Carroll Capital | Issue 1, 2023

THE PUBLICATION OF THE CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT AT BOSTON COLLEGE Issue No.1 / 2023

From Business School to Broadway, Nick Scandalios ’87 Traces His Path Is Hybrid Work Setting Up Recent Grads for Success?

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Is Management a Liberal Art?

LEARNING TO LEAD IN A MULTIDISCIPLINARY WORLD

By Dean Andy Boynton

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Contents

Carroll Capital The Publication of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College / Issue No.1 / 2023

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Launch 2 From the Editor The Geography of Impact

Assets

BY WILLIAM BOLE

4 From the Dean Coffee Lids, and Kids in the Developing World

35 The Human Factor Machines outperform humans in clear ways—but not the most important ways.

BY ANDY BOYNTON

Ventures 5 The Economics of Ideas Nobel Prize winner Paul M. Romer joins the faculty.

Photographs, from left: Tony Luong, Joshua Dalsimer, Dana Smith; Opposite: Christopher Churchill

6 Accounts The annual Finance Conference; students and alumni in the worlds of fashion, farming, apps, and sustainable seafood; and more.

10 Insights Republican and Democratic executives are behaving in partisan ways; is hybrid work setting grads up for success?

12 Enterprise Alumni seek ways to stem the affordable housing crisis.

14 Application Volunteering can connect your sense of purpose with your professional goals; tips from experts.

16 Export From California to Tibet, alumni and faculty have far-reaching influence.

COV E R I L LU S TR ATI O N BY HA R RY C A M PB E LL

24 Features 18

Building a Bridge to the Liberal Arts Being able to think broadly, creatively, and analytically has empowered some of the brightest minds of industry. Carroll School students have embraced that idea, taking advantage of multiple pathways between management and the arts and sciences at Boston College.

The business world will be better for it. BY ANDY BOYNTON

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No Business like Show Business Nick Scandalios ’87 was supposed to go work in investment banking, so how did he end up climbing the corporate ladder on Broadway?

BY JACLYN JERMYN

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A Place for Us A degree from the Carroll School can be life-changing for first generation students, but it’s a long, hard road to graduation. Luckily, they have each other, and new institutional resources, to help them navigate the challeneges. BY JACLYN JERMYN

36 Community Dorm-room startups; not your average MBA students; “Take Home” professors; and the days of old.

40 Research Scholars without borders and a sampling of recent research findings by Carroll School faculty members.

42 Impact How a team of product designers helped solve a stubborn problem with BC’s undergraduate curriculum.

44 Investments It takes a village to raise a great teacher; new programs for non-management majors, including a coding bootcamp.

46 Distinctions Two Carroll School Hall of Famers in football and accounting; and other achievements.

48 Bottom Line Meagan Loyst ’19, CEO and founder of Gen Z VCs.

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Launch

From the Editor

The Geography of Impact A little map tells a big story about the work of Carroll School alumni worldwide.

BY WILLIAM BOLE

“ Our global map shows members of the Carroll School community springing to action around the world, surfacing prominently not only in multiple business sectors but also diverse arenas including public service, athletics, and the arts.”

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High school seniors who set their sights on Boston College from distant places like California, Ireland, Brazil, and China might be amused to know that the school on the Heights was once considered a “streetcar college,” as our late University historian Thomas H. O’Conner often recalled. Young men (well before 1970, when women were fully admitted) would catch a Chestnut Hill–bound trolley in Dorchester and other city neighborhoods, lugging the soft leather briefcases known in the old days as “Boston bags.” Boston College remained a largely commuter school into the ’60s. ¶ Fast-forward to now. Students are journeying to the Heights from virtually every state in the US and 101 countries; international students make up 13 percent of the total student population. Like the University as a whole, the Carroll School of Management is extending its reach globally, but the impact isn’t measured simply by students from faraway lands arriving on campus. Alumni from both the US and abroad, along with faculty and students, are increasingly making their marks far beyond Fulton Hall.

A visualization of this impact appears on page 16 of this first edition of Carroll Capital. Our global map shows members of the Carroll School community springing to action around the world,

surfacing prominently not only in multiple business sectors but also diverse arenas including public service, athletics, and the arts.

Looking to the global south, you’ll see the fortuitously named Heide Fulton ’92, now serving as US ambassador to Uruguay. Well to the east, there’s Vidya Subramanian, MBA ’02, who helps keep alive the tradition of classical Indian Carnatic music; and Issey Maholo ’07, MS ’08, a professional soccer player in Hong Kong who keeps his day job as a J.P. Morgan executive director. And,

the line extending from Belgium could just as well stretch back to Fulton Hall, to the offices of Professors Rui Albuquerque, Mary Ellen Carter, and Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos. All three are serving as research members of the Belgiumbased European Corporate Governance Institute, which promotes dialogue between academics, legislators, and practitioners.

No doubt, other schools of management can boast of alumni doing extraordinary things worldwide, so there’s no need to get too parochial about all this. We don’t have to think like the loveable, sometimes confused baseball legend Yogi Berra, who, upon hearing that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish, said with utter sincerity— “Only in America!”

Global impact isn’t “only at BC,” but the alumni will often register their impact in ways that point back to an enlightened Jesuit education at Boston College. Take Denis O’Brien, MBA ’82, P ’23, Irish philanthropist and telecommunications pioneer. He’s on the map, and he carries the global values of his alma mater into his entrepreneurial ventures.

“I think the model of capitalism—make money, make money, make money—certainly in an emerging market, has to change,” O’Brien says. “Because if you’re a major multinational and you don’t do something decent in a country but make a substantial profit, you’re basically full of it.

If someone wants to build a sustainable business in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, they’ve got to do some good in the community.”

Wherever you are, we wish you some good reading in this edition of Carroll Capital.

PH OTO G R A PH BY M AT T K A LI N OWS K I

Contributors John and Linda Powers Family Dean

ANDY BOYNTON ’78, P ’13 Editor-in-Chief

WILLIAM BOLE Deputy Editor

JACLYN JERMYN

Olivia Justice ’25

Harry Campbell

Simo Liu

Daniel McGinn ’93

WRITER

ILLUSTRATOR

ILLUSTRATOR

WRITER

Originally from West Chester, Pennsylvania, Justice is a junior at the Carroll School of Management, pursuing a double major in marketing and art history. She is actively involved with Entrepreneurs for Social Impact and the Women in Business Club on campus. For this issue, she covered the launch of the student-created MCEE app (page 9), the American Accounting Association Hall of Fame induction of Pete Wilson (page 47), and more. When she’s not studying, she enjoys exploring all that Boston has to offer.

Campbell lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. His illustrations are recognizable for the precise lines and thoughtful ideas. His work has ranged from illustrations for opinion pieces in The New York Times to creative solutions for subjects in science and technology.

He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and worked for years in New York as a designer for companies like Warner Brothers. For this issue’s cover story (page 18), he showed what the intersection between management and the liberal arts can look like.

Liu is a Los Angelesbased illustrator known for her experimental approach. Her illustrations combine exaggerated and surrealist elements with an innovative spirit, communicating complex ideas through intuitive visualizations. She has collaborated with leading publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Business Review. In this issue, she explored the idea of how volunteering connects with careers for “Values Added” (page 14).

McGinn is an executive editor at Harvard Business Review. He covered the housing boom and bust of the early 2000s as a reporter at Newsweek and wrote the book House Lust about it in 2008. In this issue, he reported on how the Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action at the Carroll School is helping students and alumni pursue careers in the field of affordable housing development (page 12). Working on this story reminded him how important this industry is to the economy and people’s lives.

About

Check out our website and follow us on social media for the latest on the Carroll School of Management. bc.edu/carrollschool Facebook-square carrollschoolbc TWITTER bccarrollschool INSTAGRAM bccarrollschool linkedin school/carroll-schoolof-management

Mission The Carroll School of Management at Boston College ranks among the world’s leading business schools. It offers a rigorous, transformative academic experience that integrates the study of management with the liberal arts, while developing critical thinking skills and fostering ethical leadership. Part of a vibrant, Jesuit, Catholic university, the Carroll School draws inspiration and direction from our centuries-old religious and intellectual heritage. We maintain an enduring conviction that successful management education in the 21st century must combine excellence in teaching and research with reflection and action. The Carroll School educates the whole person in an atmosphere that is inclusive, ethical, caring, collaborative, and respectful of all, consistent with Boston College’s institutional mission and motto of “Ever to Excel.”

Engagement We invite alumni, parents, and friends to engage with Boston College and the Carroll School of Management, in concert with the University’s mission and priorities. Through opportunities such as the Alumni Association’s programming, the Career Center’s Eagle Exchange, or a gift to the Carroll School in support of students and faculty, the BC community can make a meaningful impact on the University and beyond. For more, visit bc.edu/alumni.

Associate Editor

LAURA DAVIS, MBA ’25 Creative Director

ROBERT F. PARSONS / SEVEN ELM SEVENELM.COM

Creative Consultant

JOHN MORAWIEC BOSTON COLLEGE OFFICE OF UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

Contributing Writers

SARAH ANDERSON, MCAS ’23 RACHEL BIRD, MBA ’23 MICHAELA BRANT, MCAS ’23 NADIA CAPOLINO, CSOM ’23 TIM GRAY OLIVIA JUSTICE, CSOM ’25 ISABELLA KEHL, MCAS ’23 PATRICK KENNEDY, MCAS ’99 DANIEL MCGINN, CSOM ’93 Contributing Artists

HARRY CAMPBELL DOMINIC CHAVEZ CHRISTOPHER CHURCHILL TAVIS COBURN CAITLIN CUNNINGHAM JOSHUA DALSIMER THOMAS FUCHS JAMES GRAHAM MATT KALINOWSKI SIMO LIU TONY LUONG MARK OSTOW LEE PELLEGRINI DANA SMITH Image Specialist

STEPHEN BEDNAREK Printing

ROYLE PRINTING

© 2023 Trustees of Boston College.

All rights reserved. Carroll Capital is published once a year in June.

Carroll Capital is printed by Royle Printing in Sun Prairie, WI. Please send questions, comments, or requests for more information to: Phone: 617-552-1373 Mail: Carroll Capital, Carney Hall 443, 281 Beacon Street, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Email: carrollcapital@bc.edu Opinions expressed in Carroll Capital do not necessarily reflect the views of the Carroll School of Management or Boston College.

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Launch

From the Dean

Coffee Lids, and Kids in the Developing World We’re teaching students how to find and develop ideas, for business and for the greater good.

BY POWERS FAMILY DEAN ANDY BOYNTON

Some years ago, I wrote about an economist who has a keen appreciation for small ideas that have an outsized impact. The topic was, of all things, coffee lids, and the unhappy ritual we have performed when ordering our lattes or double-shot espressos in the coffee shop. Mostly in the past, we had to fumble around the counter for the right-sized lid, because a medium lid wouldn’t work for a large coffee. Then came the introduction of one-size-fits-all lids, the product of an idea that required some tinkering with the design of the rims of disposable coffee cups.

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“That small change in the geometry of coffee cups means that somebody can save a little time in setting up the coffee shop, preparing the cups, getting your coffee, and getting out,” this economist pointed out, explaining how the innovation has touched both the shops and their customers. But he had a larger point: the difference between ideas and objects or things. The cardboard cup and its lid are things; used once and tossed out. Yet the recipe or blueprint for the design that allowed one lid to fit all cups is an idea, one that could benefit all coffee shops over and over again.

It’s a little example, hardly about saving humankind, but there’s a lesson: People all over the world can use an idea simultaneously and virtually without limits. That makes the idea more valuable, more conducive to economic growth and social progress, than physical assets, which are constrained by their physicality and depleted over time.

You can get a glimpse of this economist and hear some exciting news about him on the opposite page. I write about Paul Romer not just to welcome him with open arms to the Carroll School, but also because his way of thinking throws light on management education, the Boston College way. Romer explores the power of ideas everywhere, not just in his discipline— and we’re striving to do the same.

We want our students to explore insights, concepts, and algorithms across the arts and sciences, while we also help non-Carroll School students connect their studies to the world of management. In other words, we are building a bridge between management and the arts and sciences.

Indeed, on the cover of this inaugural issue of Carroll Capital, we raise the question: Is management a liberal art? In my essay (page 18), I take the reader through some highlights in the history of innovation, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett, each of whom, in different ways, took a liberal arts approach to the search for business ideas. And I talk about that bridge—which both management students and non-management majors are busily crossing every day at Boston College.

We value such an education ultimately because of what innovative ideas can do for society and human wellbeing. Consider one of Romer’s favorite examples: oral rehydration therapy for children with diarrhea in the developing world. “Many of them will die of dehydration if you don’t give them fluids,” Romer points out. “If you just give them water or even just water with a little salt, they’ll actually get an electrolyte imbalance and die. But it turns out if you mix in a little bit of glucose, a little bit of sugar, along with the salt and the water—you can save millions of lives.” That insight has in fact saved millions of lives, because an idea, once discovered, can be reused perpetually—in this case, by parents in their own homes, with simple instructions and handy ingredients. Romer adds, “The efficient price for that idea is zero, because there’s no cost associated with using the idea.”

Ideas matter, which is why we’re exposing our students to the intellectual breadth of Boston College, nurturing their curiosity and helping them to think creatively, compassionately—so they can go out and “set the world aflame.”

PH OTO G R A PH BY M AT T K A LI N OWS K I

Ventures Accounts P.6 Insights P.10 Enterprise P.12 Application P.14 Export P.16

Paul M. Romer relaxes with his dog, Penny, in his Greenwich Village home.

The Economics of Ideas A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IS JOINING THE FACULTY OF THE BOSTON COLLEGE CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT.

Starting this summer, one of the world’s most celebrated economists will be on the hunt for ideas around the Chestnut Hill campus. He is Paul M. Romer, co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics—and the newest faculty member of the Carroll School’s acclaimed Finance Department. The Nobel laureate will serve as the Seidner University Professor and will launch the Center for the Economics of Ideas at the Carroll School. The name is telling, because Romer won his Nobel

PH OTO G R A PH BY J OS H UA DA L S I M E R

for documenting how ideas propel innovation and growth.

“I’m very excited about the course that Boston College is setting with the new Center for the Economics of Ideas,” said Romer, previously at New York University. “In the pursuit of progress, the market can be the vehicle, but the values of science, scholarship, and enlightenment must be the compass. We’ve got plenty of disruption. What’s missing is direction.” Romer is joining a department already well on the ascent: Finance has ranked steadily in the top 10 of its discipline both nationally and globally. The new professorship is made possible through a generous gift by Marc Seidner ’88, P ’24, and his family.

WILLIAM BOLE

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Ventures

Accounts

EVENTS

Leaders + Lessons

Manyaqi Wang, MCAS ’20, MBA ’23

Karen Lynch

The Boston College CEO Club invited Lynch ’84, president and CEO of CVS Health, to chat about her professional journey and the company’s inner workings. In a discussion moderated by Michael Mahoney, chairman and CEO of Boston Scientific, she broke down her efforts to make healthcare more accessible and explored where she hopes CVS will be in the next five years.

Carri Twigg

A former special assistant to President Obama, Twigg pivoted from a career in politics to one in the arts when she cofounded Culture House, a production company specializing in storytelling about cultural questions confronting America. She shared the insights she’s gleaned with eager students at the Brennan Symposium held by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.

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Rick Callender

Callender, CEO of Valley Water, gave this year’s keynote address at the International Corporate Citizenship Conference, hosted by the Center for Corporate Citizenship. As the only African American executive of a public water and flood protection agency in the United States, Callender reframed how to think about environmental justice: It’s a civil rights issue.

