$3 Million Gift Establishes Herbert D. Weitzman Institute for Real Estate
North Texas real estate luminaries Donna and Herb Weitzman announced a $3 million gift to the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas at the school’s annual Scholarship Breakfast on Nov. 6.
The gift establishes the Herbert D. Weitzman Institute for Real Estate, which will provide scholarships to eligible undergraduate finance and business administration students pursuing a concentration in real estate. The money also will finance real estate student trips to case competitions and conferences. The cachet of the Weitzman name will open doors for student internship opportunities as well.
Herb Weitzman, who has nearly six decades of commercial real estate development experience, is founder and executive chairman of Weitzman, a full-service corporate real estate company with offices in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. Donna Weitzman, an entrepreneur, dating expert, author and podcaster, also has had an accomplished real estate career. She also served as mayor and city council member of Colleyville, Texas.
Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Caruth Chair and dean of the Jindal School, announced the news to a record-setting audience of more than 500 guests at the school’s annual major fundraiser.
Since its inception, the breakfast has raised more than $700,000 for scholarships. The Weitzmans regaled the audience with answers to questions from moderator Roger Staubach — Hall of Fame quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys and real estate icon in his own right — about their lives and careers.
Weitzman said his goal in establishing the institute was to enable students from all socioeconomic backgrounds to consider real estate as a career option and to offer them the academic support and tools they need.
“A program that trains our future leaders offers the potential of reshaping the North Texas community in a positive way for decades to come,” he said. “I’m honored to be able to contribute to that promise.”
Community Service Requirement Prepares Jindal School Students To Be Well-Rounded Citizens
To increase students’ sense of belonging in the bigger world beyond campus, the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas initiated a new program last fall that requires all undergraduates to dive deep into community service.
As of the fall semester, all incoming freshmen and new transfer students must fulfill 100 hours of community service or work on business-related projects for nonprofits in order to graduate.
Dr. Marilyn Kaplan, associate dean of undergraduate programs, said the Jindal School launched this initiative because one of its primary goals is to produce well-rounded citizens who engage with and become part of their communities.
Students have several options for accumulating service hours. They can volunteer at approved nonprofit organizations such as the Jindal School’s Comet Closet and the North Texas Food Bank, they can enroll in courses that have a service component, or they can do a combination of the two.
Qualifying course projects might involve creating a marketing plan for a nonprofit, helping an organization with financial statements or undertaking other assignments to help a charitable or service agency.
Although 100 hours of community service may seem daunting at first glance, over four years that breaks down to 25 hours a year or 12½ hours a semester.
“If students did just two hours of volunteer work every week, they would fulfill their obligation in less than a year,” Kaplan said.
The Jindal School has collaborated with both United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the UT Dallas Office of Student Volunteerism to connect students with a wide range of service opportunities. Students are able to sign up for volunteer work that suits their interests and skills, and log their completed hours in project management software.
“Many students were already doing the entire 100 hours or more,” Kaplan said. “We were just never able to collect the data or know the impact of what our student body was doing until now.”
This story originally appeared on the Inside Jindal School and UT Dallas News Center websites, and in MANAGEMENT magazine. Click here to read the full version of the story.
Snapshot of Rankings Puts Jindal School in Favorable Light
The Naveen Jindal School of Management’s reputation continues to grow, as evidenced by several business school rankings published late in 2018 and early in 2019.
The Jindal School’s Supply Chain Management programs appeared in two rankings conducted by Gartner Inc., a supply chain consulting firm. The Master of Science in Supply Chain Management program cracked the top 10 for the first time in Gartner’s Top 25 North American Graduate Supply Chain Programs with a ranking of No. 9. The Jindal School’s undergraduate program debuted in Gartner’s 2018 undergraduate report, placing 23rd.
