Jindal School Now – January 2017

Jindal School’s Online Programs Move Up in U.S. News Rankings

Hasan Pirkul
Hasan Pirkul

Two new rankings from U.S. News & World Report reinforce UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management’s leadership role in online learning programs in graduate management education.

Released Jan. 10, the 2017 Best Online Programs Rankings placed both the online MBA and online graduate business programs in the Top 10. JSOM’s online graduate business programs solidified their positions by jumping from No. 4 in 2016 to No. 2 in 2017. The online MBA program moved up from No. 9 to No. 7.

The upward movement continues a trend that began in 2015 when U.S. News separated MBA program rankings from other master’s degree program rankings.

“These rankings are just a few years old, but the Jindal School has strived to be a catalyst for innovation in online education since the mid-’90s,” said Dr. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the Jindal School and Caruth Chair. “We are gratified that U.S. News recognizes our efforts in this area.”

The Professional MBA Online degree and nearly every Master of Science degree offered at the Jindal School can be delivered online, depending on which electives are taken. Although students enrolled in the traditional professional and executive MBA and master’s programs can also take advantage of the online course delivery technologies, the only MBA program considered for this ranking is the PMBA Online.

“Since we are such a large business school, we have the resources and wherewithal to be able to offer a wide variety of courses both on campus and online,” said Dr. Monica Powell, senior associate dean. “That flexibility and convenience help our students further their education while balancing the demands of work and family life.”

The methodology, unchanged from the previous year, focused on both traditional metrics — such as student engagement, peer reputation and selective admissions — and nontraditional metrics. Those included student services and technology that facilitates distance learning, as well as faculty credentials/training for delivering online education. Schools that ranked highest scored high in both traditional and nontraditional metrics.

The category weights were slightly different for the two rankings. Online MBA rankings focused slightly more on traditional metrics, while the graduate business programs rankings gave a slightly greater emphasis to the nontraditional categories.

The highest possible score in either ranking was 100. The graduate business programs scored 96. The online MBA programs scored 87.

Data for the 2017 rankings was collected between August and October of last year from 255 schools for the online MBA rankings and 141 schools for the rankings that included all other online business programs.

JSOM’s MBA Program Jumps to No. 29 in Bloomberg Rankings

Naveen Jindal School of Management
The Naveen Jindal School of Management

The Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas continues its climb to the top of business school standings with the Full-Time MBA program leaping forward 13 places in the 2016 Bloomberg Businessweek rankings of best U.S. business schools.

The Jindal School’s major move in the full-time MBA rankings was predicated on improved scores in three component surveys of Bloomberg Businessweek data. The school’s ranking among employers rose from No. 36 to No. 24. Approval among graduates of the program lifted the alumni ranking from No. 57 to No. 38. And the ranking among students went from No. 36 to No. 23.

“To have this program move up significantly in this ranking is exceptionally gratifying,” said Jindal School Dean and Caruth Chair Hasan Pirkul. “This validates our efforts to improve, innovate and always offer excellence.”

The school “has been working diligently to address student, employer and alumni concerns and to incorporate their advice in making decisions,” JSOM Senior Associate Dean Monica Powell said. “Obviously that paid off.”

Bloomberg Businessweek invites full-time MBA programs throughout the country to participate in the rankings process. However, the publication ultimately is sole arbiter of which programs and how many programs are ranked.

Of the 87 business schools in the list, nine were from Texas, with the Jindal School ranked fourth in the state.

“With this new ranking, we move to No. 12 among public university full-time MBA programs in the U.S.,” said Lisa Shatz, assistant dean in charge of all JSOM MBA programs. “Pair that with the economical cost of our program and a focus on developing highly marketable skills such as IT and data analytics — and it becomes clear that a Jindal School MBA offers exceptional value.

“Speaking to the high quality of the students we enroll,” Shatz added, “we consistently have more than 90 percent of them placed in jobs within 90 days of their graduation.”

Princeton Review Ranks Innovation and Entrepreneurship No. 22

Madison Pedigo with students
Madison Pedigo with students

The Princeton Review, in partnership with Entrepreneur magazine, recently ranked the Jindal School one of the top schools for entrepreneurship in 2017 because of its MS in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MSIE) program.

The graduate program was ranked at No. 22 among more than 300 university entrepreneurship programs that were surveyed. Results were released Nov. 15 of last year.