Jeremy Stein

The Harvard economist spoke at the 9th International Conference on Sovereign Bond Markets, hosted by the Carroll School’s Finance Department. He said that while the Federal Reserve often seems surprised by financial crises, these developments are not unpredictable. History suggests loose monetary policies and rapid credit growth bring an “elevated risk” of such crises.

Dressing the Part AN MBA ALUM LOOKS TO SIMPLIFY PROFESSIONAL FASHION FOR WORKING WOMEN.

BY SARAH ANDERSON ’23

A good pair of pants are hard to find. When Manyaqi Wang, MCAS ’20, MBA ’23, noticed that shopping for quality workwear was a struggle among the women in her life, she went looking for answers.

Her solution was founding fashion brand Phoebe Jon. The idea for Phoebe Jon came to Wang while she was completing her bachelor’s in philosophy and was partly inspired by her own personal fashion ethos. “I love looking good, but I don’t like putting a ton of time into it,” she says.

“For me, that means investing in classic pieces that I know can last.”

After workshopping her idea in the Edmund H. Shea Jr. Center for Entrepreneurship’s accelerator program, Wang went on to place second in the 2020 Strakosch Venture Competition. With newfound confidence in her business concept—and $5,000 in prize money— she headed to New York after graduation to scope out manufacturers.

Phoebe Jon takes what Wang calls a “menswear approach” to

women’s fashion. Rather than cater to what’s simply trendy, she puts a modern twist on classic silhouettes.

The designs often repeat the same elements her customers already love in different fabrics and colors to make getting dressed easy.

Wang launched the brand as an e-commerce site in 2020, but she knew she wanted to open a physical store. The first brick-andmortar location, a quaint storefront in Beacon Hill, opened while Wang was in the final year of her full-time MBA program. She hopes the degree will address credibility issues she faces as a young female entrepreneur, but she’s also grateful for the invaluable advice she sought from the classmates in her program.

As for what’s next, Wang hopes to continue opening small stores across major cities. “This is the very beginning of what Phoebe Jon could be,” she says, “but I’m not in a rush. Hanging out with my customers—that’s what brings me the most joy.”

A WORLD BIGGER THAN FINANCE Where do conversations about finance veer into subjects like the war in Ukraine, the challenges posed by climate change, and even the whole system of meritocracy in the United States?

One answer: the annual Finance Conference presented by the Carroll School of Management.

Bringing together financial services professionals, policy makers, scholars, and others, the conference looks beyond money matters.

It links finance and the economy to big questions about society, the environment, and international affairs. For example, explaining how globalization is in retreat and regional instability is on the rise, Harvard University’s Meghan O’Sullivan told the gathering on May 12: “The world is moving to a place where it will be impossible to maximize your success and minimize your failures without a deep understanding of policy and geopolitics.”

Delivering the keynote to a businesscasual audience that crowded Robsham Theater, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell

ripped into the idea of meritocracy—the belief that success is solely a product of individual talent and effort. Gladwell parsed out a bundle of case studies suggesting otherwise, while he acknowledged that top performers in finance and other fields undoubtedly cherish the meritocratic notion. His cases involved athletes, third-graders identified as “gifted,” surgeons, and others who succeeded at least partly because of random circumstances (like being born early in the year or belonging to a talented team) that led institutions to bestow them with special rewards and recognition. “Achievement isn’t just about cognitive ability,” Gladwell said. “It’s powerfully shaped by context.” WILLIAM BOLE

Speakers at the 16th annual Finance Conference also highlighted specific developments on the horizon.

Lawrence Makovich, MCAS ’77, P ’05 ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERT, AUTHOR, AND INSTRUCTOR

There’s “no chance of a low-cost transition to renewable energy” in the fight against climate change, Makovich said, adding that this transition will also be inflationary. His good news was that the world has already made progress toward reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions, by shifting from oil to cleaner natural gas in recent decades.

Richard Clarida VICE CHAIR OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE (2018–2022), C. LOWELL HARRISS PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The Federal Reserve seems poised to cut interest rates by the end of the year, as inflation falls to a tolerable level and the nation likely slips into a mild-to-moderate recession, said Clarida.

Marc Seidner ’88, P ’24 CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER OF NON-TRADITIONAL STRATEGIES AND MANAGING DIRECTOR AT PIMCO’S NEWPORT BEACH OFFICE

For investors, “There’s no doubt that we’re heading into a much more treacherous economic environment,” Seidner observed, citing recession worries.

Richard Bernstein CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER/CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER OF RICHARD BERNSTEIN ADVISORS LLC.

Malcolm Gladwell

PH OTO G R A PH BY D O M I N I C C H AV E Z

The growing share of the federal budget going to service the national debt will eventually “cause us to both raise taxes and cut spending,” Bernstein predicted.

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Accounts

Jake Mazar ’08

PLANTING THE SEEDS ONE ALUM SHARES HOW HE FLOURISHED ON THE PATH FROM FULTON HALL TO SUPPORTING LOCAL FARMERS.

BY JACLYN JERMYN

Around the time his colleagues started thinking about getting MBAs, Jake Mazar ’08 was daydreaming about learning how to farm.

While it might have seemed like an outlandish idea for a former finance and economics double major, his desire to connect with the world around him led the way out of the office and into cofounding two companies, Artifact Cider Project and Wheelhouse Farm.

Growing up in central Massachusetts, Mazar recalls spending plenty of time outside. He also remembers how his whole family would gather over home-cooked meals, often featuring ingredients from their garden. From an early age, he learned to appreciate the earth and the things that came from it.

He was drawn to Boston College particularly because of its values of service to others, but he initially had trouble connecting his classwork to the real world. “It was hard to see how I get from a classroom to how I might use these skills in my future career,” he says.

Mazar felt largely unmoored by his college experience until his semester abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. Completely out of his

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job,” he says. “It terrified me, the routine of it.” He needed to make a big change—not just a different role, but something completely new.

His younger sister ultimately convinced him to give farming a try. “It was so hard to step off that well-worn path,” he says. “In hindsight, it was also one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Mazar began his farming education with apprenticeships, including at Brookfield Farm in Amherst, where he worked in exchange for housing, food, and a stipend. “Farms need labor and they have knowledge to share,” he says. “It was hard work, but I found it verysatisfying.”

During this time, the ideas for his next ventures were already starting to bloom. Hard cider producer Artifact Cider Project and farm-to-table catering company Wheelhouse, both cofounded by Mazar with friends, began as side projects while he was still an apprentice. “Farming is all about connecting to people and trying to make small changes within a community,” he says. “That hopefully has ripple effects for how we engage with the planet.”

Over nearly a decade, the businesses have changed scope many times. Mazar is no longer out in the field—his companies source more than 90 percent of their agricultural products from local farmers—but he’s no less hands-on.

“Sales, legal, accounting,” he says, “I make sure the businesses are healthy and growing by trying to make smart strategic decisions.”

Mazar says he draws especially on the softer skills he started defining in college. “As an entrepreneur, so much time is just managing and communicating. Those are lifelong skills.”

His advice for management students?

Embrace the possibilities of the path ahead.

“There’s no right or wrong way—I think the only wrong way is if you’re stuck doing something that doesn’t feel aligned with who you want to be,” Mazar says, smiling widely. “I wasn’t the kind of person that wears slacks and loafers, you know. I like to be wild and free.”

comfort zone, Mazar felt so alive. “I like feeling like I’m growing,” he says. “Cape Town felt like a big, invigorating change for me.”

A few years after graduation, he found himself back in Africa, consulting for the nonprofit TechnoServe, which promotes business solutions to poverty. Mazar had already been working in management consulting, but he craved something more mission-oriented.

Working on a soybean farming study, Mazar’s days were rarely predictable—a reality he relished. Instead of sitting in a cubicle, some days he was on a motorbike, tracking down farmers to ask them questions. Not only was the work exciting, but he felt connected to his environment in a visceral way.

When Mazar returned to Boston in the spring of 2011 and joined clean technology company EnerNOC as a marketing specialist, he hoped to maintain that feeling of connection. While he aligned with EnerNOC’s environmental work, “I looked at my boss’s job and his traditional corporate role my boss’s boss’s job. It terrified me, wasn’t clicking. “I looked at my boss’s job and my boss’s boss’s the routine of it.” —Jake Mazar ’08

Photographs, from left: Megan Dobro; Jeffrey Rivkin

Ventures

INNOVATION

Press Play Harnessing the power of music to bring people together, two management students, with help from a computer science major, develop an app that allows users to virtually share the aux cord.

When the Calvin Harris song “Feel So Close” started playing at The Lansdowne Pub near Fenway Park, the bar patrons immediately started dancing, pumped up by the selection. Why such excitement for a song that came out in 2011? The tune had earned the most upvotes on MCEE, a playlistbuilding app—developed by Boston College students—where the crowd-favorite songs get played first.

MCEE (pronounced like “emcee”), a play on the abbreviation for master of ceremonies, allows event hosts to organize a digital “party” or group where participants can request songs

From Sea to Table A marketing minor puts her classroom skills to the test through a BC Dining sustainability initiative.

BY OLIVIA JUSTICE ’25

The bottom-dwelling monkfish surely won’t be winning any beauty pageants, but it can still earn rave reviews when whipped up into a Thai coconut curry stew. Plus, it’s sustainably fished. That’s what Morgan Santaguida, MCAS ’25, wants Boston College dining hall patrons to know, in her role as a student ambassador for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), which promotes collaborative solutions to ocean challenges.

In an effort to get more students to enjoy local, sustainable seafood options, and realizing the power that students have in influencing their peers, Boston College became one of five New England universities to partner with GMRI in 2021. Santaguida, a marketing minor, leapt at the chance to get involved in a cause she was already passionate about.

With family members running a bait and tackle shop on the Jersey Shore and a lobster fisherman uncle, she’s no stranger to the challenges surrounding coastal ecosystems.

Santaguida began her work with market research, using surveys to understand the target audience and

I L LU S TR ATI O N BY J OYC E H E S S E LB E RTH

through Spotify to add to a playlist queue, and then others can upvote and downvote the selections. The idea first came to Jack Russell ’23 and Rhett Somers ’23 as part of an Entrepreneurial Management class assignment.

Seeing the idea’s potential, they brought on computer science major Gianna Jarmain, MCAS ’23, to build the app, and then joined the 2022 Accelerate@Shea cohort for professional mentorship and business guidance. The program “allowed us to take our idea more seriously and think about it as an actual company rather than just an idea we had for a class,” says Somers.

MCEE officially launched in the Apple app store this past spring, celebrating with an event at Game On!, a Fenway sports bar.

With a line all the way around the block, the launch party helped MCEE hit their one-week download goal in the first 24 hours of going live. Even with a fully launched app, the team is actively working on making MCEE compatible with Apple Music and optimizing the app for larger groups. But after a long development process, they were thrilled to have a chance to let loose with the crowd at Lansdowne— as long as the playlist was a hit.

OLIVIA JUSTICE ’25

why students might or might not gravitate toward seafood available in the dining halls. Student ambassadors also worked with dining staff to explore adding menu options that were both affordable and easy to work with, like ethically farm-raised salmon ranchero and that curried monkfish stew.

After taking Principles of Marketing this year, Santaguida was especially interested in putting lessons on branding into practice, with the use of social media and flyers posted in dining halls.

“There are so many different steps in getting seafood on people’s plates,” she says. “I think one of the main takeaways, as someone who’s really interested in sustainability and marketing, is how to figure out why things are the way they are and how to create change within institutions.”

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Ventures

Insights

research from the Carroll School no—people take into account the has revealed that these tensions political views of their peers when are escalating even more dramat- deciding to join the team, when to ically in corporate boardrooms. leave, and even who to fire.”

REPUBLICANS ARE INCREASINGLY DOMINATING You’d think that if any groups The key finding: Executive BOARDROOMS, BUT BOTH THEY AND DEMOCRATIC of professionals were inclined to teams are becoming more likeEXECUTIVES ARE BEHAVING IN PARTISAN WAYS. put profits above politics, it would minded as executives depart beTHAT’S BAD NEWS FOR SHAREHOLDERS.

BY WILLIAM BOLE be the executive teams of major cause they don’t align with the corporations. That, however, is team’s political majority. FurIn recent years, many Americans have nurtured the art of tiptoeing not what Carroll School Finance thermore, the research cuts finely around politically sensitive topics when gathering with family and so- Professor Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos enough to show that in case after cializing with friends, or they’ve taken the opposite tack of hurdling into and two colleagues have discov- case, such a departure adversely the fray. They’ve practiced these diplomatic or polemical arts in their ered in their research on political affects the market value of a firm. private lives, though probably not as much in the workplace: By most polarization in the C-suites.

Fos and collaborators—Haraccounts, the atmosphere at work has been less charged politically for “We always thought that mon- vard’s Elisabeth Kempf and Cormost people. But that’s changing, too. ey comes first—that top execu- nell’s Margarita Tsoutsoura— In a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, tives leave their political views at have presented the research at nearly half of employees reported that they had either been involved in home,” says Fos, speaking of past conferences and in a working political disagreements at work or had witnessed such arguments. And assumptions by researchers. “But paper published online by the

POLARIZED

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I LLU S T R ATI O N BY TH O M AS F U C H S

National Bureau of Economic Research. They’ve been able to uncover hidden dynamics in boardrooms by culling through 12 years of voter registration records, cross-checking with public disclosures about executives at 1,500 leading firms.

Executive teams are “increasingly partisan,” the scholars write, defining partisanship as “the degree to which a single party dominates political views within the same executive team.” They cite two factors: Republicans constitute a growing share of executive teams at the 1,500 firms (which rattles the familiar narrative that companies are becoming “woke”); and top executives, Republican or Democratic, are “matching” with peers of their own party.

Such partisanship is “valuedestroying for shareholders,” say the professors, who tracked stock prices following departures of executive team members. They studied two groups: departing executives who aligned with the political majority on their teams, and those who did not. Over two trading sessions, the average return on stocks was 1.7 percent lower for the second group of politically “misaligned” executives who departed (a statistically significant difference for such a short period).

Investors are often able to sniff out the reasons for these departures or at least know something is awry when someone leaves abruptly.

The market frowns upon boardroom partisanship. The flip side is that politically diverse executive teams are good for a firm’s value and rewarded by investors. But don’t bet on an upswing of bipartisanship as the country lurches toward another election year.

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Caught in the Middle Hybrid work models are more popular than ever, but the system is stacked against new grads looking to build connections.

BY LAURA DAVIS, MBA ’25

Tea Qatipi’s day begins at 8:15 a.m. in her South Boston apartment. She’s working from home today, so she simply brushes her teeth, makes coffee, and signs into her computer. At noon, while on a video call, nearby church bells begin to ring and she rushes to hit the mute button on her computer, embarrassed by the interruption. After hanging up, Qatipi ’22, a risk and financial advisory analyst at Deloitte, sends her manager a quick message asking to hop on a call for some project feedback. As she waits for a reply, Qatipi’s four roommates congregate in the kitchen right outside her bedroom door. For a moment, she wishes she were out there with them, but their chatter can also be distracting. She’s planning on going to the office tomorrow, but she knows most of her coworkers won’t be there.

Qatipi has a hybrid work arrangement—a flexible system combining in-person and remote work. In fact, according to a March 2022 Gallup survey of more than 140,000 workers, 59 percent of people whose jobs can be done remotely favor hybrid over fully remote or in-person arrangements.

Still, hybrid work is causing tension with the common career goals of new college graduates entering the workforce.

“Young people want to use work as their primary way of meeting people and gaining career resources,” says Beth Schinoff, who has studied workplace relationships in virtual settings as a Carroll School assistant professor of management and organization. “People in different generations just

Tea Qatipi ’22 found herself shellshocked by the abrupt change in lifestyle, citing the transition from “this very social college environment to being on your own.”

want time back. They see so much value in telecommuting.”