Jindal School innovation and entrepreneurship programs appeared in two rankings from The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. The Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program came in at No. 11 in the Top 25 Graduate Schools for Entrepreneurship, the first time the program cracked the top 15. The BS in Business Administration with Innovation and Entrepreneurship Concentration made the Top 25 Undergraduate Schools for Entrepreneurship list for the first time with a No. 23 ranking.
MBA programs appeared in multiple rankings. The highest placing was No. 6 (tied with Arizona State) in the U.S. News & World Report2019 Best Online MBA Programs. JSOM ranked No. 12 in The Princeton Review’s Top 25 Online MBA Programs. Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2018 Best Business Schools survey ranked the Jindal School at No. 37 in the U.S. and No. 43 globally.
In Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2018 Best Business Schools component indexes for the U.S. rankings, JSOM was ranked third in learning, which explores the quality, depth and range of instruction, faculty support and other criteria. The entrepreneurship index, in which recruiters ranked schools based on graduates’ skills and drive, the Jindal School ranked eighth. JSOM ranked 22nd in networking and 61st in compensation.
The Jindal School also placed 45th in the Poets & Quants 2018 MBA Ranking, a weighted aggregation of five of the top MBA rankings. Finally, the U.S. News & World Report 2019 Best Online Graduate Business Programs (non-MBA) ranked the Jindal School at No. 7.
Dr. Monica Powell, who tracks the Jindal School’s rankings, said the latest reports serve as affirmation that the Jindal School is excelling.
“We are in good company and sustaining our reputation regionally, nationally and internationally, as reflected in a cross-section of these rankings, said Powell, senior associate dean. “In some areas, we are making big jumps — as we did in supply chain and entrepreneurship.”
Faculty Achievements
New Hires Further Naveen Jindal School of Management’s Reputation
The Naveen Jindal School of Management last fall welcomed 19 new faculty members, including seven tenured and tenure-track faculty members.
Among the 19 are several familiar faces returning to the Jindal School after serving in positions elsewhere. The largest school at The University of Texas at Dallas now boasts 222 faculty members and 113 adjunct instructors.
Dr. Stanimir Markov, Ashbel Smith Professor of accounting, is among the new appointees. Markov is back at UT Dallas after teaching for five years at Southern Methodist University, where he was the Marilyn and Leo F. Corrigan Research Professor and where he twice received the Edwin L. Cox School of Business Research Excellence Award.
“It is gratifying to welcome all these new professors,” said Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Caruth Chair and Jindal School dean. “They join the Jindal School as its stature grows and its reputation for excellence increases. The credentials of these new faculty members — both in teaching and in research — add to our prominence, too.”
New Tenure-Track Faculty
Dr. Andrew Frazelle, assistant professor of operations management
Previously: PhD candidate, Duke University
Research interests: strategic routing in service networks, strategic consumers, business analytics, inventory theory
Quote:
My research focuses on operations management problems in service operations and supply chains, often in the presence of strategic customers and innovative business models. My goal is to generate insights that will help managers and consumers adapt to a world that offers more opportunities to be strategic than ever before and to improve the efficiency of the systems that they inhabit. I am extremely excited to join UT Dallas, and I am already benefiting from the welcoming and vibrant intellectual culture at JSOM and the entire University.
Dr. Bin Hu, associate professor of operations management
Previously: assistant professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research interests: sourcing and procurement, supply chain management, innovation operations
Quote:
Growing up in China and witnessing its incredible growth to become the world’s factory in the globalization process, I was fascinated by myriad supply chain and sourcing issues, and I chose to focus on this topic for my PhD thesis. I have always been interested in and following technological innovations. I assembled my own computers, built my own TV boxes, and own a 3D printer and virtual reality goggles. Such personal interests have fueled my recent expansion into research in innovative industries such as 3D printing and Uber.
Dr. Joonhwi Joo, assistant professor of marketing
Previously: postdoctoral research associate, UT Dallas
Research interests: structural empirical methods, choice theory, pricing and branding
Quote:
Over time, my research interests narrowed down to consumer choice and consumer demand, which is very closely related to marketing. I ended up writing my dissertation implementing the rational inattention, a new line of stochastic consumer choice theory, to the pricing problem. I want to inspire students to see how economics affects all our lives.