“There are multiple high-quality graduate entrepreneurship programs in the U.S., and we are delighted to be ranked in the top 25 by the Princeton Review,” Jindal School Dean and Caruth Chair Hasan Pirkul said. “This is the result of dedicated effort and working to build our entrepreneurship program over many years.”

Dr. Monica Powell, senior associate dean, echoed that sentiment, adding that “the experienced entrepreneurship faculty and management and staff are making a real impact on our students and on the North Texas area. Innovation and entrepreneurship are in our DNA. The entrepreneurship team thinks strategically and works in a collaborative way with business leaders in the community.”

That collaborative spirit is exemplified in many ways, Madison Pedigo, director of the innovation and entrepreneurship program, said. “This includes combining state-of-the-art curriculum with experiential learning that is built around ‘lean startup’ methodology. We offer 21 graduate entrepreneurship courses that provide a solid foundation and exceptional opportunities for specialization.”

The focus of the program is on “continuous improvement,” Pedigo said. “We are walking the talk.”

Other program honors include the National Model MBA Entrepreneurship Program award and the Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship Teaching and Pedagogical Innovation.

New Hires Expand Jindal School Research Interests, Expertise

Four new tenured and tenure-track faculty members joined the Naveen Jindal School of Management in the 2016-2017 academic year, adding further expertise in accounting, information systems, marketing and operations management.

“Every year we look to new faculty, particularly tenured and tenure-track members, to bring fresh ideas in education and research,” Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Jindal School dean and Caruth Chair of Management, said.

Sanjay Jain

Sanjay Jain
Sanjay Jain

A marketing professor, Dr. Sanjay Jain, this fall completed the roster of four professors appointed as O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chairs. Alumnus and school benefactor Naveen Jindal, MBA 1992, created the chair in June 2011. It supports the research and scholarly activities of the four appointees.

Jain’s appointment brings to 25 the number of Jindal School faculty serving in named and endowed professorships.

Previously, Jain was a professor of marketing and holder of the JC Penney Endowed Chair in Marketing and Retailing Studies at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. He served at TAMU from 2006. Prior to that, he held appointments at the University of Maryland and at Purdue University.

He earned his PhD in marketing at the University of Arizona and a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. His research interests are in the areas of competitive strategy and experimental game theory.

“I am particularly interested in understanding how consumer psychological and sociological phenomenon can affect a firm’s behavior,” Jain says.

Jain’s research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, Marketing Science and Management Science. His work has been a finalist for the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long-Term Impact Award in 2011. He also was the winner of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Practice Prize in 2009, and he was awarded the Outstanding Service Award from Management Science in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Jain is associate editor for Management Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. He sits on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science.

He is teaching marketing management this spring.

“UT Dallas is a dynamic school with a focus on high-quality research. I am excited at the possibility of interacting and collaborating with colleagues who share my passion for research,” Jain says.

The other tenured and tenure-track new hires are:

Nathan Goldman
Nathan Goldman

Dr. Nathan Goldman, assistant professor of accounting

Previously: PhD candidate, University of Arizona
Research interests: Taxes and business strategy, corporate taxation, accounting for income taxes, auditing of income taxes, capital markets, disclosure decisions
Quote: “Taxation, both at the corporate and individual levels, has a significant effect on virtually every business decision. My research goals as a faculty member are to better understand why firms make tax decisions, as well as the consequences of these tax decisions. Additionally, I hope to create an atmosphere for learning about taxation where my students will become engaged in the topic and grow as young professionals.”

Amit Mehra
Amit Mehra

Dr. Amit Mehra, assistant professor of information systems

Previously: Associate professor, Indian School of Business in Hyderabad
Research interests: Technology-driven personalization in retailing and education, digital retailing, human-capital development, and high-tech product and services development
Quote: “New businesses are emerging, and existing ones are changing drastically because of two simultaneous trends: One, sophisticated data analytics provides fundamentally new information on how individuals can be served better, and two, IOT (Internet of Things) technologies provide a means to serve individuals in real time as their needs emerge. These trends are creating many new and exciting challenges, and I want to be one of the academics exploring these areas in depth in the coming years. I am very happy and proud to be at UT Dallas, and I think that I will have the perfect platform for my work here.”

Shouqiang Wang
Shouqiang Wang

Dr. Shouqiang Wang, assistant professor of operations management

Previously: Assistant professor, Clemson University
Research interests: Strategic decision-making problems in business sectors, such as operations management, supply chain and marketing, and public policies, including sustainable operations, environmental regulations, healthcare and national defense
Quote: “In particular, an overarching theme of my research is to identify managerial and operational solutions to improve efficiency and mitigate misalignment of incentives among decentralized entities, in the presence of asymmetric information and dynamic strategic interactions in these contexts.”