Meeraf Alemayehu ’22, who works at EY in People Advisory Services, says that when she’s working remotely, it’s hard to get to know colleagues. Alemayehu goes into the office once a week, but her team members usually aren’t there on the same day. A recent team dinner finally gave her a bonding opportunity. “We talked about our love lives,” she adds. “Now I feel like I know them [better].”

When workers are encouraged to select which days they’re in the office—without needing to alert coworkers—a hybrid work environment can feel as isolating as a fully remote one. “Research shows when you work remotely, you tend to focus more on work than on people,” says Schinoff.

With less in-person interaction between colleagues, new grads have fewer opportunities to network or develop mentor/mentee relationships. This could have lasting consequences for young workers, although Schinoff emphasizes that the research is lagging behind the rapid changes in the workforce.

These challenges are only intensified by the adjustment from college life to a primarily solitary work environment. “Postgrad is always going to be a transition,” says Alemayehu, “but it’s further isolating when you’re not fully in person [at work].” Likewise, Qatipi found herself shell-shocked by the abrupt change in lifestyle, citing the transition from “this very social college environment to being on your own.” If networking is a fundamental priority, the better work model is clear to Schinoff: “Always choose in-person if you want to build connections.”

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Aaron Horne ’17 stands on the steps of Courthouse Lofts in downtown Worcester, a renovation project that offers tiered rental rates based on residents’ income.

Ventures

Enterprise

HOME WORK

LEVERAGING THEIR REAL ESTATE EDUCATION, ALUMNI SEEK WAYS TO STEM THE CRISIS OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING. DANIEL MCGINN ’93

When Aaron Horne ’17 was growing up in Pittsburgh, he rode a bus from his city neighborhood through eight or nine distinct neighborhoods to a suburban school every day. Along the way, he’d ask himself: Why do these places look different? Why are the building styles unique? Do people like living here? On vacations, Horne traveled to Cleveland, Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Charleston. “Getting exposure to other places made me think about how communities came to be and created an interest in how places are created,” he says.

When he arrived in Chestnut Hill, Horne thought he might pursue a career in architecture or urban planning. Then, in the fall of his sophomore year, he took a class, Real Estate and Urban Action, created and taught primarily

by Joseph E. Corcoran ’59, H ’09.

Corcoran had grown up in Dorchester during the Great Depression, joined the Army, and attended Boston College on the GI Bill before launching a career transforming tired public housing projects into thriving mixedincome residential developments.

Late in his career, Corcoran began teaching a course at the Carroll School of Management.

“The course taught me how real estate could be a way to help people who may not have the means or the best opportunities,” Horne says, tracing his path toward a ca-

PH OTO G R A PH BY TO N Y LU O N G

graduation, he joined California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, where he worked on projects to convert hotels into affordable housing for the homeless. In November 2022, Cross moved to the nation’s capital to join the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Like Cross, Horne began tackling urban housing problems as an undergraduate. After his junior year, he landed a Corcoran summer internship in Mattapan, researching property ownership and documenting the shortcomings of absentee landlords. During the fall of his senior year, he took a real estate finance class taught by Senior Lecturer Edward Chazen, who offered to help Horne with his job hunt. Chazen introduced him to leaders at Trinity Financial, a Boston-based, communityfocused real estate developer.

Horne accepted a job as an assistant project manager.

Today, one of his accomplishments (together with colleagues) is anchoring an intersection in downtown Worcester. Courthouse Lofts required a $73 million renovation to convert an abandoned courthouse, parts of which dated to 1840, into 118 apartments offered at tiered rental rates based on residents’ income. Walking through the hallways one morning, Horne pointed out how they’d retained vestiges of the building’s prior life: One hallway contains an antique legal file cabinet, one apartment wall is lined with bars from a courtroom’s holding

cell, and a soaring lounge area contains the judge’s bench. “We didn’t want people to forget that this building was a courthouse for many years,” Horne explains.

A few miles away, Horne has started working on a new project where Trinity plans to demolish 372 public housing units and replace them with 527 higher-quality, but still affordable, apartments.

Although Horne’s day-to-day work varies—arranging financing, seeking approvals, choosing appliances—the most gratifying aspect remains constant. “Seeing families move into these homes and be appreciative of the opportunity to find good quality housing where they feel safe—that will never not be meaningful to me,” he says.

Jennifer Corcoran, MCAS ’13, granddaughter of the Corcoran Center’s benefactor, understands that sense of gratification. Corcoran was a philosophy major, unsure of her career goals—this was before the Corcoran Center began in 2014. After graduation, she joined the family business and is now a project director at her father’s company, Joseph J. Corcoran Company. “What I’m really drawn to is the transformation of communities and how people advance their lives,” she says. These days, when she returns to campus, she sees the impact of an education blending real estate with urban action.

“I’m really jealous of the students at the Corcoran Center today,” she says. “They’re going to know so much more than I did when I was going into the business.”

reer focused on affordable housing.

This is precisely the vision that Corcoran had in 2014, when he made the gift enabling the creation of the Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action.

The center, led by Executive Director Neil McCullagh, offers eight undergraduate courses, a case competition, a summer internship program, guest lectures, and other programming. “We want students to understand the responsibility and power that come with a real estate education,” says McCullagh, who remained close to Corcoran until his death in 2020.

Hundreds of students have learned those lessons, among them Colin Cross, MCAS ’19. He grew up in McKinney, Texas, and from the time he arrived in Boston, he was fascinated by the variety of housing and cityscapes. “I made an effort to break out of the ‘BC bubble’ and get into the city to explore neighborhoods,” Cross says. As a junior, he applied for a Corcoran summer internship and was assigned to the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, where he inventoried city-owned parcels to determine which ones might be appropriate for development.

“I was really encouraged to get out and understand the neighborhood context— “Getting exposure to other places made me think they didn’t want me sitabout how communities came to be and created an ting at my desk on Google Maps,” Cross says. Upon interest in how places are created.” —Aaron Horne ’17

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Application

CENTER FINDINGS

Looking to Up Your Leadership Game?

Parental Leave for All Only 62 percent of men take the full parental leave available to them, yet 96 percent of parents feel a deeper bond with their child as a result of leave, according to the Center for Work and Family’s New Dad Series, a 10-year research effort examining the “evolving roles of working fathers.’’ Promoting flexible schedules in the workplace is a significant way for managers to encourage dads to use their paternity leave. The center recommends taking it a step further by surveying the dads in your organization to understand their needs and offer resources, events, and forums for them to discuss work-life balance.

Stemming the Retirement Crisis Why do US workers end up with inadequate retirement savings? The main reason: Only half of private-sector workers are covered by an employeesponsored retirement plan, says the Center for Retirement Research in a recent analysis, “Closing the Coverage Gap.” One approach is for employers to not only offer 401(k) plans but also to automatically enroll employees (workers can opt out). Several states have passed legislation requiring many companies to do so, but human resource executives can take action voluntarily and clear obstacles to enrollment (this helps recruit and retain talent).

Other managers can make sure their employees understand the value these programs offer.

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Being a Leader in Hard Times The Lynch Leadership Academy develops the leadership skills of educators through fellowships, coaching, and more. The academy laid out tips for school administrators looking to better respond in times of crisis—lessons that can be applied to managers across industries. Employees look to leadership “in times of uncertainty,” but instead of rushing to take action, leaders should focus on listening to their community first and reacting with empathy.

Managers might, for example, provide more opportunities for flexibility around scheduling and workload.

By taking care of your community, employees will feel more supported and empowered at work.

A Focus on Equity Data suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has widened inequalities, disproportionately affecting the health and economic wellbeing of vulnerable populations.

Companies can help reverse these inequities by working to address bias and discrimination, according to a report by the Center for Corporate Citizenship. Some methods include issuing a companywide survey to learn about real or perceived discrimination, expanding implicit bias training, and offering gift-matching programs to encourage employee donations to civil rights groups. The results? Deeper employee engagement, improved talent attraction, and better financial performance. NADIA CAPOLINO ’23

VALUES ADDED HOW VOLUNTEERING CAN CONNECT YOUR SENSE OF PURPOSE WITH YOUR PROFESSIONAL GOALS.

BY TIM GRAY

If you’re a graduate or friend of Boston College, you know the University strives to educate “men and women for others.” Being such a person often entails giving back with volunteering. But volunteer work can be hard to balance with the demands of a career, especially when being hailed by bosses, colleagues, and clients via omnipresent electronic devices.

Strategic volunteering offers a way of balancing the demands of a 24/7 world. It’s an approach to giving back that entails considering how your career and your volunteering can reinforce each other, and how you can use your skills to maximize the impact of your charitable efforts.

Admittedly, that’s an easy idea to put into words—implementing it is harder.

Katherine Smith, executive director of Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship, says one starting point might be Fr. Michael Himes’s three questions for determining a person’s vocation (as presented in The Idea Hunter, coauthored by Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton). Fr. Himes taught theology at Boston College from 1993 to 2021 and died in 2022.

He suggested, as students searched for their callings, they should ask themselves: 1) What brings me joy? 2) What am I good at? 3) What role does society need me to serve? “It’s the intersection of those three things that creates a sense of vocation and purpose,”

Smith says. When you find that sense of purpose, you’ve likely found a volunteer opportunity where you can excel and stand out.

Daniel Pink, author of Drive, offers a similar framework but one that sidesteps the daunting question of determining society’s needs. Pink, who’s writing about motivation in a corporate context, proposes a three-part test for identifying worthwhile undertakings. He says you should ask yourself where you can exercise autonomy, achieve mastery, and feel a sense of purpose.

“Pink is talking about tapping into intrinsic motivations” in your job, Smith says. But those same intrinsic motivators can apply to charitable work. Find a volunteer activity that meets his trifold test, and you’ve likely identified a way to increase your skills and broaden your professional network.

Njoke Thomas, a Carroll School professor of management and organization, tosses another word into the mix: authenticity. Her research has explored something different from but relevant to vol-

unteering—how YouTube content ter represent a nonprofit if you feel Christel, MBA/MSW ’00, says creators transition from posting authentic and are perceived that her team helps the bank’s employvideos as a hobby to creating ca- way. That can lead to better oppor- ees identify charities that need reers as online influencers. “The tunities to increase your skills and their skills and fit their interests. people who have been posting the network, she says.

“It’s a way to learn and grow,” she longest, their authenticity appeal Joan Christel, president of the says, pointing to the value of learnis, ‘You guys, you know me from State Street Foundation, the char- ing new skills such as presenting to way back when, and you know I’ve itable arm of Boston’s State Street a nonprofit’s board. “We hear from been doing this for love,’” she says Bank, likewise counsels that peo- our employees that they see it as a of those who make the transition. ple seek out volunteer work that safe space to stretch themselves.”

Extending that idea to volun- speaks to their values, not chariA bit of logistical advice she ofteering, Thomas says people might ties they think will impress their fers is to consider the size of a nonconsider whether a volunteer op- boss. “If you do something just be- profit you’re considering working portunity is authentic for them. cause you think it matters to your with. As in business, size brings Does it express their values? You’ll company, it’s going to be hard to trade-offs. Big nonprofits will likely find more meaning and bet- fake your way through it,” she says. have well-established procedures for handling volunteers but may not provide the 1. What brings me joy? 2. What am I good at? same breadth of oppor3. What role does society need me to serve? tunities to learn and dis-

I L LU S TR ATI O N BY S I M O LI U

tinguish oneself. Small ones may be more chaotic but may also offer a greater chance of taking on high-profile roles.

Christel knows firsthand how powerful volunteering can be in advancing one’s career. A lifelong dancer, she has volunteered with the Boston Ballet for years because of her love of the art form. She led a special project aimed at refreshing and diversifying the board of advisors. She worked at a different company then, and, through this project, met an executive who ended up counseling her on her career.

“That’s what led me to State Street,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here were it not for my own skillsbased volunteering.”

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Ventures

Export CAMBRIDGE, USA

Juan Fernando Lopera ’99 As Beth Israel Lahey Health’s first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, Lopera is leading efforts to improve healthcare practices for underserved populations across Massachusetts.

LOS ANGELES, USA

Chris O’Donnell ’92, HON ’17, P ’22, ’25 Holy smokes, Batman! Before Golden Globe–nominated actor O’Donnell appeared on the silver screen as Robin in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, he was hanging out on the Heights, completing a marketing degree. These days, he’s best known for playing Special Agent Callen in the TV series NCIS: Los Angeles, which ran for 14 seasons.

URUGUAY

Heide Fulton ’92 COLOMBIA

Luly Castellanos de Samper ’91, P ’18 With deep knowledge of the medical device and healthcare industries as well as the Latin American market, Castellanos de Samper serves in Bogotá, Colombia as worldwide president of energy for the MedTech division of Johnson & Johnson.

With an extensive background in foreign service, Fulton is currently serving as US ambassador to Uruguay. A career diplomat, Fulton previously worked for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and the Office of Mexican Affairs. She also served as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires for Honduras from 2016 to 2019.

INFOGRAPHIC

All Around the World From the coast of California to the mountains of Tibet, Carroll School alumni and faculty have far-reaching influence. Making their mark not just in business, but also in sports, politics, entertainment, and beyond, our community members are out shaping the world we live in every day.

BY ISABELLA KEHL ’23

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M A P BY J U D E B U F F U M

BELGIUM

Professor of Accounting and Joseph L. Sweeney Chair Mary Ellen Carter Carter has joined the European Corporate Governance Institute as a research member. She will share insights on corporate governance issues with other members, including Carroll School Finance professors Rui Albuquerque, the Seidner Family Faculty Fellow, and Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, a Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow.

JAPAN

Young-Kee Yu ’97 You might know Yu as the Japanese rapper Verbal.

Between producing albums and directing music videos, he even found time to start jewelry label Ambush with his wife, Yoon Ahn.

TIBET

Associate Professor Juan Montes

CZECH REPUBLIC

Bijan Sabet ’91, P ’21 From Boston College trustee to diplomat: Sabet recently began serving as US ambassador to the Czech Republic. He’s also a cofounder and partner at influential venture capital firm Spark Capital, which has invested in companies like Slack, Wayfair, and Warby Parker.

Facing avalanches, frayed ropes, and limited oxygen, Montes conquered Mount Everest’s Kangshung Face. As an associate professor of the practice in the Management and Organization Department, he uses this experience to teach students how companies can face crises head-on with a “resilience toolkit.”

HONG KONG

Issey Maholo ’07, MS ’08 Maholo is not only an executive director of prime finance at J.P. Morgan.

He’s also a professional soccer player, taking the Hong Kong Premier League by storm as a goalkeeper.

IRELAND

Denis O’Brien, MBA ’82, P ’23 An Irish philanthropist and founder of telecommunications operator Digicel Group, O’Brien takes great inspiration from his time in school. Not only did he help support future business leaders in Ireland with the O’Brien Fellowship at the Carroll School, he also gifted and named the O’Brien Centre for Science at his other alma mater, University College Dublin.

INDIA

Anupam Mittal, MBA ’97

INDIA

Vidya Subramanian, MBA ’02 Blending her artistic aspirations with her entrepreneurial spirit, Subramanian has been helping students across the world learn classical Indian Carnatic music for more than 15 years. Those efforts, along with her empowerment of working women through the creation of remote teaching jobs, earned her a Women Transforming India Award.

Over in Mumbai, entrepreneur Mittal is making waves as a judge on Shark Tank India. The founder of leading Indian online matchmaking service Shaadi.com, Mittal has a sharp eye for promising business ventures.

He’s the shark you want in your corner.

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A BRIDGE TO THE

Being able to think broadly, creatively, and analytically has empowered some of the brightest minds of industry, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. Carroll School students have embraced that idea, taking advantage of multiple pathways between management and the arts and sciences at Boston College. The business world will be better for it.