Dr. Stanimir Markov, Ashbel Smith Professor of accounting
Previously: professor of accounting, Southern Methodist University
Research interests: information intermediaries, corporate disclosure, capital markets
Quote:
My research explores how information — accounting and non-accounting — is produced and used by information intermediaries and capital markets. This is important because without quality information, fair and efficient markets cease to exist and managerial opportunism becomes rampant.
Dr. Xiaoxiao Tang, assistant professor of finance and managerial economics
Previously: PhD candidate, Washington University in St. Louis
Research interests: theoretical and empirical asset pricing, options, recovery, disaster risk
Quote:
My research focuses on using options to obtain forward-looking moments of stock returns. I am also interested in newly developed statistical models and their applications to different areas in finance.
Dr. Shervin Tehrani, assistant professor of marketing
Previously: PhD candidate, University of Toronto
Research interests: quantitative marketing, game theory, structural modeling, machine learning, applied econometrics
Quote:
I am a theorist and an empirical researcher in marketing. My first paper was about the benefit of selling the product through competitor outlets. My recent research shows that sending the right message to the right consumers can be profitable even in a competitive market where all firms do advertising targeting. The heart of my research is to construct practical and pragmatic models to explain people’s choice behavior under bounded rationality.
Dr. Yingjie Zhang, assistant professor of information systems
Previously: PhD candidate, Carnegie Mellon University
Research interests: mobile and sensor technologies, big data and smart city, user-generated content, sharing economy, social media
Quote:
I am interested in the intersection of social and technical aspects of information technologies. In particular, I use real-world trajectory data to analyze users’ online and offline behaviors under a social-cyber-physical system.
Professor Named to Highly Cited Researcher List for Fifth Consecutive Year
Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair of Management, has been named to the list of Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate Analytics for the fifth consecutive year.
Clarivate Analytics is a Philadelphia-based company that maintains and analyzes metrics on scientific and academic research, patents and regulatory standards, trademark protection, pharmaceutical and biotech intelligence, domain brand protection and internet protocol management. Clarivate Analytics previously was the “Intellectual Property and Science” business of mass media company Thomson Reuters.
Being included on the company’s 2018 list of Highly Cited Researchers is a distinction for exceptional scholars around the globe who, over the last decade, have produced multiple highly cited publications, which are defined as those ranking in the top 1 percent by citations for a specific field and year.
The analysis considers 22 categories of research. Peng, a professor of organizations, strategy and international management, is among 96 scholars in the economics and business category. He is also the sole UT System representative in the category.
In all, four UT Dallas scholars are included on the 2018 list. Others are:
Dr. Ray Baughman, the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair, is a professor of chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Baughman directs the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute and is listed among 2,020 scholars in the cross-field category.
Dr. Luigi Colombo, recently retired from Texas Instruments and an adjunct professor of materials science and engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, is listed among 211 researchers in physics.
Dr. Robert Wallace, who holds the Erik Jonsson Distinguished Chair and is a professor of materials science and engineering in the Jonsson School, is also listed among researchers in the cross-field category.
Blackstone LaunchPad Director Wins Tech Titans Award for Seed Fund Efforts
Blackstone LaunchPad Director and JSOM faculty member Bryan Chambers was honored last August with a 2018 Tech Titans award for his work with the UT Dallas Seed Fund.
Tech Titans, a technology trade association in Texas with 300 member companies, is a nonprofit that annually recognizes outstanding technology companies and individuals in the North Texas area who have made significant contributions to their industries.
Chambers earned the Investment Catalyst Award, which recognizes a significant technology-related investment transaction that will impact and deliver significant long-term economic prosperity for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
Launched in January 2017 and structured under the Jindal School-based Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the seed fund invests exclusively in technology startups founded by UT Dallas students, faculty, staff, alumni and other affiliates.