Faculty News and Achievements

Global Strategy Scholar Recognized as Influential Researcher

Mike Peng
Mike Peng

Dr. Mike Peng was one of two UT Dallas professors recently named to the 2016 list of Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters.

Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair of Management, is on the list for the third consecutive year. In his field of economics and business, only 70 scholars appeared on the list.

The list recognizes researchers for having a significant global impact within their respective fields of study. The 2016 list includes about 3,000 researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences. The citation analysis focused on contemporary research achievement: Only highly cited papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during 2004-2014 were surveyed.

A leading scholar in global business strategy, Peng is best known for his development of the institution-based view of strategy and his insights about the rise of emerging economies, such as China, in global business. His research has investigated business strategies in more than 20 countries.

Peng said he believes a combination of quality and quantity contributed to the repeated high ranking of his research. In 2016 and 2017, Peng has five publications on the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™ — a database that tracks publications in 24 leading business journals — and he has 10 additional papers in these two years.

“I want to share this accomplishment with my 100-plus co-authors,” Peng says. “I co-authored a majority of my more than 130 papers with colleagues and PhD students — a lot of them are at UTD. The honor is not only mine, but also theirs.”

The second UT Dallas professor named to the highly cited list, Dr. Aria Nosratinia, Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor and associate head of the electrical engineering department in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, is on the list for the first time.

Associate Dean Earns Outstanding Leadership in Education Award

Diane McNulty
Diane McNulty

The US-India Chamber of Commerce recently awarded Dr. Diane McNulty its 2016 Outstanding Leadership in Education Award. At the chamber’s 17th annual awards gala last December in Dallas, McNulty was cited for being instrumental in helping to shape and strengthen UT Dallas educational engagements in India, encouraging student trips and study abroad there, and facilitating opportunities for students from India to experience American university life.

Associate dean for external affairs and corporate development at the Jindal School, McNulty took a memorable trip to India in 2008 with a UT Dallas group that included JSOM Dean Hasan Pirkul and Vice Dean Varghese Jacob. A highlight of that trip was an extended visit with alumnus Naveen Jindal, MBA 1992, whose subsequent support of the school resulted in it being named for him in October 2011. Jindal is a former student of McNulty, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in corporate governance and ethics.

Her interest in international relations is a long-held one. She has been a board member on the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas since 2000 and is active as well on the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations. She also sits on the board of directors of the Public Affairs Council, a Washington, D.C.-based global association for public affairs professionals.

She shares that interest with Pirkul, who was a 2003 recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Education Award from the chamber’s predecessor, the Greater Dallas Indo-American Chamber of Dallas.

Jindal Professors Win Best Teaching Case Study Award

Metin Çakanyildirim
Metin Çakanyildirim
Serdar Simsek
Serdar Simsek

Operations management Professor Metin Çakanyildirim and Assistant Professor Serdar Simsek recently earned the 2016 Best Teaching Case Study award from the Decision Sciences Institute at its annual meeting in Austin.

Simsek and Çakanyildirim were among the finalists chosen to present their cases at the Nov. 19 – Nov. 22 conference.

Their case, “RestA Mattress,” provides readers with insights about the operations of recently merged companies while giving them hands-on experience in applying the techniques and principles of operations management in a relevant context. The case asks readers to determine the type of data required for the analysis and to collect them from publicly accessible resources.

The analytical case involves parameter estimation and joint optimization over merged supply networks. It qualitatively lays out synergies in a merger and evaluates them, establishing a link to mergers and acquisitions literature in finance. A link to organizational behavior is made through the discussion of challenges faced by a female, recent-graduate analyst. The case also highlights outsourcing of some logistics operations, the risks involved and hedging strategies.

The Decision Sciences Institute is a professional organization of academicians and practitioners interested in the application of quantitative and behavioral methods to the problems of society.

IS Prof’s Early Career Award Follows Successful Summer Workshop

Jianqing Chen
Jianqing Chen

Associate Information Systems Professor Jianqing Chen in November received the 2016 Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award from the Information Systems Society of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award recognizes and honors early career individuals who have earned a PhD within the past 10 years and who are on a path toward making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.