BY ANDY BOYNTON

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and innovator—was known to remark on more than one occasion, “Ah, Shakespeare. That’s where you get the ideas!” I’m not exactly sure what he meant by this. I do not know if Edison’s pursuit of the incandescent light bulb (one of his signature inventions) was somehow inspired by King Claudius’s command in Hamlet, “Give me some light!” I have no idea if his thinking about the phonograph (which he also invented) was influenced by the mysterious noises that enthralled Caliban in The Tempest.

What’s clear is that Edison was fond of analogy and metaphor, as in, “Now is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III). He believed that the ability to see analogies was the key to invention. For example, he looked at the way messages flow through telegraph equipment and conceptualized an analogous flow of electricity through wires and filaments. That was part of Edison’s musing about the electric light bulb, which came several years before his creation of the first patented movie camera.

Indeed, Edison believed that the best learning was diverse learning, and he wanted all of his collaborators to know a lot of different things.

All prospective employees took a written test of 150 questions geared toward different jobs and classifications. College graduates were asked a raft of questions like “What is the first line in the Aeneid? Who composed Il Trovatore? What voltage is used on streetcars?” Cabinet makers were asked: “Which countries supply the most mahogany? Who was the Roman emperor when Jesus Christ was born?” Edison demanded scores of 90 percent or better for those who would enter into what became known as his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The message: People need to think elastically and creatively no matter what job they’re doing; an engineer could learn a thing or two from Shakespeare.

Roughly a century and a half later, the worlds of management—and management education—are slowly catching up with Edison and other iconic figures. Leaders in industry and management education have begun to grasp (at least in principle) the value of widely diverse learning, along with the need to create and employ professionals who think broadly, creatively, analytically. Such ways of thinking may be lagging in some organizations, but they’re essential to a management education at a liberal arts university, notably a Jesuit one. Which is why, at the Carroll School, we have spent much of the past decade or so building a bridge to the arts and sciences. In fact, it is not uncommon for our undergraduates to take a majority of their courses in the humanities and natural sciences.

All that raises a bracing question: Is management a liberal art?

The question could sound strange, given that schools of management are clearly separated from the arts and sciences in the modern research university. It is common knowledge, or should I say perception, that business education is more about “doing” than “knowing.”

And how many practitioners of finance or business analytics, young or old, would say that their discipline is a liberal art? Hopefully more than in the past.

Peter F. Drucker, the founder of modern management theory, addressed these questions head-on. “Management is what tradition used

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Photographs, from left: Bettmann; George Rose

Thomas Edison—perhaps the greatest American inventor and

to call a liberal art—‘liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; ‘art’ because it deals with practice and application,” he wrote. “Managers draw upon all of the knowledges and insights of the humanities and social sciences, on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on the physical sciences and ethics. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results….”

Drucker was hardly alone in advancing a robustly humanistic view of management. Speaking with National Public Radio in 2011, Apple icon Steve Jobs spoke about the earth-shaking phenomenon of the Macintosh, Apple’s original personal computer, explaining that his driving motivation “was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people … to bring graphics to people ... so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera ... to help them communicate.”

And here’s the clincher: “Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.” For good measure, Jobs added, “In my perspective ... computer science is a liberal art.”

Like many great innovators, Jobs was interested in more than just one thing. He had, among other curiosities, a side interest in calligraphy. “And we designed it all into the Mac,” Jobs recalled in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford, referring to the computer that was the first to have elegant typography. In other words, he wasn’t a narrow specialist, which raises another question at a time when creativity and

ideas are critical to business success: Should everyone be a generalist, to some degree?

Here, it is useful to think about two kinds—or shapes— of professionals. One can be shaped either like an I (think narrow and tight) or a T (think extended). The I-shaped professional is highly versed in a specific area of expertise and learns by drilling more deeply into a particular field.

The T-shaped person, with broader skills and knowledge, learns by linking up different perspectives from varied disciplines.

Both types are essential in any organization. Many leaders today, however, feel that T people are better at fostering the diverse connections and conversations that bring exceptional ideas to the surface. These leaders also bemoan what they see as a dearth of Ts in today’s hyper-specialized environments. I’ve heard quite a few leaders say, “We have a lot of I-shaped people. What we need are more Ts.” My point is not that the Ts shall inherit the earth—that it’s always better to be one of them—but that most people would be well-advised to develop T characteristics. How is that done? Dabbling in calligraphy or other odd subjects is optional. What’s necessary is to broaden your sources of information and knowledge, as a way of getting standout ideas for your projects.

“Management is what tradition used to call a liberal art—‘liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; ‘art’ because it deals with practice and application.”

PETER F. DRUCKER

Thomas Edison, opposite, believed that the best learning was diverse learning, and he wanted all of his collaborators to know a lot of different things.

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“Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience. In my perspective ... computer science is a liberal art.”

STEVE JOBS

Warren Buffett, opposite, made a point of seeking out sources of ideas that were unfrequented by other investors. He searched for information about the intrinsic value of a given company.

This led him beyond a narrow cluster of familiar sources.

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cards to pay for their dinners, and assumed that the same would be true in other cities. The next day, he dropped in on banks and travel agencies that use American Express traveler’s checks, before turning up at supermarkets and drug stores that sold the company’s money orders.

At all stops the American Express trade was brisk. Using his communication skills, Buffett also interviewed the company’s competitors. As Lowenstein summarizes in Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist: His sleuthing led to two conclusions, both at odds with prevailing wisdom: 1. American Express was not going down the tubes.

2. Its name was one of the great franchises in the world.

As investors grew fearful of American Express stock, Buffet became greedy. He poured nearly a quarter of his assets into the stock. Sure enough, American Express’s value began to rise again on Wall Street (this was before the days when Buffett’s purchasing alone could power market movements). In the end, he escaped narrowness through a breadth of sources. He didn’t put himself where all the other investors were; he didn’t just read the usual, distilled reports by stock analysts or stare at the ticker tape. Rather, he extended himself into diverse settings, places where few if any investors were trolling for ideas. In this way, he took on the broad shape of a T while remaining fixated on one question: Should I invest in American Express?

Photographs, from left: Michael L Abramson; Eric Francis

Consider Warren Buffett. He would have to be considered I-shaped in the sense that he’s all about finding better ways to invest money. As biographer Roger Lowenstein notes, “His talent lay not in his range—which was narrowly focused on investing—but in his intensity.” True, but Buffett did make a point of seeking out sources of ideas that were unfrequented by other investors. In the past, most of his colleagues were primarily interested in the mechanics of the stock market. Buffett, however, searched for information about the intrinsic value of a given company. This led him beyond a narrow cluster of familiar sources.

In 1963, Buffett was closely studying American Express.

At the time the company boasted a million cardholders, but things quickly began to unravel. A New Jersey subsidiary of the company imploded in a scandal involving fraud (by a third party), and American Express stock plunged by nearly 50 percent. Amid this crisis, Buffett continued to study the company—but in unusual ways, like an anthropologist conducting ethnographic research, or perhaps a journalist doing in-depth reporting, rather than a purely I-shaped investor.

He went to Ross’ Steak House in Omaha, not to chow down but to sit near the cashier and talk to the owner. He observed that patrons were still using American Express

So, there’s nothing wrong with being a card-carrying I as long as you can also be a T in some significant sense. Yes, most professionals need to specialize, but they are more likely to find distinctive ideas if they have one foot outside their disciplines or “small worlds,” in the words of technology analyst Andrew Hargadon. There are winning ideas to be leveraged from a grocery store, or a calligraphy class taken long ago in the fine arts department.

In an interconnected business world, T qualities are essential. For one thing, if you’re T-shaped, you naturally think people from other disciplines, from other academic backgrounds, might have something valuable to say about problems you’re tackling. A T-shaped executive is more likely to see how a finance problem often isn’t just about finance.

It’s quite possibly a marketing problem, perhaps an issue related to cultural differences among diverse clients, or a challenge requiring a sense of history and geopolitics. The world is T-shaped.

That world is one reason why, at the Carroll School, we’ve been fostering linkages between management and the liberal arts. Another reason is that Boston College, too, is T-shaped. Our Jesuit Catholic liberal arts university is committed to nurturing “the whole person,” not just a fragment of the person that yields specialized knowledge. Our goal is to develop students intellectually, socially, ethically, and spiritually; by doing so, we contribute to their full human flourishing.

For more than a decade, our school has been constantly looking for ways to make management education more human, laying the bricks,

one by one, for passageways between our academic programs and the arts and sciences. We began with Portico, our signature course taken by every first-semester student; it looks at contemporary business through global, historical, philosophical, and ethical lenses. Then, we allowed our students to waive selected management requirements in exchange for majoring or minoring in a non-management discipline. Starting with the class of 2027, we will now simply require them to take five non-Carroll School courses, on top of requirements in the University’s undergraduate core curriculum.

Along the way, we have made sure that traffic on the multidisciplinary bridge is chugging in both directions.

We’ve done that partly by creating seven new minors in management disciplines exclusively for non-management majors, who nonetheless take these classes together with Carroll School students, enriching the perspectives of both student populations. Still another lane of that bridge is the Summer Management Catalyst Program, which introduces management to non-management majors.

The results: 58 percent of our 527-strong class of ’23 graduated with a major or minor from the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences; these students and many others are now taking more credits in the arts and sciences than in management disciplines. Coming from the other side of the bridge, more than 1,300 Morrissey students are minoring at the Carroll School.

One of our newest courses, Coding for Business, throws light on the bold assertion by Steve Jobs that even computer science is a liberal art. The course is part of our management core curriculum, and we are taking what Jobs would call a liberal arts perspective on coding—which, in our understanding, is about much more than writing code. It’s about thinking. We’re teaching students how to specify a problem, identify the variables and how these relate as pieces of the solution, and then figure out how to use the precise syntax of the language (Python, with a dash of SQL) to formulate the solution. This is an exercise in logical, disciplined problem-solving; students will be able to apply that learning to wide-ranging situations as managers in a T-shaped world.

In the final analysis, the best leaders and managers make wise choices for their organizations and stakeholders.

And the wisdom they need comes from combining technical expertise and competence with an astute sense of their various contexts, including cultural, social, historical, and other vantage points. When a management education integrates these different realms of knowledge, creating pathways to the arts and sciences, our students gain wisdom.

At Boston College, management is truly a liberal art.

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NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS Nick Scandalios ’87 was supposed to go work in investment banking, so how did he end up climbing the corporate ladder on Broadway?

By Jaclyn Jermyn Photographs by Joshua Dalsimer

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“I’M NOT HIRING YOU. I just wanted to meet the person on the other side of this resume.” That’s what Nick Scandalios ’87 remembers being told when he stepped into the bustling Manhattan offices of the Nederlander Organization during summer 1987. It wasn’t exactly what he was hoping to hear.

Nick Scandalios sits in Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, which is owned by the Nederlander Organization.

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On paper, Scandalios knew he was an unlikely candidate for a receptionist job with a company known for producing some of Broadway’s biggest shows—he had, after all, just graduated from the Carroll School summa cum laude with a finance degree. But as the person on the other side of the resume, Scandalios saw a prime opportunity in front of him. Here was his chance to learn the ins and outs of the theater industry hands-on—and he loved theater.

Thanks in no small part to his radiating enthusiasm, his pitch worked. The receptionist job was his as long as he made a small promise: He had to stay for at least six months. “They thought I was going to be bored out of my mind,” he says, laughing. But Scandalios kept looking ahead. He’s now been with the company for nearly 36 years, no longer a receptionist, but the executive vice president.

Growing up in Port Washington on Long Island, Scandalios always enjoyed singing and performing, but he found his passion for theater the first time he heard the soundtrack to Evita. “I became obsessed,” he says. If he closes his eyes, he can instantly transport himself back to being a teen, swept up by the music.

At the same time, he says, “Being good at math in our house was a prerequisite to breathing.” His father was a computer programmer turned banker, and his mother was a high school math teacher—both the children of Greek immigrants and very practical. They struck a deal with their son. If he got a business degree first, they would then pay for any acting program he got accepted to. The compromise seemed fair enough to Scandalios, who was just beginning his college search.

Getting a peek at Gasson Hall down Linden Lane was enough to make him fall for Boston College. During his years in business school, he couldn’t quite shake his theater aspirations and got involved with the Boston College Theatre Department. He even starred as Tony in West Side Story his senior year. Summer breaks in Port Washington were spent balancing banking jobs with putting on shows with Harbor Theater Company, which he cofounded in 1984 as a way to give young adults like himself acting opportunities.

But the looming deadline of graduation was catching up with him. He got into the Chase Bank training program— his father was a Chase executive, although Scandalios never worked under him—and his future seemed set. That is, until a Chase colleague of his father’s called him up one day and “proceeded to scream at me for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only about three minutes of expletives,” Scandalios says wryly.

The gist was this: He knew about the young man’s passion for theater and was adamant that people like him and Scandalios’s father shouldn’t work their whole lives just to see their children not follow their dreams. “He said to me, ‘You have to go try this. If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it,’” Scandalios continues. “I was at that age where there’s this push and pull of finding my own identity. If my

father had said it to me, I would have never taken the advice.”

He did take the advice, leaving Boston College unemployed but with a stack of resumes he sent to every New York theater organization he could think of, ending up at the Nederlander Organization before the summer was out.

The company is the owner and operator of more than 30 venues across the US and England, and a prolific producer on Broadway. It’s also a family business, a theatrical dynasty started in 1912 with the purchase of a 99-year lease on the Detroit Opera House by David T. Nederlander.

David’s son, James M. Nederlander, also went into show business, heading to New York City and purchasing the Palace Theatre in 1965. The organization is now one of the world’s largest privately held entertainment companies and owns the second most Broadway theaters. Their tenants include wildly popular productions like Hamilton and The Lion King. “It’s a small industry with an outsized impact,” Scandalios says. We’re sitting in the Nederlander boardroom, overlooking Times Square. Music and sirens punctuate the conversation and brightly colored LEDs reflect off the framed Tony Award nomination certificates that cover the walls.

When he started with the organization, Scandalios was told that Nederlander, called Jimmy Sr., likely wouldn’t remember his name for six months. But one day, Scandalios heard someone call out, “hey Nick!” Nederlander had remembered his name and it had only been two weeks.

Within six months, he became Nederlander’s personal assistant, and Nederlander became his mentor and advocate.

“He was an extraordinary genius,” Scandalios reminisces— over his shoulder hangs a commanding black-and-white portrait of Nederlander. “By the time I was 28 years old, I was almost in the position I’m in today because of the dynamic of working so closely with him.”

After Jimmy Sr.’s death in 2016 at the age of 94, the torch passed to his son James, often called Jimmy Jr. “I can be the same person for him that I was for his father. There is so much built-in trust,” Scandalios says. He acts as a chief operating officer, shifting between the different arms of the business. “It’s a real estate company, a theater production company, a theater touring company, and now a ticketing operation,” he says. “On any given day, I can exercise different muscles. Some tasks are more for my creative brain, some are more analytical, and some are pure financial brain.”

That ability to leapfrog between projects makes Scandalios stand out to anyone who catches wind of it. In 2017, the Boston College Theatre department named Scandalios the Father J. Donald Monan Professorial Chair in Theater Arts for the academic year. In a press release marking the occasion, Crystal Tiala, chair of the Boston College Arts Council and theater professor, called him “as generous and kind a person as he is a brilliant businessman.”

Scandalios is still a guest lecturer for the annual course Principles of Theatre Management and invites students to New York to get industry insights firsthand. “You can tell

how much he loves giving back to these students,” Tiala says. “He just beams from ear to ear. He’s wonderfully approachable.” Scandalios likes to tell students that life is about “being in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, making the right choices.” He stresses that there aren’t actually wrong choices per se, but we are all the sum of our choices.

