proposals that are suitable, and assign student teams to work with the businesses.
“In the past, businesses had to find individual faculty members if they wanted students to do a project for them,” says Tim Ruefli, MSIS professor and director of the Information Management MBA specialization. “It involved a lot of inconvenient paper-shuffling and was hit-and-miss.”
For businesses that are interested in tapping into student talent, both undergraduate and graduate, at the McCombs School, the MSIS students’ work has been a phenomenal bargain.
Jose Chacon, who is with Austin-area semiconductor company Intrinsity, Inc., has been very pleased with the exceptional quality of the student efforts. “The students are amazingly professional,” he says. “At Intrinsity we were having trouble dealing with resumes that were e-mailed to us, and the students developed a database for us as well as a Web site where job candidates could provide information. They saved us $5-10,000 on this one project.”
“We feel very passionately about keeping the stakeholders in MSIS engaged and connected with the department,” says Elota Patton, an MSIS lecturer who has been an enthusiastic leader in gathering resources for the Web site. “We hope that the MIS Bridge Web site and the project portal make everyone associated with our department feel like part of an interactive learning community.”
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
