Most transitions of top leadership lead to angst — especially when your current leader (and, in this case, my boss) achieved so much. However, the opposite has been true throughout the Owen community since the university announced that Eric Johnson will take the reigns as dean from Jim Bradford starting July 1. I have known Eric for more than 20 years, starting when we were both in our early careers at Owen, he as an operations professor, while I was [...]
Okay, so it’s not the news you were hoping for: you were waitlisted for B-School. As a recent Businessweek article explained, this is the season when students are “buzzing with concern” about how to navigate the dreaded waitlist. But with a few smart moves, applicants can increase greatly the likelihood of getting out of what many people describe as a kind of purgatory. Here are a few tips: 1. Ask why you were waitlisted Just remember, if the Admissions Committee [...]
Vanderbilt alumnus Tim Murray (EMBA ’03), Chief Executive Officer of Aluminum Bahrain B.S.C (Alba), brought members of his executive team to meet with Owen students, faculty and administrators as part of a recent US tour. Murray had served in various executive roles at Alba since 2007 before becoming the CEO in October 2012. Prior to Alba, he worked as Vice President and CFO of Knoxville-based ARC Automotive, a global manufacturer of Air Bag Systems. During his visit, Murray shared a [...]
Vanderbilt once again made it into the top-30 MBA programs as ranked this year by U.S. News and World Report. While that marks a slight decrease from last year, it simply reflects the volatile, horse-race nature of rankings. (If you want to read more about the limitations of rankings, check out Malcolm Gladwell, the New York Times, or the B-School website Poets & Quants.) Here are a few highlights from this year’s ranking: • Owen’s overall index score was the [...]
For college undergraduates — and recent grads — looking for a crash course in business skills to help land a job, summer bridge programs offer enormous benefits, as the Wall Street Journal reports in a story today. Designed for students whose colleges don’t have an undergraduate business program, summer business institutes like Vanderbilt’s Accelerator help round out a traditional liberal-arts education for employers seeking candidates with relevant business skills. At Vanderbilt, for example, students receive 100 hours of classroom instruction [...]