Despite the balancing act of his daily schedule, Scandalios is extremely generous with what free time he has, volunteering with his church and nonprofits like Family Equality, which advocates for and protects the rights of LGBTQ+ parents and their children. It’s an immensely personal cause—he and his late husband Ric Swezey had their two children via surrogacy in 2007. Swezey passed away in a tragic accident when the couple’s twins were only nine. Accepting the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award in 2018 for his humanitarian work, Scandalios said that it was the joy of holding the twins that moved him and Swezey to get involved with Family Equality.

“Every child deserves the right to grow up in a loving home,” he says.

“The idea that [anyone] would want to deny people the ability to form families and raise children—take in foster children and adopt children— it’s unfathomable to me.” His children, now teens, have shown no interest in the industry that has profoundly shaped Scandalios’s life, but he doesn’t mind. “My parents let me follow my pathway. That’s what I want for my kids,” he says. “I’m going to spend zero time trying to convince them. It has to come from within or it doesn’t have longevity.”

A few blocks away sits the Nederlander-owned Palace Theatre, sheathed in protective scaffolding. It has played host to everyone from the Marx Brothers to Ethel Merman to Liza Minnelli in its century-plus of operation. With Times Square rents at a premium, the theater is being carefully raised 30 feet as part of a $2.5 billion redevelopment project.

It’s a major engineering feat for a city landmark that was once a vaudeville house and then a movie theater. Now it is evolving once again. When complete, the building encasing the theater will include retail space, a hotel, and an outdoor stage, all to entice Broadway patrons to stay awhile.

After Covid-19 shut down Broadway for 18 months, the industry is still climbing back to its pre-pandemic output, Scandalios says. With the scores of retirees and remote workers that have left New York City since 2020, he’s also seeing a decade of audience demographic shifts compressed into just a few years. New Broadway shows typically take seven years to develop, he explains, “but we don’t have seven years of time to adjust. Gen X and the millennials are the core of the theater audience [now], so that’s where our storytelling needs to focus.”

In late 2022, the Nederlander Organization unveiled the newly redubbed Lena Horne Theatre, in what Scandalios considers one of the most moving experiences of his career. The change came in response to advocacy organization Black Theatre United’s call for the three major Broadway owners to rename a theater in honor of a Black artist.

Horne, an actress and civil rights activist, had special importance— Nederlander produced her Broadway review Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. Audra McDonald, Vanessa Williams, and more attended the rededication ceremony, all inspired by Horne’s legacy.

“We stand on the shoulders of the people who precede us and who we look up to,” Scandalios says. “That’s the human condition. I stand here because of Jimmy Nederlander Sr. How do I want to pay things forward? The lights are going to go out someday. How do you want to have spent your time?”

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ROWAH IBNAOUF ’25

A P L AC E F O R US

A degree from the Carroll School can be, and usually is, life-changing for first generation students and their families. But it’s a long, hard road to graduation—filled with obstacles and complicated feelings around identity and their search for success. Luckily, they have each other, and new institutional resources, to help them navigate the challenges.

By Jaclyn Jermyn Photographs by Christopher Churchill C AR RO LL C APITAL 29

As Rowah Ibnaouf ’25 sat in front of her computer, trying to take part in her college freshman orientation virtually, the power in her aunt’s house kept conking out. It wasn’t an unfamiliar problem—the North Carolina native was spending the summer with her extended family in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city. The trip was an opportunity her mom wanted her to have before going off to college, and Ibnaouf was rolling with the punches as she navigated the unreliable 3G Wi-Fi and continuous power outages.

That visit “was a refreshing way to end high school and start something new,” she says. “I had to immerse myself in my roots and be confronted with the fact that this is who I am. This is what I love about myself.” Weeks later, when she walked onto the Boston College campus surrounded by strangers, embracing what she loved about herself didn’t seem so simple anymore.

Ibnaouf, who is studying information systems at the Carroll School of Management, is one of the 1,000-plus current Boston College students considered first generation, or “first gen,” college students, meaning undergraduates whose parents never enrolled in postsecondary education.

Getting into college is difficult enough—Boston College admitted 15 percent of applicants into the class of 2027, the lowest rate in the school’s history—but in order to make it to graduation day, first generation students face an uphill battle. They have access to many institutional and community resources, but they still must navigate the academic challenges, the culture shocks, and the everyday financial struggles. They will also have to grapple with complicated feelings, ultimately, about the success they achieve.

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Growing up in Delaware, Cindy Lin ’23 says she was raised knowing she wanted to go to college, but she didn’t completely understand how college would help her get a job later in life. “I didn’t know what a degree does for you,” she explains. Lin, who studied finance and accounting for finance at the Carroll School, is joining UBS as an investment banking analyst, but the road to getting there was a long one.

When she reviewed her wish list for the perfect college—medium sized, liberal arts emphasis, and a good business program—it was an advisor that pointed her toward Boston College. He even connected her with John Mahoney, the University’s vice provost for enrollment management, who retired at the end of this past academic year. When she visited the Heights, Mahoney made sure she got a good tour and Lin quickly realized it was the school for her.

“He became a major support figure for me,” Lin says, adding that she has even spent Thanksgiving with Mahoney’s family.

For first generation students who decide to attend Boston College, the university offers free college transition programs to ease students into college life. For many participants, this is also an important opportunity to bond with incoming first years that share things in common.

The Learning to Learn office, which acts as an institutional support for underrepresented students, organizes the transition program BC F1RST, which has an annual cohort of around 40 students. “It’s a really closeknit community,” says Jimmy Kirwan ’23. Kirwan, a finance and English double major, met Lin during BC F1RST and the two have stayed close friends. As they both head to New York City after graduation to work in the investment banking industry, they plan on being roommates.

At the Carroll School, these students are supported by a robust network of faculty, staff, and alumni ready to help them achieve their goals.

And yet, little can fully prepare students for the rigorous academic pace of a top university. “The workload hit me like a truck at first,” says William Sweet ’24, whose concentration is operations management. “It wasn’t harder than what I expected, because I knew what I was getting myself into going to a top school,” he says, but with no point of comparison, Sweet didn’t realize that the hard work of the semester ahead really did begin on day one. Because of the enrollment age cutoff date in his Brooklyn school district, he was also starting college at 17. Lin agrees that adjusting to the workload of college wasn’t easy, especially when she admits that she struggles with perfectionism. After experiencing a monthslong illness during her first year on campus, Lin had to miss multiple classes because of doctor’s appointments. “It’s really easy to fall behind if you get sick or something,” she says. “These classes have so many assessments throughout the semester—quizzes that make up like 30 perecnt of your grade—it’s so easy for me to lose sight of the big picture.”

While it might seem obvious enough to simply wave the white flag with professors, Ibnaouf thinks in some ways, asking for or accepting help can be a cultural minefield. “I know in African cultures, when someone offers you something, you’re supposed to say no the first three times before you take it,” she says. “That’s just etiquette. Even though

my professors would say you can drop by for office hours anytime, I didn’t internalize the fact that they actually wanted us to be in their office, asking questions.”

When students were able to get themselves to office hours, the general consensus is that they found that their professors really did care about their success and wellbeing, not only in the classroom, but at that impressionable moment in their lives. “I went to office hours freshman year and cried in front of the professor because I truly felt so alone and out of place,” says Kirwan. His professor, Portico instructor Joseph Cioni, walked him over to University Counseling Services, where Kirwan was able to get an appointment the next day—an option that the Florida native says feels like a blessing. “I have been seeing the same therapist for four years and was recently referred to a psychiatrist on campus. This is the happiest and most ‘Jimmy’ version of myself I have felt,” he adds.

“I went to office hours freshman year and cried in front of the professor because I truly felt so alone and out of place.”

JIMMY KIRWAN ’23

Mishal Khan ’24, an information systems and marketing student from Maryland, admits she struggled academically during her first year at the Carroll School, but that didn’t mean what she was being taught didn’t stick. “I had a really big wake-up call that grades are not everything,” says Khan. She embraced what she learned from her favorite Physical Computing and Coding for Business classes when she started applying for summer internships. “I did a bunch of interviews and coding technicals—and I was using code that I had learned in classes I didn’t exactly pass with the best grades, but I had retained that knowledge,” she adds. Those efforts landed her a summer internship this year with Discover. “They were trying to bring more women of color into their company and they flew me out to see where I would be working over the summer. It was everything I pray for.”

Diversity programs at top businesses are on the rise, and with that in mind, the Carroll School developed Career Bridge in 2020, a seven-week, pass/fail course for first generation and high financial need students during their first year at Boston College. The school was already offering a career accelerator course to all Carroll School students, but some people were falling through the cracks simply because they didn’t know the breadth of opportunities available to them.

“There’s a gap in educating students who come from underrepresented backgrounds,” says Andrew Barksdale, an assistant director for undergraduate career engagement at the Carroll School. “They’re forging a path for their families, and with forging a path, you don’t know until you know.” He adds that with job-recruiting cycles beginning sometimes as early as the fall of sophomore year, he worried about first generation students being out of the loop.

“The wave just crashes past them. Very capable students, but they just didn’t know about the opportunities.”

Career Bridge launched in spring 2021 with Barksdale as instructor. He wishes a similar program existed when he was an undergrad at the Carroll School and a scholarship athlete playing varsity football. “I showed up to classes, but I was unprepared in terms of understanding what life was after football,” he says. “So the opportunity to educate students that have some similar disadvantages … I didn’t want to be left behind. That’s the connection I’ve made.”

After completing Career Bridge as a student, Sweet became a teaching assistant for the course. “The first year got us [students] thinking about what we can do to prepare for the future using the resources at CSOM to help us,” says Sweet. “It makes me very happy to come into the class [now] and see that they’re enjoying what they’re learning,

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but also getting a community. We want to build community, but it’s one thing to build it. It’s a different thing to be able to maintain it and have it go outside the classroom.”

One way that Barksdale is thinking about building community is by formalizing the mentorship model that already exists around Career Bridge, as well as the other Carroll School initiatives he oversees, like the Alumni Alliance for Diversity and Inclusion and the Diversity in Business program, which introduces students to career opportunities in industries that lack diversity. “Our upperclassmen and alumni are doing well, and are good mentors and guiding lights,” he says. “Having them come back and talk is very powerful and it reinforces the messages that we’re trying to teach.”

This intentional community is mutually beneficial for students and upperclassmen—many of whom continue to seek Barksdale’s counsel even after they’ve left his classroom. “When you’re in Fulton and you’re in accounting class, you just don’t always see [students of color],” says Ibnaouf, who took Career Bridge as a first-year student.

“You have to have a class like Career Bridge gather you all into one place in order to see each other. Drew is someone with a lot of knowledge and it’s really nice to see, not just a person of color, but a Black person in a position where he can help other students of color. He is always a very guiding hand.”

Another benefit of offering Career Bridge to first-year students in particular is the opportunity to have conversations about culture shock happening in real time. “That’s one of the biggest things we talk about,” says Barksdale.

“It’s important that we talk about how to navigate that and adapt to a new environment. This isn’t going to be a oneoff, this is going to be how life is.”

One of the first real cold days of freshman year, Khan remembers seeing students crossing campus bundled up in Canada Goose down jackets and thinking maybe she would get one too. “I thought it was just your average trendy jacket,” she says, laughing—Googling the brand, she quickly realized many of the styles retail for upwards of $1,500. Ibnaouf remembers similar reality checks, seeing her classmates with new Macbook laptops and fancy headphones. “The little things start to pile up,” she says.

“There are millions of dollars in difference in how we live— how we grew up. It can be very draining.”

A working laptop has become an essential tool to navigate classes and complete assignments, but Kirwan says when his laptop broke suddenly during the middle of the semester, he became worried about keeping up. “It was a complete nightmare,” he says. After alerting his professors

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“These classes have so many assessments throughout the semester—quizzes that make up like 30 percent of your grade—it’s so easy for me to lose sight of the big picture.”

CINDY LIN ’23

to the situation, he talked to Sara Nunziata, assistant director of undergraduate advising, who was able to get him a new laptop. “I didn’t even know that was a possibility,” he adds. With emergencies like that in mind, the Carroll School created the Leo V. Sullivan Fund, a discretionary fund geared toward management students who belong to Boston College’s Montserrat Coalition, which assists students at the highest level of financial need. That money can help with everything from the purchase of textbooks to business attire ahead of job interviews.

The differences in lived experiences between first generation students and their peers are not always financial—sometimes they’re simply philosophical. Portico, the Carroll School’s signature class for first-year students, acts as a doorway into the concepts of management through an interdisciplinary lens, with lessons on philosophy, ethics, and social sciences woven in. “Morality and business were always intertwined for me,” Ibnaouf says, “and that’s the big thing that

“I always thought that I was sort of a lone wolf as a person of color in CSOM. Then I met people with similar backgrounds and who were very willing to talk about their experiences. It feels like all of me is there when I’m talking to them.”

ROWAH IBNAOUF ’25

they’re trying to teach you in Portico.” When she was growing up, her dad worked a factory job. If he came home injured, she could piece it together that it might be because of inadequate training or poorly maintained equipment. Because many of her classmates hadn’t experienced similar problems, she thinks they weren’t as easily able to see the ethical quandaries surrounding the real-world business dealings they were discussing in class.

Thankfully Ibnaouf was able to see how that understanding of morality and business might help her excel. She was recruited by Barksdale to serve as team captain for a group competing in the 2023 National Diversity Case Competition, hosted by the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. There, her four-person team took on a real-world case concerning American conglomerate 3M’s commitments to environmental justice in communities near the company’s manufacturing plants, ultimately winning third place in the competition. The prize money will help Ibnaouf travel to Singapore for a summer internship with maritime technology company Fredrik Marine.

The relief of securing a job or internship can often go hand-in-hand with a difficult financial reality check. “Last summer, I made more than both of my parents combined,” says Kirwan—his summer internship with J.P. Morgan landed him a full-time role with the company as an analyst. “I feel guilty about making more than them. They work twice as hard, but I think if I was a parent, I would want my kids to be doing the same. That’s how I rationalize it.”

Khan mentions some of the same guilt showing up for her and other first generation friends, “because we feel like our parents deserve more and our friends deserve more.” She adds that after getting into Boston College, she gave presentations at her high school to educate students about the resources available to them. “I just wanted to motivate people to escape this poverty cycle that we’re stuck in.” Khan pays for her college education in part through participation in a work-study program. Between multiple jobs, she was working 18 hours a week during her freshman year. “Going abroad is actually the first time where I’m not working,” she said, as she embarked on the adventure during spring 2023. “I’ll finally be a normal student who can go home after class.”

A robust study abroad program is something that many students take advantage of during their time at Boston College—36 percent of Carroll School students in the class of 2023 ventured overseas—but financial hardship and limited available scholarships can make this rite of passage feel out of reach for some. “I’ve come so far and was so set on

going abroad. I’m going to places my parents would die to see,” says Khan, who selected Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as where she wanted to study during her junior year. She adds that this opportunity wouldn’t have been possible if she had not been accepted into the Fung Scholars Program at Boston College, which specifically supports academic experiences in Asian countries. Khan says that while her days in Dubai were spent studying, she was spending her nights during the holy month of Ramadan exploring new foods when she broke her fast, adding, “It has been heartwarming to feel more comfortable in myself here. I feel more connected to my culture.”

“You might think you’re alone, but you’re really not,” says Kirwan—finding like-minded students helped ease the uncertainty of feeling out of place on the Heights. He got involved with First Generation Club, a student group dedicated to the representation of first generation students at Boston College that hosts events like club mixers, first generation faculty panels, and professional development nights that offer both intellectual engagement and bonding opportunities. Kirwan and Lin both served as club copresidents during their junior year and Khan currently sits on the executive board.