Through the seed fund, UT Dallas entrepreneurs work directly with high-potential startups on their funding and growth plans, Chambers said.
And to work in conjunction with the fund, Chambers designed a course to teach the business of venture capital and entrepreneurial concepts. Students in Special Topics in Entrepreneurship — Seed Fund Support learn how to evaluate investment risk and use due-diligence methodology to, in effect, become venture analysts on behalf of the fund. The course is offered at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
“The inspiration for the class was to create a valuable entrepreneurial experience by offering transparency into the work of great founders and startups,” Chambers said. “Some of my best entrepreneurial lessons have been from working closely with founders. Students get to roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty while applying both entrepreneurial and financial concepts in this course.”
Student News
JSOM Seniors Place Third in Global Social Business Competition
A team of four seniors from the Naveen Jindal School of Management took third place at Creative Shock, an annual international social business case competition last month in Vilnius, Lithuania. The team was one of two from UT Dallas that advanced to the finals by placing in the top 10 in preliminary competition.
Third-place finishers Team Temoxicilin included Arjun Daru, a global business major; Kimberly Killen, a global business and supply chain management major; Nhi Lai, an information technology and systems major; and Karina Nunez, a supply chain management major.
Established in 2011 at ISM University of Management and Economics in Lithuania, Creative Shock challenges participants to solve real-life business, marketing and public relations problems for social enterprises and organizations. The 2018 event attracted more than 1,700 students from around the world. It was the first year the competition included teams from the United States. UT Dallas’ teams were the only U.S. finalists.
In preliminary competition, students had one week to solve two social business issues. The first involved identifying the best locations for a fictitious company in Africa to expand on that continent. Competitors also were asked to create videos promoting the mission of two real companies, Stand4 Socks, which benefits the homeless population, and Anksti, a Lithuanian company that provides information about and specialized products for premature babies.
At the finals, students were required to solve two cases. The first focused on the financial or social impact of a drug that combats opioid abuse. For the second case, the teams measured the financial, legal, cultural, skills, marketing and growth/impact challenges of a local pancake house that employs people with mental disabilities.
“Taking part in this competition aligns well with JSOM’s mission and UT Dallas’ strategic plan of engaging in a global society and providing global experiences for students,” said Hubert Zydorek, director of the BS in Global Business program and of the Center for Global Business.
Online MBA Student Wins Capsim Simulation Challenge
Naveen Jindal School of Management Professional Online MBA student Brendan Wiley finished first in the fall 2018 Capsim Foundation Challenge. The online competition tested more than 320 contestants from 83 universities on their ability to run a multimillion-dollar simulated company and lead it to dominance in an international marketplace.
While two Jindal School students have placed as high as second in past challenges, Wiley is the first to win the event.
Besides a nice talking-point addition to his résumé, he earned a place in the Capsim Hall of Fame.
Capsim is a Chicago-based business simulation and assessment company that sponsors and runs biannual competitions based on two of its simulations.
“It is notable that Brendan won with a commanding lead and that he won with the highest score achieved to date in a Foundation Challenge,” said Dr. Larry Chasteen, the Jindal School’s director of online graduate programs. “He scored 844 of a possible 1,000 points. The second-place winner finished 16 points behind him.
“And before Brendan, the highest first-place total was 826, recorded in fall 2014.”
Challenges are open and free to Capsim “alumni,” undergraduate or graduate students who have learned how to run one of the online simulations in a class. Wiley qualified to enter by learning the Foundation simulation in Chasteen’s online Strategic Management (BPS 6310) course.
To prepare, Wiley, an operations director at Summit Electric Supply in Fort Worth, watched all Chasteen’s lectures, all the videos he could find on the Capsim website and YouTube videos for different strategies. He consulted blogs for answers to some questions, and he created an Excel drift chart for research-and-development positioning. “This really helped me quickly and accurately position my products,” he said.