The award came after Chen co-chaired the 10th China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM 2016) in Dalian, China, last June. The workshop provided researchers and practitioners in information management and related areas an opportunity to present original ideas and share insightful opinions. The theme of CSWIM 2016 was Internet Plus, Business Innovation and Analytics.

The workshop attracted more than 250 participants, a record number, including scholars from the U.S., Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Arun Rai, editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly, and Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Information Systems at the Jindal School.

IS Prof Earns Young Researcher Award

Mehmet Ayvaci
Mehmet Ayvaci

Information Systems Assistant Professor Mehmet Ayvaci received the Best Young Researcher Award last October from the Workshop on Health Information Technology and Economics for the paper “Classification in the Presence of Anchoring Bias: A Model and an Application to Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Co-authors are IS faculty member Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan and Dr. M. Eren Ahsen, a 2015 UT Dallas biomedical engineering PhD alumnus, from IBM Research.

Ayvaci, Raghunathan and Ahsen developed a new approach to optimize classification in systems subject to anchoring bias. Such bias can be described as the propensity to return to or depend upon the first piece of information provided — the anchor — in categorizing subsequent information.

“Anchoring bias has been observed in many classification contexts in business, medicine and in everyday life,” Ayvaci and his co-authors wrote in their abstract. “For instance, a financial adviser’s estimate of the future performance of a stock is often influenced by the historical data, which is shown to resemble anchoring. In a supply chain, an inspection agent’s assessment of quality is affected by the supplier’s history and reputation. When hiring a job candidate, the interview assessment — a significant input to the decision-maker in addition to the candidate’s résumé — is influenced by the candidate’s academic pedigree, such as the schools he attended. Radiologists’ interpretations of images (such CT scans and X-rays) are often biased by the clinical history of patients.”

The trio’s research derived the optimal aggregation of attributes and classification under anchoring bias for a linear classifier. They also analyzed the impact of bias on the classifier design and its performance, and they derived the conditions under which using the anchor attribute for classification is not beneficial.

In their study, they applied their findings to breast cancer diagnostic-decision contexts in which the radiologist’s interpretation of a mammogram is biased by the patient’s clinical profile information.

Information Systems Prof Leads Local Grant Team Building Health Informatics Platform

Indranil Bardhan
Indranil Bardhan

Dr. Indranil Bardhan, professor of information systems and the Jindal School’s Information Systems Area coordinator, is serving as senior investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and construct a patient-focused and personalized health system that addresses the fractured structure of healthcare information.

The project, “Large-Scale Medical Informatics for Patient Care Coordination and Engagement,” received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Initiative. A three-year effort that began last September, the project involves close cooperation with the South Region Big Data Hub, located at Georgia Tech.

By using information about the environment gathered through real-time, mobile and wearable devices and social media data, the team will create a detailed and comprehensive picture of a patient’s health and a tool to help manage patients’ engagement with their healthcare providers.

Successful completion of the project will accelerate progress in addressing challenges related to health disparities, healthcare access and precision medicine, Bardhan says. Progress will come by “improving care coordination, longitudinal health-record creation and cohort tracking; and by creating a system to enable closed-loop feedback once the patient is discharged,” he says. “Simply put, the integration of patients’ sensor-based data with clinical data from electronic health records will enable improvements in diagnosis, monitoring and care coordination between patients and providers.”

The team also includes researchers from Emory University, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; UT Southwestern Medical School; University of Virginia; and West Virginia University.

Jindal Professor Receives Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award

McClain Watson
McClain Watson

Dr. McClain Watson’s outlook and success in teaching helped him earn a 2016 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, a UT System-level award for performance excellence. The regents’ award, presented last August, follows the campus-level President’s Teaching Excellence Award he earned in 2015.

In his courses, Watson, director of Jindal School business school communication programs, discusses with students the importance not only of being knowledgeable in a business context but also of projecting a sense of confidence and warmth. They need to lead others to think they are trustworthy, hardworking and take their jobs seriously, he says.

Watson assigns public-facing work. In the Advanced Business Communication class, students create a Professional Online Portfolio (POP) that helps them stand out in their job searches and give companies a fuller picture of their skills and personality.

Each portfolio is a student-designed and student-controlled website that features a video introduction, a résumé, professional yet friendly photos of the student, examples of school or work projects others may see, descriptions of the student’s community and leadership experience, and information about personal interests and life goals.

The POP project was one of 30 innovations recognized in February 2016 by AACSB International, the global accrediting body and membership association for business schools. The Innovations That Inspire initiative showcased ways that business schools are modernizing and diversifying the business education environment.