Finding a like-minded community has also been a crucial part of Ibnaouf’s college experience. During her junior year, she will serve as codirector for the student-run FACES council, Boston College’s only anti-racist group, and help educate the school community on systems of power and privilege around race. “I always thought that I was sort of a lone wolf as a person of color in CSOM,” she says. “Then I met people with similar backgrounds and who were very willing to talk about their experiences. It feels like all of me is there when I’m talking to them.”

Kirwan emphasizes that when first generation students at the Carroll School are able to accomplish their goals, it’s important that they also help other students. “Something my dad instilled in me was the idea of not pulling the ladder up behind you,” he says. “Being able to mentor other people gives me a sense that I belong here.” For him, it was contributing back to the Boston College community that made him really see Boston College as a home.

“What really pushes first gen students is wanting to make the people around you proud and be able to uplift them,” says Ibnaouf. “My parents came to America to a worse-off life in order to start something new for [their] children who hadn’t even been born yet. I just want to make things better, not only for myself, but for others, too— but you still need drive to get through the system. I have to push through it. I’m doing this for a reason.”

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THE BC MBA

Assets

Community P.36 Research P.40 Impact P.42 Investments P.44 Distinctions P.46

The Human Factor

Machines outperform humans in clear ways— but not the most important ways.

BY TIM GRAY

In this era of ChatGPT— the online “chatbot” that can answer questions and even write essays—it’s easy to assume that humans can no longer compete with computers. The research of Miao Liu, a Carroll School accounting professor, offers hope to our embattled species.

Writing in the Journal of Accounting Research, Liu examined loans by a small-business lender in China. He found that a machine-learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, did beat humans in analyzing hard information, like financial statements and performance ratios. But humans “have strengths in acquiring soft information,” Liu wrote.

Soft information would include, for example, the

I L LU S TR ATI O N BY TAV I S CO B U R N

reasons why someone’s business might have run into temporary troubles.

He concluded that humans were using the numbers as signals. If a number caught their attention—say, a surprising drop in cash flow—they’d follow up with the help of a technology that has existed for more than 100 years: the telephone.

Simply put, they’d call borrowers and find out what was happening with their businesses. Then they could use their judgment to decide whether someone deserved a loan.

AI-generated information allows humans to focus their brain power on what they do best. The results? Better than what the machine would have recommended.

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Assets

Community

The Next Big Thing

STUDENTS IN THE SHEA CENTER’S ACCELERATOR PROGRAM HIT THE GROUND RUNNING WITH STANDOUT BUSINESS IDEAS, INCLUDING AN AT-HOME MOLD DETECTOR AND A CAMPUS LIFE MOBILE APP.

BY LAURA DAVIS, MBA ’25

On a rare warm Friday afternoon in mid-April, life was in full bloom across campus. On the lawn outside Gasson Hall, students sprawled out on blankets, enjoying picnics and catching up on classwork. The scene inside 245 Beacon Street was equally lively. It was Demo Day, the culmination of the semester-long Accelerate@Shea startup incubator program organized by the Edmund H. Shea Jr. Center for Entrepreneurship and the Start@Shea student executive board. In the ground-floor auditorium, anxious participants lined the walls, getting in a few last moments of preparation before giving their two-minute business pitches. It was a highly anticipated moment for these 12 groups, who had been working on their startups since January.

The Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” played from surround sound speakers as Zarah Lakhani, LSEHD ’24, cofounder of Vitaliti, took the stage alongside Andrea Crewe, LSEHD ’22. The pair looked out on the packed room, filled with students waving around inflatable cheering sticks in support. “When we tell people about our product, the typical response we get is: ‘Wait, this doesn’t already exist?’” says Lakhani. “The answer is no. There’s currently nothing on the market that automatically tests for mold.” Vitaliti’s product, Spore, is an at-home mold detector that works like a carbon monoxide one, continuously monitoring for mold spores in the environment and alerting homeowners with LED lights if spores appear.

After finishing third at the international Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge in spring 2022, Vitaliti took their idea to the Shea Center’s Elevator Pitch Competition, winning first place. Kelsey Kinton, senior associate director of the Shea Center, calls the Elevator Pitch Competition the “entry point” for the entrepreneurship programs throughout the year. Winning it earned Vitaliti a spot in Accelerate@ Shea and access to funding, alumni mentorship, and workshops to bring their business plan to life.

“When we started [Spore], we realized that everyone has a mold story,” says Lakhani, who met Crewe at Designed for ImpACCt, an interdisciplinary program connecting students from select East Coast schools to practice design thinking. They were paired with Lindsay Dotson, then a North Carolina State University student. “The idea

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Andrea Crewe, LSEHD ’22 and Zarah Lakhani, LSEHD ’24; below, Madelyn Divino, MCAS ’23, Bobby Wittman ’25, and Michael Faris ’23

Scenes from Demo Day 2023, the culmination of the semester-long Accelerate@Shea startup incubator program.

PH OTO G R A PH S BY DAN A S M ITH

stemmed from Lindsay’s roommate growing up with toxic black mold,” Lakhani added. “She developed an autoimmune disease.”

Another accelerator business concept, Campi, was born out of a familiar college stressor: fear of missing out. As team members Michael Faris ’23, Madelyn Divino, MCAS ’23, and Bobby Wittman ’25 traded stories about their time on the Heights, they realized they had all missed out on events, clubs, and programs that they never heard about. They created Campi, an app that congregates all the campus events happening on any given day, so students don’t have to rely on word of mouth or flyers pinned to cork boards.

To help the accelerator teams develop their ideas, they’re paired with at least three professional mentors, most of whom are alumni. “We encourage students to talk to as many people and get as much feedback as possible,” says Kinton. Some of that mentor feedback helped Campi streamline their business concept. The app was originally a one-stop-shop for all things campus life. It included an events calendar, a virtual marketplace, and an online community forum, all designed

by Faris, who picked up a computer science minor and learned how to code for this project. After running the idea by their mentor, Tom Coburn, MCAS ’13, CEO and cofounder of online marketing platform Jebbit, the team realized

they were trying to do too much. Coburn’s advice helped transform Campi into the campus event app (including listings for every student club) that has garnered over 2,000 downloads since launching in the fall.

“It’s amazing being in the same room as other like-minded student entrepreneurs,” says Lakhani. Weekly Tuesday night meetings began with bonding time, where 12 teams mingled over pizza, sharing ideas and discussing upcoming weekend plans. Then, the gatherings turned over to the alumni experts, who spoke on entrepreneurial topics like branding, market segmentation, and the important legal elements to consider when building a startup.

Lakhani adds that all of the cohort members weighed in on each other’s ideas and offered encouragement on expanding their businesses after the program’s end.

Within each cohort, Kinton estimates that one to three teams work on their startups fulltime after graduation, while others keep it going part-time. Wittman will serve as the CEO of Campi next year, while Faris plans to stay involved as an alum by improving the code from afar. “We absolutely love to see when teams continue pursuing their companies [after the program], and that happens,” says Aly Steichen ’24, one of five students organizing the accelerator for class credit. “But our goal is providing an entrepreneurship education.”

As Demo Day wrapped up with a boisterous round of applause, the teams were already thinking about the Strakosch Venture Competition, the Shea Center’s final entrepreneurship event of the year. This year, it was Vitaliti that walked away with the first place win, earning the grand prize of $10,000—but they’re not stopping there.

“Our primary market is homeowners right now. In the future, we hope to expand to dorms, hospitals, and clinics,” says Lakhani, adding that a lab at Kansas State University is currently working on develop“ When we tell people about ing a prototype of Spore. “I would our product, the typical love to work on this full-time after response we get is: ‘Wait, graduation [in 2024]. I think we have a lot of traction and validathis doesn’t already exist?’”

—Zarah Lakhani, LSEHD ’24 tion, thanks to Shea.”

HISTORY

Changing Hands

The Industrial Management Laboratory, 1950

When the College of Business Administration building—known as Fulton Hall—opened in the fall of 1948, The Heights reported that the new facilities were “complete in all the tangible elements necessary for the sound and thorough training of business administration.”

Students could study in the 50,000-bookcapacity library, tour the Exhibition Room displaying goods made in New England, or even try operating a lathe machine in the Industrial Management Laboratory.

The laboratory, one of the first of its kind among colleges, was established to help ensure that students were familiar with operating conditions in industries, like manufacturing, which they may have been heading into after graduation. This commitment to handson learning hasn’t waned over the years, but it has changed shape.

These days, if you find yourself in one of the state-of-the-art Maker Labs in the 245 Beacon Street building, which opened in 2022, you won’t find anyone learning how to use a power saw, but you may come across students crafting robots powered by Circuit Python code for Physical Computing class.

The premise is unchanged: Future business leaders need hard skills to go along with their big ideas. Whatever the next wave of innovation is, there will be a Carroll School class dedicated to helping students gain the necessary skills in tangible ways. JACLYN JERMYN

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Assets

Community

TURNING POINTS

Hitting the Right Notes

WITH UNCONVENTIONAL BACKGROUNDS COME UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORLD OF BUSINESS FOR THESE PAST AND PRESENT MBA STUDENTS.

BY RACHEL BIRD, MBA ’23

“Part of business school is learning in the classroom, but it’s also about learning from those around you,” says Marilyn Eckelman, graduate programs associate dean. From songwriting in Nashville to consulting in Afghanistan, these current and former graduate students might not be the most likely candidates for an MBA, but their nontraditional backgrounds are creating surprising points of connection along the way.

Olivia Klayman, MBA ’23, once had her version of a Lana Del Rey song go viral on SoundCloud. The musician says that the experience altered the trajectory of her life. She’s no stranger to shifting gears when opportunities arise—Klayman has worked in comedy clubs, taken a songwriting publishing deal in Nashville, and had jobs at a marketing agency and a data analytics consulting firm. Pursuing an MBA is just the latest chapter. “I’m not afraid to take risks and bet on myself,” she says.

For Klayman, the ultimate draw of music is its ability to “help people not feel alone by giving them a sense of community,” she says—and she sees clear connections between being a musician, the MBA program, and her new marketing role in Johnson & Johnson’s medical devices department. “My background is in understanding others and making them feel heard,” she says. “[Now] I’m working with devices that give people back their humanity. Songwriting is also all about giving people back their humanity and offering support.”

As she finishes up her time at Boston College, she finds that her creative, open-minded approach to classroom learning has been essential and that working with her peers across industries has come naturally.

After all, she says, “when you strip away the titles and experience, we are ultimately just humans who want to feel seen, heard, and valued.”

Building a Community

Olivia Klayman, MBA ’23

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Engaging with communities is also a specialty for Dewin Hernandez, MBA/MSW ’21. He used his graduate degrees to pivot from an undergraduate background in music education and music business at Berklee College of Music to his current role in

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Deloitte’s Government & Public Services division, working with agencies in sectors such as health and higher education.

Hernandez draws on both his academic and applied education nearly every day. After graduating from Berklee, he worked as a music instructor at the Lawrence Community Works youth center and then, while at Boston College, he cofounded the Future Leaders Advocacy & Advisory Group (FLAAG), a graduate student group that works to support social and racial justice initiatives at the Carroll School. Hernandez says his graduate education has served as a framework to blend “managerial structure and how to use it [for] community building.”

Creative Thinking

Colin Clark, MBA ’23, has approached every class with the same question: How would this apply to professional wrestling? He acknowledges that he’s likely “the only person in the room asking that question,” but his five years working on the writing team of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) have given him a unique perspective. Writing is just “one part of the engine that drives [that] billiondollar business forward,” Clark says.

Curious how his work fits into the big picture, he sought out an MBA in order to diversify his skills.

Despite the big differences between WWE and business school, Clark sees his MBA as a continuation of his professional writing career. In particular, the program’s interdisciplinary emphasis has made him see the connections between the storylines that writers create, TV ratings and merchandise sales, and WWE’s balance

PH OTO G R A PH BY M A R K OS TOW

sheet, he says. While he isn’t sure what’s next for him professionally, Clark knows that whatever it may be, “business school has only enhanced my ability to do that well.”

The Draw of Data

The widely applicable nature of data analysis is at the core of the Carroll School’s data analytics sequence for MBA students. It’s also what brought David Fox, MBA ’24, to Boston College. A former reservist in the United States Marine Corps, Fox started his own boutique consulting firm while living in Kabul, Afghanistan. His undergraduate education in South Asian studies and Arabic as well as his connection to the country— his wife is from there—came in handy when he chose to specialize in market research and media production in Afghanistan and nearby countries. When he fled Afghanistan with his wife and son in August 2021, he recognized that it was also a turning point for his career. Despite his experience with entrepreneurship, he had no formal education in business. “If there was ever a time for me to do a full-time MBA program,” he says, “that was the time.”

Fox knew how to collect raw data, but he also wanted to learn how to perform the kind of rigorous analysis that he thinks is defining the future of business. His previous work provided him with “a broader perspective about the world,” he says, but an MBA can give him the tools to apply that experience, ideally in finance or banking. Ultimately, he credits the Carroll School with helping him to professionally reinvent himself.

“This program has given me a second chance.”

Up to the Dorm for a Duck Dinner Brenden Picioane ’23 loves to cook anyAssociate Professor Thomas Wesner way. Why not take enjoys Take Home Prof the hundred bucks with students. on offer and cook for his favorite professor and closest Boston College friends? The Carroll School’s Take Home Prof program gives students a stipend to buy groceries and treat a faculty member to dinner.

“This is a cool opportunity to get to know a professor in a less formal setting,” said Picioane, a business analytics and computer science student, on an early spring evening in the Thomas More Apartments. Picioane invited Thomas Wesner, associate professor of the practice of Business Law and Society. “BC prides itself on the quality of its professors, and you can tell with ‘Wez,’” said Picioane. “His curiosity, his passion—he brings all that to cultivating the next generation.”

On the menu: duck legs, smoked sausage charcuterie, and egg noodles with mushrooms and onion. As Wesner dined with Picioane and his classmates Patrick Cadogan ’23 and Ricardo Pereira, MCAS ’23, a chorus of compliments on the meal turned to talk of the consumer trends on which Picioane’s family business rises and falls—his father is a butcher in Queens. After many summers selling meat in farmers markets, Picioane would soon start work as an associate at Maryville Consulting Group in Boston.

“I’m excited about post-graduation life,” said Cadogan, a finance student, as the seniors discussed their futures. “I’m just building the skeleton of what that’s going to look like,” he added, but “the whole-person education and broader perspective” he gained at Boston College was helping him figure out what companies he didn’t want to work for. “That moral framework I have now is so important.”

“We were taught to use our advantages to lift others up,” put in Pereira, a graduate of the Carroll School’s Summer Management Catalyst Program, run by Wesner. “Your business law class made me decide to major in philosophy for pre-law,” added Pereira, and now he was mulling law school offers. “You just made my day!” Wesner exclaimed, and the two high-fived.

“I’m so impressed with these students,” Wesner said after the dinner. “I’ve seen them grow so much in four years. It’s great to have a chance to hang out with students and see all the progress they’ve made. It brings people together and fosters community—that’s who we are and what we do.” PATRICK KENNEDY ’99

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Assets

Research

Assistant Professor Curtis Chan

Scholars Without Borders AT THE CARROLL SCHOOL, CONVERSATIONS CROSS DISCIPLINARY LINES AND BRING FACULTY TOGETHER.

BY WILLIAM BOLE

Inside a large conference room in Fulton Hall, Curtis Chan—an assistant professor in the Carroll School’s Management and Organization Department—is introducing an aspect of his research that he calls “task segregation.” This is when a group of workers is disproportionately assigned a specific task, which can erode the quality of a job and, as a result, create workplace inequality. His case in point: “Everyone’s favorite organization—the TSA,” Chan says wryly, referring to the Transportation Security Administration. His audience laughs, and Chan proceeds to examine how women TSA workers shoulder the larger burden of the dreaded pat-down task at airport security checkpoints, leading to various forms of “within-job inequality.”

