Jindal School Places Among Elite Schools in Online Rankings
The Naveen Jindal School of Management stands among the elite institutions of higher learning in two new online rankings — and several online specialty rankings — from U.S. News & World Report.
Released Jan. 26, the rankings place the Jindal School’s online graduate programs in the top 10 in the following categories, including all four of the specialties that U.S. News ranked this year:
| Ranking | Position |
|---|---|
| Best Online Master’s Business Programs (non-MBA) | No. 6 (tied) |
| Best Online MBA Programs | No. 7 |
| Best Online MBA Program Specialties (General Management) | No. 5 |
| Best Online MBA Program Specialties (Business Analytics) | No. 6 (tied) |
| Best Online MBA Program Specialties (Finance) | No. 6 |
| Best Online MBA Program Specialties (Marketing) | No. 10 (tied) |
“This is a good outcome, and I am pleased,” said Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Caruth Chair and dean of the Jindal School. “Our stance has always been to focus on the process and have faith that the results will follow. With online programs playing such a vital role in higher education during the global pandemic, these new rankings confirm that we are on the right track.”
During the past year, faculty and administrators implemented a variety of online graduate programs and other virtual initiatives that helped ease students’ transition to distance learning while COVID-19 numbers began to climb. New programs in management science, business analytics and supply chain management led the way.
“I have had a multitude of professors and classes which I found to be incredibly beneficial, thought-provoking and intellectual,” said Garrett Brown, who graduated in December with an MBA from the Jindal School’s online program and works for Collins Aerospace as a senior subcontract program manager in the company’s Mission Systems division. “I have also appreciated how great a job the school has done from an online and part-time perspective.”
Although he worked full time, Brown said, UT Dallas and the Jindal School “still made the experience exceptional.”
Other initiatives, such as virtual interviewing and networking workshops, the JSOM Question Desk and tutorials from JSOM’s Business Communication Center (See Connecting Silver Linings to Meet Student Needs, below) helped graduate and undergraduate students stay connected while they were socially distancing.
Connecting Silver Linings to Meet Student Needs
After the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in and The University of Texas at Dallas switched to predominantly virtual learning and work environments, Naveen Jindal School of Management faculty and staff members realized that students were at risk of being overlooked and not having their needs met.
Professors and administrators worried that students might become less visible among the panoply of webcams, computer displays, microphones, speakers and headphones used for virtual interactions, so they created more opportunities to increase student visibility, participation and human interaction.
“There are so many devastating global outcomes to COVID-19,” says Dr. Monica Powell, senior associate dean and graduate dean at the Jindal School. “Buried in that devastation are some silver linings that have changed how work gets done and how you connect with people.”
Silver linings have since surfaced in many places, shapes and forms at the Jindal School. Powell and her team created web seminars and chats design to help students better engage with faculty, administrators and staff. Hannah Barling, the Jindal School’s social media specialist, recruited a student social media team. The Jindal School’s Career Management Center revamped to offer a slew of online workshops to teach students and alumni the skills they need to be successful at virtual career networking.
Read more in MANAGEMENT magazine.
Donor Scholarships Launch Brighter Futures for Jindal School Students
Through the generosity of committed supporters, the Naveen Jindal School of Management has been able to award $498,495 in donor-based scholarships to 407 undergraduate and graduate students during the 2020-21 academic year.
Such scholarships typically come from named endowments given by generous alumni and friends of UT Dallas. One $50,000 endowment provides two $1,000 scholarships per year. Because only the interest is used to fund the scholarships, the endowed fund provides an ongoing and permanent source of scholarship support each year that is awarded in the name of the specified donor, Doug Anderson, the Jindal School’s assistant dean of development and alumni relations, explained.
Anderson would love to see enough donations to award a scholarship to every student in need. “There is always a great need for scholarship support, and we have many more students who apply than funds available,” he said.