The competition, which opened Oct. 30, ended in a weekend final that closed Nov. 18.
Jindal School Accounting Team Takes Second Place in Case Competition
Naveen Jindal School of Management accounting students competed against teams from six other Texas universities in Grant Thornton’s 2018 Metroplex Case Competition. The lesson they learned, that business leaders need the ability to think on their feet to succeed, earned them a second-place trophy and $2,500 at the October event.
The Dallas office of Grant Thornton LLP, a regional hub of the global audit, tax and advisory membership organization, has hosted the competition since 2015, when a team from the Jindal School took first place. Last year, the other participating schools included Texas A&M University, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech University and the University of North Texas, which won the first-place $7,500 award.
The JSOM team consisted of sophomore Sharvari Gupta, junior Keerthy Benny, seniors Kenny Nguyen and Zachary DeCamp, graduate student Patrick Sarman, and alternate member Syed Saad Shahabuddin, a junior.
Jindal School team members each devoted 10 hours a week for several weeks to make initial, general preparations. One week prior to the competition, they received the case and turned their efforts to formulating their analysis with the help of faculty advisor John Gamino, director of the BS in Accounting program. Accounting faculty members Tiffany Bortz, Mary Beth Goodrich and Chris Linsteadt served as coaches.
The case included audit, tax and advisory questions, and the teams pitched to a fictional retailer named Curate, a furniture and goods importer that was struggling to stay in business.
“We had to sell ourselves as a firm that wasn’t just providing a solution for our clients but was the best choice for taking their business to the next level,” DeCamp said. “Their financials weren’t great, so we couldn’t really give them a super long-term solution. We had to think of something more short-term that would generate the cash for them.”
The teams made their presentations Oct. 26 at the Grant Thornton Dallas office. A judging panel of two Grant Thornton employees and three Grant Thornton clients determined the winners.
JSOM Senior Wins $5,000 Scholarship
Jindal School senior Rachel McKenna, a fast-track accounting major who also is pursuing a BS in Finance degree, earned a $5,000 scholarship at the beginning of the fall semester. The award came from Ascend, a 60,000-member pan-Asian professional organization.
McKenna’s prize, the AICPA Scholarship, was one of 11 offered this year by the Ascend Foundation for scholastic excellence and community contributions. The nonprofit organization distributed the awards in partnership with the American Institute of CPAs.
The AICPA funded the scholarship and paid for McKenna to travel to San Francisco to accept the scholarship at Ascend’s 2018 National Convention.
“This award affirms the fact that I chose the right profession for me,” she said. “It means a lot that the AICPA is investing in my future.”
A member of the Jindal School’s Professional Program in Accounting, McKenna plans to sit for her CPA exam upon graduation and then pursue a career as an external auditor.
She serves in a variety of leadership roles on campus, including as a leader for Ascend’s UT Dallas chapter . She has been an ambassador for JSOM’s Career Management Center and has been mentoring business students since her sophomore year. She was an office assistant for more than two years at the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance, and is currently a supplemental instruction leader at the UT Dallas Student Success Center.
Alumni News
Jindal School Graduate Tapped for Postgraduate Program in China
A recent Naveen Jindal School of Management graduate has become the second UT Dallas student — and the first from the Jindal School — accepted into the selective Schwarzman Scholars postgraduate program in Beijing. Carlos Rodriguez-Cruz y Celis, a global business and marketing double major who graduated in December, will join the Class of 2020 scholars in August at Tsinghua University on a fully funded scholarship.
Started in 2016, the Schwarzman Scholars program brings together students representing 119 universities and 38 countries to live and study together. Rodriguez-Cruz y Celis is one of 147 students selected for the next class. The program is designed to prepare the next generation of global leaders while building relationships between China and the world in the current geopolitical landscape.
Rodriguez-Cruz y Celis’ desire to explore new places has been evident the last four years as he studied abroad for a semester in Vienna and participated in the Archer Fellowship Program in Washington, D.C.