On this day in April, Fulton 515 is bustling with professors from across Carroll School departments. Crowding tables in the rectangular room and sitting in extra chairs lining the walls, Chan’s colleagues pitch questions to him, at times evoking a doctoral dissertation defense. The occasion for

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this brisk exchange is the Bartunek Faculty Research Forum, which brings large swaths of the faculty together three times a year, lunch provided (Chinese food, always).

The 75-minute forum is emblematic of the school’s research culture, which has a distinctly communal flavor. One thinks of scholars laboring in solitude, or conferring with colleagues in their own fields or subspecialties, transmitting thoughts that only they can comprehend, like members of a fraternal society performing their secret handshakes. That’s part of academic life. At the Carroll School, though, professors “go beyond the code words,” because they’re speaking with a broader community of scholars, says Professor Jean Bartunek, the forum’s namesake.

This is not a natural occurrence. Asked about the research culture when she arrived at the Carroll School in the late 1970s, Bartunek, who is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Professor of Management and Organization, said, “There wasn’t much at all.”

There was little research of the kind done by Carroll School faculty today—original findings published in top academic journals— and hardly a widespread culture of conversation around research.

She says changes began in the 1980s and accelerated when Andy Boynton became dean in 2005.

Other highlights of the school’s community-oriented research culture include what are dubbed “Research Conversations.” These

are seminars hosted by Carroll School departments a few times a week on average, featuring guest presenters from other institutions—with the entire Carroll School faculty invited. “People here care about research and listen to their colleagues, and give their feedback,” says Haub Family Professor Ronnie Sadka, Finance Department chair and senior associate dean for faculty. “And they move the needle forward.”

At the April 11 Bartunek forum attended by around 60 faculty members, Chan explains why female TSA agents are disproportionately allotted the pat-down task (basically, regulations require that female agents perform the task on female passengers, and there aren’t enough of them for all those passengers). This means that TSA women are inordinately exposed to a physically and emotionally exhausting task that passengers loathe, which can bring higher turnover and “managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off,” he and a coauthor have written in Administrative Science Quarterly. The faculty question Chan further on how he extrapolates findings from his qualitative, interview-based research, which prompts close questioning about methodology.

In another context, Chan notes that a research focus on workplace inequality reflects “BC values, which are about dignity and care for the person.” And no one challenges the proposition.

“People here care about research and listen to their colleagues, and give their feedback.”

—Professor Ronnie Sadka

PH OTO G R A PH BY C AITLI N C U N N I N G H AM

RECENT PAPERS

Faculty Findings

Carroll School faculty plumb questions as diverse as whether gig-economy companies encourage entrepreneurship and if IRS corporate audits influence CEOs’ game-playing on personal tax returns. TIM GRAY “Does Tax Enforcement Deter Managers’ Self-Dealing?”

IRS audits scare even CEOs. And those audits don’t have to be personal— executives reduce their personal tax shenanigans when their companies are audited. That’s according to research

by Accounting Professors Benjamin Yost and Susan Shu, published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

The professors examined whether executives change their own gifts of stock when their companies are audited. These gifts often end up benefiting the executives, either because their timing is suspicious—they happen right before big stock drops—or they go to a family foundation the executive controls.

The IRS doesn’t announce audits, but the professors figured

I L LU S TR ATI O N BY JA M E S G R A H A M

out how to identify them—and then match this information with stock gifts, which are reported.

Their conclusion: “Heightened scrutiny from tax enforcement serves as an effective monitoring mecha-nism and reduces managers’ self-dealing behavior.”

“Consumer Financial Vulnerability: Novel Insights for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy” When you hear “financial vulnerability,” you probably think of poverty. If so, you’re typical—and wrong, according to Marketing Professors Linda Salisbury and Gergana Nenkov. They and their collaborators have reconceived the idea of consumer financial vulnerability in a Journal of Marketing article. They argue this sort of vulnerability entails exposure to potential

harm, often rooted in risks beyond just low income or wealth.

A business owner, for example, might’ve been wealthy but exposed as financially vulnerable by the pandemic. The professors’ new definition helps marketers identify vulnerable consumers and create products and services that “meet their needs while also preventing (or reducing the risk of) realized harm.”

“Launching with a Parachute: The Gig Economy and New Business Formation” Ride-hailing companies seem a straightforward proposition—with a smartphone, you can hire a car more cheaply and easily than you could an old-fashioned cab.

Now, research by Finance Professor Livia Yi shows that gig-economy companies like Lyft and

Uber may have less obvious benefits: They may encourage entrepreneurship.

Writing in the Journal of Financial Economics, Yi and colleagues discuss the introduction of Uber and Lyft nationwide, which they found was associated with upticks in business registrations and small business lending. The gig economy, they suggest, may be serving as a form of insurance for entrepreneurs, giving them the financial and schedule flexibility to start businesses.

“Determinants of LGBTQ+ Corporate Policies” LGBTQ+ policies remain divisive in corporate America.

Some companies, like Starbucks, strongly support them; others, like Chick-fil-A, condemn them. Finance Professor Nathan Dong and coauthors say the education level of a firm’s employees and the political leanings of the county of its headquarters determine whether it will be more like Starbucks than Chick-fil-A. More college-educated employees and liberal neighbors lead to more LGBTQ+ friendly workplaces.

Published in The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, the researchers also concluded that shareholder pressure induces companies to change their LGBTQ+ policies.

“Learning to Successfully Hire in Online Labor Markets” Everyone is tempted by a bargain. And everyone knows it’s sometimes smart to pass on what’s cheap because it’ll cost you in the long run.

Companies, it turns out, are no different, at least in their online hiring practices. According to Business Analytics Professor Sam Ransbotham and former Carroll School Professor Marios Kokkodis, firms often experiment with their hiring in online labor markets, like Upwork and Freelancer. They start out by hiring the cheapest contractors, even when those folks have so-so reputations. They can’t resist a bargain.

But then—surprise!—they get burned and opt to change their approach, paying up for better workers and seeing better results. Employers are likely to do this because they’re overconfident, the researchers write in Management Science. They “try to beat the market by hiring cheaper contractors that they consider as good deals.” A few of these hires work out. But most don’t, so they change their approach.

Visit bc.edu/csomresearch for more faculty research.

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Assets

Impact

David Quigley, Mary Thomas Crane, and Andy Boynton

From Swiffer to Socrates HOW A TEAM OF PRODUCT DESIGNERS HELPED SOLVE A STUBBORN PROBLEM WITH BOSTON COLLEGE’S UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM.

BY WILLIAM BOLE

When Boston College needed to revivify its outdated core curriculum, it turned to a group of design consultants better known for inventing the Reebok Pump and the Swiffer mop. How did that work out? A newly published book tells the story of what ultimately became the renewed core, instituted five years ago. What follows is an abridged version of the opening chapter of Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core, edited by Mary Thomas Crane, David Quigley, and Andy Boynton (Fordham University Press).

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In November 2012, Boston College began holding town-hall-style meetings in hopes of enlisting faculty and others in a difficult conversation about the University’s undergraduate core curriculum, which had not seen a revision since 1991. During one of those meetings, a fine arts professor alluded to the hard-held opinions and turf issues that had stymied reform and hampered conversation. “Core avoidance here is like tax avoidance,” he said. “It’s become an art form.”

Standing at the front of a large lecture hall were people with stellar campus credentials, including the dean of arts and sciences, the dean of the management school, and the director of the University’s influential Institute for the Liberal Arts. They and others, however, had little to show for their efforts to cultivate true dialogue with faculty and departments—which explained the presence of someone else at the late-afternoon gathering, a man wearing thick black eyeglasses and a gray sporty blazer with a white open-collar shirt.

That was Anthony Pannozzo, then senior vice president of Continuum, a leading design and innovation consultancy. Boston College had hired the firm to choreograph conversations about renewing the core curriculum, which students had generally come to see as something to get through, not something likely to challenge or inspire them.

At the first gathering, Mary Crane, the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English, who also directs the Institute for the Liberal Arts, did not wait for professors to express their wariness of bringing in design consultants to

PH OTO G R A PH BY M AT T K A LI N OWS K I

help solve the problem of uninteresting and unchallenging courses. “If I had gotten the letter that you got a couple of weeks ago, I’d have a lot of questions,” she admitted to about 75 faculty members, referring to the announcement that Boston College had retained non-academic consultants to spearhead the dialogue.

“Initially, we went in with total skepticism,” she recounted (one exception being the Carroll School of Management’s Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton, who had floated the idea). “Never! Never!

How can these people ever help us with our core?”

At the second town hall, the faculty interrogated Pannozzo on Continuum’s experience with universities, which was sparse. He mostly deflected the questions, before Crane interjected, “As far as we know, nobody has tried this approach to revising the curriculum. So, we’re taking a risk.” To which David Quigley, then dean of arts and sciences, now provost, pointed out that other universities aiming to reinvigorate core studies had taken risks and failed—on their own, without design consultation. There was no need to name names, including that of a preeminent institution across the Charles River: The academic graveyard is full of praiseworthy plans to revise core curricula that went nowhere.

That began the public portion of Boston College’s core renewal process. At the start of 2012–2013, a committee of University notables led by Quigley, Crane, and Boynton had begun meeting or otherwise collaborating day and night on the project, as Continuum quietly conducted “stakeholder interviews” with faculty,

students, administrators, and of design consultants alumni, not initially about the on campus. core but about their broader viDuring stakeholdsions and hopes for Boston Col- er meetings, the conlege. The process would at times sultants were bringing seem foreign to faculty, or a vocal a level of empathy to number who balked at the “vi- those conversations sion first” approach and were well that others had armed for debate over the minuti- found hard to muster. ae of curriculum proposals. They Indeed, Pannozzo and their departments, for one made a point that thing, were understandably at- might not have tached to their favorite courses passed inspection in the University’s core, making in an epistemology change all the more difficult. course but illustratUltimately, there would be a ed the desire to nurproposed framework for deepen- ture dialogue. “Everything we’re ing and enlivening core studies. hearing has to be taken as true, The process that began as a risky because it’s truth according venture would end fittingly and to the individuals who said bracingly at the end of the aca- it,” he explained in an interdemic year—with a call on each view. “We’re complete outsidschool and department to give the ers. When faculty talk to us, proposal a thumbs up or down. they can’t assume we know anything. They become more open Continuum is known for innova- and introspective, which gets us tions in product design, including to an interesting conversation.” its spawning of the Swiffer mop Soon enough, a broadly incluand the iconic Reebok Pump, so sive conversation was in full sail there was natural skepticism on the Heights. Boynton joked about ushering the firm into the at the time, referring to the gym sanctum sanctorum of a Jesuit staff—“I think that even people at university—the core curriculum. the Rec Plex want input.”

A newly constituted eight-memGravitating to the center of ber core committee had to make discussion was the idea of strucit clear to faculty that while Bos- turing new multidisciplinary ton College was looking to the de- courses for first-year students signers to foster an environment around “the Ps and Qs,” problems in which conversations about and questions. “It’s a nice way of the core would flourish, no one signaling what BC is all about,” was asking them to fashion a re- Quigley remarked at the time. newed curriculum. There would That idea took further shape under be no need for them to evolve the rubric of “Complex Problems” from Swiffer to Socrates; the task (team-taught courses by profesof developing a final product and sors from diverging disciplines) proposals would fall notably to and “Enduring Questions” (two the clients. Skepticism lingered, professors teaching separate but the faculty as a whole quick- though linked classes with overlyly came to tolerate the presence ing topics to a shared group of stu-

Curriculum

by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core

Edited by Mary Thomas Crane, David Quigley, and Andy Boynton

Fordham University Press (2023), 272 pages

dents). The core team, however, made it clear they wouldn’t plow ahead without a faculty consensus, which led an English professor to say, “The only way to know is to ask people what they really think”—a suggestion he finetuned by using the word “vote.”

There wasn’t exactly a vote, but over several days in early May, each department and school deliberated on the proposed renewal.

Each school and the vast majority of departments wound up giving their resounding approval, but that wasn’t the end. For some time afterward, the University—guided by Gregory Kalscheur, SJ, now dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences—further evaluated the renewal ideas, planting them more deeply in the ground of Boston College’s Jesuit Catholic mission. The new, rigorous and topical courses were fully launched in 2018.

By all accounts, the collaboration with Continuum still represents the lone example of a university calling on a design firm to help midwife a curricular breakthrough. In that sense, the designers are batting a thousand.

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Assets

Investments

CURRICULUM

Two New Programs for Arts and Sciences Majors The Carroll School has unveiled two new programs for non-management students interested in business. The new offerings, a General Business minor and an intensive coding course, are meant to equip students from the arts and sciences with a broader understanding of management.

Unlike the minors offered until now— which include Accounting for CPAs, Accounting for Finance and Consulting, Finance, Marketing, Management and Leadership, and Managing for Social Impact and the Public Good—the General Business minor does not require students to focus on just one area of business. The curriculum is flexible to students’ interests and requires the completion of Introduction to Financial Accounting, in addition to five classes from a selection of offerings across the Carroll School’s departments.

The launch of this minor underlines Boston College’s philosophy of education, which involves integrating different disciplines. “On a bigger level, it helps people to think broadly and develop the well-roundedness that BC students are so well known for,” says Ethan Sullivan, senior associate dean for undergraduate programs at the Carroll School. The new minor aims to further bridge the gap between management and the liberal arts for undergraduate students.

Jumpstart into Coding, the coding bootcamp launching next summer, is essentially an accelerated version of the introductory Coding for Business course that all management students are required to complete.

The idea is to foster learning by doing.

Students take part in twice-a-day class sessions for three weeks. In addition to lectures and hands-on exercises, students will gain important perspectives from experts and onsite visits. Participants will earn four credits that can be applied to their graduation requirements or to the General Business minor. OLIVIA JUSTICE ’25

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Livia Yi

LESSONS LEARNED

BECOMING A STANDOUT FACULTY MEMBER IS NOT SIMPLY ABOUT BEING A GREAT SCHOLAR—YOU HAVE TO BE A GREAT TEACHER, TOO.

BY LAURA DAVIS, MBA ’25

On a brisk Wednesday in February, students begin shuffling into Livia Yi’s Fundamentals of Finance class.