The scholarships are “launching brighter futures for our students. They’re able to graduate on time or continue for advanced degrees,” Anderson said. “Donor scholarships can bridge the gap between the money the students have available and the amount needed for their education.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
Faculty News and Achievements
Jindal School Professor Recognized for Highly Cited Research
Clarivate Analytics Web of Science listed three University of Texas at Dallas faculty members in its 2020 list of Highly Cited Researchers, including one faculty member from the Jindal School.
Dr. Mike W. Peng, the O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair; professor of organizations, strategy and international management; and executive director of the Center for Global Business in the Jindal School, is listed among 101 scholars in economics and business. Peng has been on this list every year since the list’s inception in 2014.
Read more on the UT Dallas News Center.
JSOM Professors Win Best Paper Award for Algorithm Bias Research
A paper co-authored by two Jindal School faculty members and an Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science PhD graduate has won a best paper award for research that helps reduce bias in medical diagnoses.
Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan, an Ashbel Smith Professor in Information Systems; Dr. Mehmet Ayvaci, an associate professor in Information Systems; and Dr. Mehmet Eren Ahsen, a 2015 biomedical engineering doctoral graduate now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, won the award from Information Systems Research, a peer-reviewed academic journal that is tracked in The UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™.
Their paper, “When Algorithmic Predictions Use Human-Generated Data: A Bias-Aware Classification Algorithm for Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” details a debiasing mechanism that the team developed to address algorithmic bias in the context of developing a decision-support tool for breast-cancer diagnosis.
As machine learning, which utilizes algorithms, becomes more pervasive in healthcare, Raghunathan said, accounting for bias helps the industry better realize that potential.
“Eliminating bias from the human side can be very, very challenging,” he said. “People have been trying that for many years. At a minimum, the algorithms now can recognize that bias, if it exists, and the machines can adjust to account for it.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
Information Systems Researcher Wins Early Career Award
Dr. Atanu Lahiri, an associate professor of information systems, was one of six honorees who recently received an award marking them as “on a path towards making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.”
Lahiri won the Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award from the Information Systems Society of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award was announced on Nov. 8 at the INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology 2020.
Given annually since 2015, the award honors the late Dr. Sandra A. Slaughter, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology known for seeking recognition for rising young leaders in the information systems discipline.
“This is a huge honor. I’m deeply grateful to my colleagues and students, all of whom have played a significant role in helping me reach this remarkable career milestone,” said Lahiri. a member of the Jindal School’s Information Systems Area faculty since 2014. “I’m also grateful to professors at my alma mater, the University of Rochester, who spent countless hours educating me and instilling in me the value of strategic thinking.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
JSOM Pair Studies Motivations and Methodologies of Property Tax Protests
Dr. Alejandro Zentner, associate professor of managerial economics, and Brad Nathan, a Management Science Accounting Concentration PhD, student, have co-authored a property tax protest study with Dr. Ricardo Perez-Truglia, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the study, “My Taxes Are Too Darn High: Tax Protests as Revealed Preferences for Redistribution,” a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper issued in September, Nathan, Perez-Truglia and Zentner used a pool of 78,462 Dallas County households to examine the reasons for protests.
One of their basic findings was that “households are more likely to protest when they stand to gain more from protesting.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
JSOM Researcher Offers Window into Challenges and Obstacles of Working Remotely
Dr. Dawn Owens, clinical associate professor of information systems in the Jindal School, and her colleagues investigated gender differences and parental responsibilities in work-life trade-offs related to home-office conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their research was presented Dec. 13 at the 1st International Research Workshop on Women IS and Grand Challenges, a virtual event hosted by the Association for Information Systems Women’s Network College.
“The study raises awareness about the challenges of working from home, particularly when there are other family members of various ages also working from home,” said Owens, who studies virtual teams and information technology capabilities. “As we prepare for a new normal going forward, there are several factors organizations should consider as they provide support to remote workers. These include providing sufficient office equipment outside of a computer and offering flexible work time and alternate child-care solutions.”
Read more in the UT Dallas Magazine.