Prof’s Award-Winning Paper Studies Effects of Madoff Ponzi Scheme on Investor Trust

Umit Gurun
Umit Gurun

Research that Accounting Professor Umit Gurun undertook using the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme to study the effects of trust on investing earned him and his co-authors the 2016 Best Paper Award from the Wharton School and Wharton Research Data Services at the Western Finance Association Conference last June.

For “Trust Busting: The Effect of Fraud on Investor Behavior,” Gurun and fellow researchers Dr. Noah Stoffman of Indiana University and Dr. Scott E. Yonker of Cornell University obtained court documents that listed home addresses of more than 11,000 victims of Madoff’s fraud. They then created a map to identify which areas in the U.S. had highest exposure to the biggest Ponzi schemes on record. They also made a request via the Freedom of Information Act to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to obtain detailed information on the assets managed by registered investment advisers and banks.

They looked for connections between these three data sets and discovered that consumers who lived in close proximity to Madoff’s victims lost trust in the financial system and consequently withdrew their investments, opting instead to make safer bank deposits.

“This trust shock created a ripple effect in the victims’ social circles,” Gurun says.

The study shows that the ripple effect is pervasive and has an adverse effect on the economy. The investment advisers whose clients lived close to Madoff victims become tainted with this trust shock and were more likely to go out of business than their counterparts whose clients were not affected. The trust shock exhibited by the victims and their social networks continues to this day and shows no sign of dissipating any time soon.

Profitability and Takeover Possibility Study Nets Two JSOM Profs a Best Paper Award

Ashiq Ali
Ashiq Ali
Bin Li
Bin Li

The Multinational Finance Society presented Dr. Ashiq Ali, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Accounting, Dr. Bin Li, assistant accounting professor, and Dr. Todd Kravet, a colleague at the University of Connecticut, the Best Paper Award at the society’s annual conference last June.

Their study, “Accounting Profitability and Takeover Likelihood,” examines the association between profitability and the likelihood a firm will become an acquisition target.

“While past research argues that poorer performing firms are more likely to be acquired, because acquirers can unlock value through efficient management,” the trio wrote, their research reveals that acquiring firm managers motivated by opportunism are, on average, more likely to go after safe, high-performing firms. This results in a lower return on investment for acquiring firm’s shareholders than if the firm were to acquire a poor-performing target, with the goal of improving its operational efficiency.

“Managers may have incentive to be empire builders, that is, expand the business that they are managing,” Ali said. “The bigger the firm becomes, the more compensation and power the managers end up getting. When acquiring other firms, these managers are more likely to go for firms that are doing really well rather than the ones that are doing poorly, because in the latter case, managers will actually have to work to make the target firms more efficient and prevent it from failing.”

Ultimately, investors need to consider what acquirers are doing on a case-by-case basis, Ali said, but tendencies toward opportunism, according to the team’s research findings, can be a good indicator that the returns from the acquisition of a well-performing firm will not be favorable for acquiring firm’s shareholders.

The Multinational Finance Society is a nonprofit that advances and disseminates financial knowledge, philosophies, techniques and research findings among members of the academic and business communities.

Student News

Two Sales Students Take Honors in 2016 ICSC

ICSC Speed Selling champ Sonia Hernandez (left) with marketing faculty member and team coach Semira Amirpour (center) and fellow top teammate Alexander Zahabizadeh
ICSC Speed Selling champ Sonia Hernandez (left) with marketing faculty member and team coach Semira Amirpour (center) and fellow top teammate Alexander Zahabizadeh

JSOM Team Finishes in Top Ten

Recent graduate Sonia Hernandez and senior Alexander Zahabizadeh took top honors in the 2016 International Collegiate Sales Competition at Florida State University last November. In addition, The University of Texas at Dallas placed seventh overall among the 69 competing schools.

The four-day international competition gave students a chance to hone their sales skills in real-life situations, in front of judges from well-known companies from around the country.

Hernandez, who graduated in December with a double major in marketing and business administration, won first place — out of 120 participating students — in the speed-selling competition.

She will begin working in the Dallas office of Qualtrics as a sales account executive early this year. The company is a market-research firm based in Provo, Utah.

Zahabizadeh, who is majoring in electrical engineering with a minor in marketing, finished sixth overall — out of 137 competitors — in the role-play competition.