With to-go coffee cups in hand, they make their way to the front of the room to grab printed name cards before filing into the lecture room’s 50 seats. The dull murmur of chatter quiets as Yi, an assistant professor of finance at the Carroll School, calls class into session at noon on the dot. The topic of the day? Bond valuation. ¶ The concepts in this core course are complex, but Yi explains them plainly, anchoring the lesson in the present day. She shows the class—mostly sophomores and juniors— recent headlines and a video on yield curves, and pauses to share opportunities for further learning. While reading PH OTO G R A PH BY LE E PE LLE G R I N I

The Wall Street Journal is recom- ulty may now take for mended, students can also get granted—such as the their daily fix from podcasts— installation of underWhat’s News, Your Money Matters, graduate teaching asand Tech News Briefing are a few sistants and the creexamples she scribbles on the ation of the Coughlin chalkboard. Students furiously Distinguished Teachcopy down notes as she lectures, ing Award, which recgraphing calculators in one hand ognizes outstanding and pencils in another. Contin- faculty members. ued learning in the field of fiThe committee “ We’re always trying to get better and better. nance is important, she explains. even started bringing The question we’re always asking is, ‘How can “When you go to an interview for in speakers to discuss a job, you’ll be informed about issues of significance, we make this better for students?’” —Judy Gordon what’s going on.” now called the WilWhile there is no one-size-fits- son Faculty Teaching all definition of what it means to be Seminar, after the a great teacher, the placement of late accounting professor and works with a three-person men- a well-organized course. At the the Carroll School within the eco- first committee head, Pete Wilson. torship team of senior finance start of class, students are hesisystem of a liberal arts university— One recent session focused on stu- professors. “They are great teach- tant to raise their hands and parand a Jesuit one at that—demands dent integrity in the age of arti- ers,” she comments. “If I get stuck, ticipate in the conversation, so that faculty strive for excellence. ficial intelligence tools, and pro- they want to help me.” Each se- Gordon suggests they “change Leading the charge is Judy Gordon, vided educators with a forum to mester, one of them will sit in on gears.” She instructs them to talk professor and chairperson of the discuss preventing students from a class and provide feedback on in small groups to warm up, and Management and Organization using technology to cheat. course content and delivery. At during the impromptu breakout Department, and associate dean The group was also responsi- the end of the semester, the group session, she speeds around the for teaching and learning. The lat- ble for implementing a classroom will get together to go over her room. Observing the groups dister position is new, an investment observation protocol. The system student-submitted teaching eval- cussing the day’s case study and in cultivating better teachers, born matches up new faculty with more uations, deciphering which points throwing around phrases like out of the pandemic. Gordon was in seasoned professors to provide were a consensus, and help de- “dependency diagrams,” her eyes the eye of the storm, planning vir- mentorship during those first few velop strategies for improvement. light up. After a few minutes, she tual workshops on using new tech- years of teaching. The relationIf a teacher’s evaluations are brings the class back together and nology and engaging classes re- ship should be more active than problematic, Gordon or Boyn- finds her students eager to share motely. But she says it was Powers “just sitting in on class,” Gordon ton may get involved. In the past, key takeaways.

Family Dean Andy Boynton who says, and that’s why they ramped they’ve paired faculty members It’s those students, and the saw the value in continuing to up the program in the aftermath with new mentors, brought in constant drive toward improvehave “someone who was really of the pandemic. Great teachers outside consultants, or sent fac- ment for their sake, that keep the paying attention to teaching,” and “aren’t cloned,” and Gordon, who ulty to the University’s Center for faculty going. “We’re always tryin December 2021, she was official- served as committee head be- Teaching Excellence. “We pay at- ing to get better and better,” says ly appointed to this role. fore taking on her role as associ- tention to it,” Gordon says—she Gordon. “The question we’re While certain changes were ate dean, emphasizes the value of keeps track of these interventions, always asking is, ‘How can we spurred on by the pandemic, the having several faculty members enabling her to follow up and pro- make this better for students?’”

Carroll School’s emphasis on on a mentorship team. vide support. “That’s probably Reflecting on her first two years teaching isn’t new. Shortly after Yi—whose first semester teach- the most important thing.” as a teacher, Yi echoes that sentiBoynton took on his role nearly 20 ing at Carroll was spring 2022— In Gordon’s Tuesday morn- ment. “As a junior faculty memyears ago, he formed a teaching avoided the turmoil of remote ing Leadership class, she em- ber, I don’t just want to be a good committee. The committee was learning, but she still sees the bodies all of the qualities she researcher. I want to be a good responsible for establishing many benefits of initiatives started believes make a strong teacher: teacher. I think it’s a really meanof the systems Carroll School fac- during that period. She currently subject knowledge, passion, and ingful part of the job.”

PH OTO G R A PH BY C A ITLI N C U N N I N G H A M

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Assets

Distinctions

only did she learn how to tie her on a deeper level,” says Castro. shoes, but she was able to meet “We have similar outlooks on life— other people with disabilities who that we should not limit ourselves because of our disabilities. Even bravely shared their stories.

Castro also credits her con- though I was born without a limb fidence to the support from her and [Patrick and Jessica] lost family. Before she was born, her limbs, it’s interesting to see how father was involved in an accident no matter what limb difference and spent years relearning how you experience, you still have that to walk and talk. His resilience same mindset.” showed Castro that she too could Cathryn Cheevers ’23, the 2020 persevere and achieve whatever recipient of the Boston College she set her mind to. She eagerly Strong Scholarship, met Castro threw herself into athletics, even at the scholarship ceremony and becoming captain of her high noticed her drive immediately. school varsity women’s basket- “I was truly so impressed when I ball team. heard what she had gone through After she received early admis- and how she has persevered,” says sion to Boston College, Castro’s Cheevers, who graduated in May achievements and attitude im- from the Morrissey College of pressed Grant Gosselin, dean of Arts and Sciences. “She has such undergraduate admission and fi- a positive attitude.” nacial aid, so much that she was Sitting in the Chocolate Bar the only candidate he brought cafe in Stokes Hall, Castro often before the scholarship commit- pauses to wave at passing friends tee. The award itself was estab- before continuing on with her stoJennifer Castro ’26 lished by alumni from the class of ry. It’s evidence of how involved 2005 in honor of Patrick Downes, she has gotten with campus life LSEHD ’05, and his wife, Jessica already. As a freshman, she beKensky, who were both victims of gan participating in both the stuthe 2013 Boston Marathon bomb- dent admissions program and the ings, with injuries resulting in am- Women in Business Club. Recentputations. Before starting school, ly, she also joined the undergradBOSTON COLLEGE STRONG SCHOLARSHIP AWARDEE Castro met with Downes and uate government’s Council for JENNIFER CASTRO ’26 WON’T LET CHALLENGES STOP Kensky over Zoom, where they in- Students with Disabilities at the HER FROM LEAVING A MARK ON CAMPUS.

BY ISABELLA KEHL ’23 stantly clicked. She visibly bright- suggestion of Cheevers. ens while talking about the pair, “They are a great group of peoMost people learn how to tie their shoes as young children, but Jenni- and is thrilled to be part of a net- ple who are always working for the fer Castro ’26 finally got it down at age 12. What may seem like a small work of people passionate about community and put so much effort victory was a pivotal moment in her life and a prime example of the disability advocacy. into the school to try and make it drive that made her the ideal recipient for the 2023 Boston College “When you speak to people who an accessible place for everybody,” Strong Scholarship. are going through the same chal- Castro says, smiling warmly. “I Awarded annually, the scholarship is typically presented to a first- lenges as you, you can connect can’t wait to get more involved.” year student with a permanent disability who has overcome adversity and embodies the Boston College spirit. Castro was born without her left arm from the elbow down. Growing up, she never wanted to draw “When you speak to people who are going attention to her limb difference—until she attended the Wounded through the same challenges as you, you can Warrior Amputee Softball Team Kids Camp. “Camp is where I first started to grow and become comfortable talking about my arm,” she says. Not connect on a deeper level.” —Jennifer Castro ’26

Living Without Limits

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PH OTO G R A PH BY ALI N A C H E N/ TH E H E I G HT S

SPORTS

Team Player Luke Kuechly ’15 has racked up plenty of accolades for his sportsmanship. In fact, he’s the most decorated defensive football player in Boston College history—a distinction that has landed him a spot in the College Football

Hall of Fame. Kuechly will be the eighth Eagle player to grace the Hall of Fame after his December induction.

During his collegiate career, Kuechly amassed the second-most tackles in National Collegiate Athletic Association record books—he’s also Boston College’s all-time leader in career, solo, and single-season tackles.

He was the ninth pick in the 2012 NFL draft, leaving Boston College early to join the Carolina Panthers. Yet earning his degree remained important to Kuechly. In the off-seasons, he advanced toward the baccalaureate end zone, completing his final classes before graduating in 2015 with a marketing concentration.

He spent eight seasons with the Panthers before retiring in 2020. In that time, Kuechly was named Defensive Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year, and played in five Pro Bowl games. He is still with the Panthers organization as a scout and radio broadcaster.

“I loved my time up at Boston College,” says Kuechly.

“It’s a special place and this recognition wouldn’t have been possible without those people.” OLIVIA JUSTICE ’25

MASTER WORK A beloved Carroll School professor is inducted into the American Accounting Association Hall of Fame after his passing.

BY OLIVIA JUSTICE ’25

Professor G. Peter “Pete” Wilson will posthumously join the American Accounting Association Hall of Fame this year, upon his induction in August. Before his death in 2020 at the age of 74, Wilson was one of Boston College’s most revered professors, whose expertise and wisdom made him a constant model for students and colleagues alike. In addition to his roles as professor and the Joseph L. Sweeney Chair in Accounting at the Carroll School, Wilson was also a standout scholar, publishing innovative research in journals such as The Accounting Review and Review of Financial Studies.

Year after year, he received glowing feedback from students. Much of his philosophy of teaching, and what contributed to his acclaim as a master teacher, was what he called “the journey from me to we.” Wilson credited the success of a class not to himself as an educator, but rather to the entirety of the classroom. He also placed a distinct value on teamwork and collaboration. He spent minimal time lecturing, opening up time for critical thinking and real-world problem solving within groups.

I L LU S TR ATI O N BY N E I L W E B B

In addition to the thousands of students who left his class with a complex understanding of accounting, Wilson’s renown is reflected in the many awards he earned from the American Accounting Association, including the J. Michael and Mary Anne Cook/Deloitte Foundation Prize for teaching excellence.

Wilson would often end the semester with an opportunity for students—and himself—to reflect on personal and intellectual growth. When asked in 2016 about his reputation as a great teacher, Wilson remarked, “I’m a very good teacher, but I have great classes.

You wake up one morning and say, ‘I can’t do this without them.’”

FACULTY

Awards and Appointments Jonathan Reuter The Spängler IQAM Prize in Financial Economics— Review of Finance Best Paper was awarded to Reuter, associate professor of finance, and coauthor Eric Zitzewitz of Dartmouth College, for their paper, “How Much Does Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? A Regression Discontinuity Approach.”

Elizabeth (Bess) Rouse A Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow and associate professor of management and organization, Rouse has been appointed to a three-year term as associate editor at the Academy of Management Journal.

Samuel Hartzmark and David Solomon The Federation of European Securities Exchanges (FESE) De la Vega Prize—awarded for an outstanding paper on financial markets—went to Hartzmark, a Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow and professor of finance, and Solomon, David J. Mastrocola Faculty Fellow and professor of finance, for their paper, “Predictable Price Pressure.”

Vanessa Conzon An assistant professor of management and organization, Conzon received the Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award. She was unanimously recommended by the award selection committee because of the “ambition of her dissertation work, its methodological strengths, as well as its contributions to theory and practice.”

Visit bc.edu/csom-research for more faculty news and distinctions.

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Bottom Line

Meagan Loyst ’19 CEO + Founder of Gen Z VCs

Business Insider has called you “the Queen of Gen Z VCs.” If that were a true royal title, what would be your first decree? It’s so funny, that title

Voice of a Generation Meagan Loyst ’19 loves Taylor Swift, romance novels, and a good hair accessory.

She has also become a leading spokesperson for young venture capitalists. While working at the VC fund Lerer Hippeau, Loyst started asking questions about what Generation Z investors, those born around the turn of the millennium, were up to. Since then, she has built a 21,000-strong online community called Gen Z VCs, which has evolved into virtual and in-person meetups around the world. As her profile continues to grow—earning notice from Forbes, Fast Company, and more—Loyst has transformed Gen Z VCs into her full-time job.

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actually started within the [young venture capitalist] community, and then the press picked it up.

Before I started writing my articles, people didn’t know that Gen Z were even old enough to be investing, but the community went viral almost immediately. That’s how I see my role, as being the voice of a generation and advocating for a perspective that is often missing. My first decree, if I had the opportunity, would be to allocate more government resources to first-time founders, to promote entrepreneurship at a younger age. Entrepreneurship is an incredible field; it’s so empowering. I think governments can do a lot to encourage college- and even high-school-age founders.

I’m seeing that firsthand with the work we’re doing in Chicago, and I would love to see that rolled out on a national scale.

Tell me more about your work in Chicago. Even though I’m from

Long Island, New York, I’ve made a lot of connections in Chicago.

We did a summit in Chicago that drew 300-plus attendees and energized the startup ecosystem there. From that summit alone, we were able to facilitate $2.4 million for young founders who pitched on stage, and that’s just the beginning of a lot more local chapters for Gen Z VCs. Globally, we’ve facilitated 2,000 jobs in tech and VC roles for young people, matched founders with $8 million in funds, and started a mentorship program that’s helped 350 students and a VC course with 1,200-plus students.

Let’s say I’m a young person with an interest in business strategy, but I have zero capital. How can I possibly become a venture capitalist? There’s a lot of different

ways. Venture capital has become much more accessible to young people in recent years. The obvious venue is joining a venture capital firm, becoming an investor on that team and deploying capital on behalf of the fund. A lot of firms are looking to hire younger investors to bring that Gen Z perspective and skill set to their teams.

Are there common traits of Gen Z folks in VC? I think they’re very

scrappy, so doing a lot with a little. They're very creative. There’s definitely an inclination to create content and build a personal brand. You have to come in with a sort of underdog mindset around what you can accomplish. What people say you can’t do, you go out and prove them wrong. Also, part of the Gen Z ethos is the idea of disrupting the status quo and being creative in how you come up with solutions.

Gen Z in the US is statistically quite a diverse group. Is that another argument for elevating Gen Z in VC? Having women and people of

color around the table is really, really important. They are able to find and spot those founders, and the businesses that they’re building, who are solving these problems that they see firsthand.

You have to have diverse perspectives in order to see those problems from a different lens.

Having people on the venture side that can place that bet on an underrepresented founder is so important. PATRICK KENNEDY ’99

PH OTO G R A PH BY H AD I YA Z DAN I

Managing Up

The Dean’s INNOVATION Fund This unrestricted fund supports all facets of the Carroll School and provides flexibility for meeting the most critical needs.

Some days, Annie Li ’23 sends email reminders on behalf of Nan Liu, a William S. McKiernan ’78 Family Faculty Fellow and associate professor of business analytics.

Other times she meets with students who need extra help. This is Li’s sixth semester as a teaching assistant—and she loves it. “Being a TA reflects BC’s culture of mentorship and service,” she says.

Tyler Doornweerd ’24 wouldn’t trade his time as a research assistant for anything.

This semester he is applying his coding skills and talents to every project he works on for Assistant Professor of Finance Simcha Barkai. “This is a true learning experience for me,” he says.

Li and Doornweerd are among the 400 BC undergraduates who count on their positions as teaching assistants and research assistants each year—jobs that wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the Carroll School Dean’s Innovation Fund.

Yet this fund supports far more. Gifts to the Dean’s Innovation Fund provide essential resources to student and faculty needs as they arise and the resources to invest in emerging opportunities that shape the school’s future.

For more information about the impact you can make on the Dean’s Innovation Fund, please contact Michelle Bishop-Dorsey at michelle.bishop@bc.edu or (617) 552-9031.

‘‘

Ever to Excel is the motto that fuels our ambition. At the Carroll School, we are constantly searching for new ideas and striving to be more and to be better. The Dean’s Innovation Fund is essential to fulfilling these goals.”

Andy Boynton ’78, P ’13 John and Linda Powers Family Dean

Fund Highlights Over the years, the Dean’s Innovation Fund has been a vital resource in the development of new initiatives, such as: ▶Launching numerous Carroll School centers and the Portico program. ▶Funding technology and research. ▶Creating several minors for undergraduate students from across campus. ▶Providing textbooks, laptops, and interview attire for students in need. ▶Investing in top faculty and cutting-edge course development.

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PAID THE PUBLICATION OF THE CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT AT BOSTON COLLEGE

Carney Hall 281 Beacon Street Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

The Dean’s INNOVATION Fund Responds to emerging opportunities Satisfies highestpriority needs Invests in areas with biggest potential Turn this page to learn more.

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