Student News
Jindal School Student’s Organizational Efforts Lead to National Office
The efforts of a business administration junior in bringing a new student organization to UT Dallas have helped land her a leadership role in that organization’s national student leadership team.
Sarah Romanko was recently elected national president of the postsecondary division of SkillsUSA, a nonprofit organization of middle school, high school and college students, as well as educators and industry. The group — founded in 1965 — is devoted to bridging the skills gap, the variance between the job skills employers need and workers are able to deliver. (One estimate from Deloitte has that gap at 2.4 million unfillable jobs that adversely impact the economy to the tune of $2.5 trillion.)
Her advice to students looking for a student organization that will provide a meaningful collegiate experience is to consider what SkillsUSA has to offer, which centers on developing the soft skills that many employers are looking for.
“We definitely talk about the soft skills aspect of the club — that is something we actually talk about in our recruitment presentation,” she said. “We really focus on what employers are looking for and what we are doing to help them develop those skills.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
Senior Wins National Contest Showcasing U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
Outlining her ideas for achieving one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, Praneetha Pratapa, a Jindal School senior, won first prize in a national essay contest by tying remanufacturing standards to a U.N. objective aimed at ensuring sustainable production and consumption by 2030.
Pratapa, an information technology and systems and supply chain management double major, won $2,000. She developed her winning entry under the guidance of Dr. Ramesh Subramoniam, a clinical associate professor of operations management, and is working with him on a research publication on the same topic that is to be published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2021.
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
Senior Earns Internship Along With International Real Estate Scholarship
Arden Pray, a business administration senior with real estate career aspirations, has been recognized by the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network Foundation as one of 25 international collegiate female scholarship recipients. Pray will receive a $5,000 scholarship, an internship and other benefits.
CREW is “dedicated to transforming the commercial real estate industry by advancing women globally,” according to its website.
Pray, who is enrolled in the Real Estate Investment Management Concentration, said her first Real Estate Club at UT Dallas event “was a CREW panel. So this was a full-circle moment for me. [That event] shaped my view of the real estate industry. I always assumed it was such a male-dominated industry. Seeing those women so successful was very formative.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
Alumni News
Alumnae Earn Women in Business Awards
The Dallas Business Journal selected two Jindal School alumnae as recipients of 2020 Women in Business Awards. Sheena Payne, MS’15, and Patti Niles, who in 2017 earned an Executive Certificate in Nonprofit Governance from the Jindal School, were among 30 honorees of the annual award “that is given to influential women who go above and beyond in their business and community and who will continue to impact our business landscape for years to come.”
Payne is director of community affairs at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Niles is president and CEO of Southwest Transplant Alliance, a nonprofit organ procurement organization. Both believe their education at the Jindal School played a role in furthering their careers.
“I knew The University of Texas at Dallas has a great reputation, and I knew I wanted to be in an accredited program related to organizational consulting and behavior,” Payne said. “The certificate program at the Jindal School allowed me to learn about the various different coaching models and allowed me to network with a lot of people.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
EMBA Alumna Named a Women in Technology Honoree
Kelley McClain, managing vice president at Capital One and 2010 graduate of the Executive MBA program at the Jindal School, was honored Sept. 30 as one of Dallas Business Journal’s top 25 women leaders in North Texas technology.
“This achievement has validated my belief that we must continue to learn and take risks to enable our full potential,” she said.
McClain has worked at Capital One 19 years, progressing from front-line operations management to a variety of executive roles before moving into her current position. In her effort to continually learn and advance her career, McClain chose to pursue an executive MBA at the Jindal School.
“The University of Texas at Dallas’ Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) program was a game changer for me, both personally and professionally,” she said. “Most notably, the executive coach feature of the program was life-changing — I still have several fond memories of Dr. [Richard] Miller and Dr.[David] Springate’s course offerings. Throughout my time at Jindal School, I gained confidence, established executive presence, learned to collaborate and enhanced my critical thinking skills.”
Read more on Inside Jindal School.