He has a position waiting for him at Texas Instruments upon his graduation next May.

“Most people only know TI for its calculators, but 97 percent of its revenue come from selling the little black chips you see on a circuit board in your computer or phone,” Zahabizadeh says. “TI has roughly 150 product lines, with each acting as a mini company with 50 to 200 engineers. I will be acting as the marketing and sales team member of one of those product lines. The interesting thing is that they only hire electrical engineers for the role, so I will be the first from the UT Dallas sales program to enter the job role, while also being the first engineer graduating from our sales program.”

Accounting Senior Finishes Second in International Business Challenge

Jordan Matheney
Jordan Matheney

Jindal School senior Jordan Matheney recently finished in second place in the Fall 2016 CAPSIM Foundation Challenge, a simulation competition that tested contestants’ ability to successfully run a company long term. He demonstrated world-class management skills amid a field of more than 570 students from 180 universities in more than 13 countries who participated in the fall challenge.

It was the second year a Jindal School student finished in second place in the challenge, which is sponsored and run by CAPSIM, a Chicago-based business simulation technology and services firm. The challenges are open to students who are “alumni” of CAPSIM simulation courses.

As an accounting major, Matheney learned how to run the business simulation in the Strategic Management (BPS 4305) capstone class taught by Professor Larry Chasteen. “The class helped me learn about setting and reaching goals for a company, and trying to be a market leader,” Matheney says. “In the competition, you need to have different products at different price points to capture market share. The class helped us to understand how to approach things like that.”

Matheney decided to enter the competition because he felt it would further expand his ability to identify and make big-picture decisions. “The company ‘you run’ in the competition is a manufacturer, and you make decisions in areas like purchasing capacity, automation and employee training,” he says. “[The competition] was eight hours long, each hour representing one year in business.”

Larry Chasteen and John Setty
Larry Chasteen and John Setty

Matheney had some assistance beforehand from John Setty, a 2015 Executive MBA alumnus, who was JSOM’s second-place finisher last year. “The biggest piece of advice he gave me was to use my time wisely,” says Matheney, who earned his undergraduate degree in December and is slated to get his graduate degree at the end of the Summer 2017 semester. “He said it was important to have a plan.”

Why have the JSOM challengers fared so well?

“I think it’s partly because students really embrace the simulation format and see it as a chance to learn about the risks and opportunities of business but in a safer way,” Chasteen says. “It’s exciting for many to see the effect scenarios can have.”

JSOM Soccer Player Elected Vice Chair of NCAA Advisory Committee

Joseph Weber
Joseph Weber

Jindal School of Management marketing major and soccer player Joseph Weber has been elected vice chair of the NCAA Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), moving him one step closer to his dream of a career in sports administration.

Weber, a senior and starting goalkeeper for the Comets soccer team, was nominated by his fellow National SAAC representatives and then elected by a majority vote at the Nov. 13-14 SAAC Leadership Council meeting. He takes office this month and will serve until his two-year committee member term ends in December.

A year ago, when Weber was appointed to serve on SAAC, he thought he would be lending his voice to minor issues and might be able to make a small impact at the campus level. “I thought I would be involved with little things like getting key-card access to the training room or rearranging our team’s budget so we can eat more nutritious meals on road trips, things like that,” he said. “After I got involved, I realized that there was a much bigger picture.”

Weber has worked on committee initiatives such as the It’s On Us campaign — launched by the White House in 2014 in partnership with the NCAA and other organizations to bring awareness to and prevent sexual assaults on university campuses.

“At first we thought it would be something small but a point that needed to be made,” Weber said. “Now, seeing it come to fruition with spin-offs on campus and as a national movement in which students all over have better awareness about the issue — it’s been rewarding.”

More recently, the committee has focused on mental-health awareness and solving such game-environment problems as inappropriate behavior by fans and parents toward visiting teams and participants.

“Seeing how much a student-athlete’s voice is represented, particularly in Division III, is amazing,” Weber said. “It’s already given me a glimpse into what I want to do as a career,” he said. “I’m looking into getting a master’s in sports administration now.”

Weber has applied for a postgraduate internship with the NCAA. For now, he is focusing on his studies and his SAAC leadership role after having completed a successful soccer season with a record of 13-5-2. The Comets won the regular-season American Southwest Conference (ASC) title as well as the ASC Tournament title. They went on to compete in the NCAA Division III tournament, where they lost in the opening round. Weber was named the ASC’s Goalkeeper of the Year.

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