Dear Fellow Deans,

Greetings from Garden City, New York!

I hope your new year is off to a superb start! We are expecting great things from the new year here at the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business—creating the next generation of business leaders and finding new ways to encourage student success. Here are a few stories to illustrate how we are doing that.

Sincerely,



Rajib Sanyal, Ph.D.

Dean

IMPACT—Leadership in the Professions

You can find our faculty impacting their academic professions through active leadership roles—as keynote speakers, editors of journals, reviewers of manuscripts or discussion panelists, for instance. Just to mention a few: Charles Richard Baker, Ph.D. , professor of accounting, is a trustee of the Academy of Accounting Historians and series editor of Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting ; James Hazy, Ed.D. , professor of management, was a keynote speaker at the third Systems and Complexity Science for Healthcare Conference, hosted by George Washington University; Zhimin Huang, Ph.D. , professor and department chair of decision sciences, is editor of the Journal of Modelling in Management ; and Soon Ryoo, Ph.D. , associate professor of economics, serves on the board of editors of The Korean Economic Review .

ENGAGEMENT—Corporate Classroom Connections

We have embraced the essence of that well-known quote attributed to Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." More and more of our courses are incorporating an experiential hands-on component, in which faculty members partner with area businesses to bring real-world projects into the classroom for students to work on. For example, Fan Liu, Ph.D. , assistant professor of marketing, engaged her students in a marketing research course to collaborate with Stelios Karakonstantis '10 (above, in blue check shirt), the founder and CEO of Shredcore, a physical fitness gym, on a project to rebrand the business.

INNOVATION—Learning From Following

We have launched a job-shadowing program—another experiential learning opportunity we provide our students to complement internships and mentorships. Job shadowing lets our sophomore and junior students spend a day at an organization, guided by an executive there, to gain firsthand, ringside interactive exposure to the workplace. Organizations participating in this initiative include State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, GEICO, Merrill Lynch, ING Group and Penn Mutual. Our goal is to ensure that every one of our students graduates with either an internship, a mentorship or a job-shadowing experience.