While in Vienna, he got involved with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization and developed an interest in nuclear security and diplomacy, a path he plans to pursue professionally after his year in Beijing.
He deepened his desire to pursue public service through internships at the United Nations Information Center and the Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Exchange Programs in Washington.
“Not many students are engaged in the world at the level Carlos is. … His networking abilities are amazing,” said Hubert Zydorek, director of the BS in Global Business program. “You can give him one opportunity, and he is able to take it to the next level; and I think this is and will be a key element to his success.”
Rodriguez-Cruz y Celis graduated with major honors from the Jindal School’s Davidson Management Honors Program and UT Dallas’ Collegium V Honors Program. He credits his achievements and personal growth to the community he found on campus. “I’m from a small community in Puerto Rico,” he said, “and the people in the UT Dallas community welcomed me with open arms and believed in me and gave me the opportunity to grow and explore my personal interests in a way that allowed me to find my path.”
MBA Professors Encouraged Alumna to Follow Her Vision
Courtney Caldwell, MBA ’06, is living the dream, big time, as chief operating officer of the fast-rising McKinney-based ShearShare, an app for cosmetologists and barbers who want to rent salon space by the day.
Since she and her husband, Dr. Tye Caldwell, co-founded the business-to-business platform in 2016, it has grown from a tiny two-person startup into a flourishing global platform that connects beauty and barbering professionals in 380 cities across 11 countries. ShearShare and its staff of 10 also have garnered a slew of awards and accolades, not to mention more than $1 million in funding (see The Kudos Keep Coming, below).
None of it would be possible without educators at the Naveen Jindal School of Management nudging Caldwell to follow her vision, she says
“The MBA professors really emphasized how a student’s uniqueness — culture, upbringing, life perspective, career experience — serves as a competitive advantage,” she says. “They encouraged me to use my own background. And for the first time, I really heard how important it is to bring whatever is distinctively ‘you’ to the table to help solve problems.”
Today, Caldwell is happy to repay the favor by serving on the board of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Last July, she became a member of the institute’s advisory board, the Entrepreneurship Council.
Bryan Chambers, director of the Blackstone LaunchPad powered by Techstars entrepreneurship program, says Caldwell’s ability to think outside the box was a big reason why the UT Dallas Seed Fund, money set aside to help entrepreneurs ready for commercial product develop, invested in ShearShare in 2017.
Steve Guengerich, executive director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, says investing in forward-thinking entrepreneurs like Caldwell and ShearShare triggers a strong cause-and-effect reaction.
“Our data show that for every $1 UT Dallas is investing, our companies are raising another $24 from other investors — a significant multiplier effect,” Guengerich says.
“Tye and I are determined with a vengeance,” Caldwell says, “to put Dallas on the map when it comes to startups. We tell future entrepreneurs that if you have an idea, you don’t have to live on either coast. You can live your dream right here in Dallas.”
ShearShare has picked up multiple awards and seed money in recent months. Here are some notable recent milestones for the company and its co-founder, Courtney Caldwell, MBA ’06:
- Winner of UT Dallas Seed Fund grant, Investment Cycle I in April 2017.
- Winner of the L’Oreal Women in Digital NEXT Generation Award in September 2017.
- Winner of a $100,000 investment in the Diversity & Inclusion Investment Challenge, presented by Capital Factory with the Dallas Entrepreneur Center, DivInc, and Perot Jain, LP in January 2018.
- Winner of a $250,000 investment at Google Demo Day in March 2018. ShearShare is the first Texas startup to bring this award to the Lone Star State.
- Winner of a Dallas Business Journal Women in Technology Award in March 2018.
- Winner of the Fund Conference NEXT Award in April 2018, an award that showcases the most promising startups in Texas.
- Recipient of a $500,000 investment in May 2018 after appearing on The Pitch podcast.
- Winner of $10,000 in June 2018 in the first FreshBooks Reshape the World Challenge.
