Smith Newslink MBA - An eNewsletter for MBA Students at the Robert H. Smith School of Business

News Briefs

Financial Times Ranks Smith School’s MBA Program No. 17, Research No. 5
The Smith School's MBA program is ranked No. 17 in the U.S. in the Financial Times MBA 2007 rankings, published last month. The influential rankings also place Smith No. 5 in the world for research, which is based on the number of faculty research articles published in world’s top academic journals.

The Financial Times rankings place Smith School’s MBA program at No. 30 in the world and show that Smith has the No. 5 program among public business schools. Smith’s MBA program is also ranked No. 2 among the top 20 U.S. schools in the “value for money” category. And the rankings show that Smith had the second best 2006 MBA placement rate among the top-20 schools. Ninety-five percent of Smith School grads had accepted jobs within three months of earning their degrees.
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MBAA Elects Officers for Upcoming Year
The Smith School MBAA announced the much-anticipated results of the class of 2008 MBAA elections on Sunday, February 4. Voting had started on the Internet on Wednesday, January 31st and ended on Saturday, February 3rd. The winners were as follows:

President: Rob Grossman
Executive Vice President: Ted Martin
Vice President of Finance: Brett Weinrieb
Vice President of Marketing & Communications: Matt Herman
Vice President Career Development: Seth Kelly
Vice President of External Relations: Nicholas Morosoff
Vice President of Community Relations: Jorge Christian

The incoming MBAA team has big shoes to fill as the outgoing MBAA team led by Ben Fishman has done a wonderful job. Other members of the outgoing MBAA team include Leslie McDowell, Steve Schifferle, Josh Kroo, Chris Van Horn, Hima Dasika, Arindam Basu, and Leslie Pankowski.

The MBA Association is the umbrella student government organization for the Smith MBA program. The MBAA executive team works to coordinate and fund individual club activities in a manner that creates professional and social opportunities for all Smith MBA students. In addition, the executive team works with student government leaders from other top MBA programs in order to draw upon best practices and share them within the Smith community.

Entrepreneurship Start-Up Night Networking Reception
The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, in partnership with leading venture capital firms in the D.C. Metro region, invite Smith MBA students to experience Start-Up Night, an alternative to traditional campus recruiting. At Start-Up Night -- Tuesday, February 27, 6-8 p.m., Executive Dining Room, 2517 VMH -- a panel of VC partners and CEOs will provide rare insight into the types of positions available at their portfolio companies.

So far, two VCs -- Columbia Capital and Core Capital Partners -- along with the following start-up companies are planning to attend: Agent Logic, Core, Exponential Storage, Freewebs, Geocentric, GlobalPawn, Hillcrest Labs, Tipton Equity, XTS, Inc.

Start-Up Night is designed to provide entrepreneurial-minded Smith students with a better understanding of job descriptions and career possibilities at early stage companies. In addition, Start-Up Night provides a unique opportunity to network with high growth ventures in the area.

Students should submit statements of interest and resumes for a Resume Book to LaVern Chapman (lchapman@rhsmith.umd.edu) in the Office of Career Management by Friday, February 16. This Resume Book will be sent to Start-Up Night firms, as well as companies that contact the Dingman Center with an interest in hiring students.

►Online Registration is Required

ExecutiveBiz Seminar Moderated by Howard Frank: "Surviving & Thriving in the Flat World: China, India and YOU," Feb. 28 in Tysons Corner (Special Discount for Smith Community)
The Smith School has teamed up with ExecutiveBiz to present "Thriving & Surviving in a Flat World: China, India, and You!" The panel will be moderated by Dean Howard Frank on Wednesday February 28, 2007, from 7:30 - 10 a.m. at the Hilton McLean, Tysons Corner. The panel will address how globalization is affecting business locally and ways that every business leader can thrive in this new global economy. This is a great opportunity to hear practical advice and learn from executives recognized for their impressive business acumen. Panelists include Smith School Entrepreneur-in-residence Tien Wong, CEO of Opus8, Inc., Smith School Fellow Wei-Wu He, PhD, general partner at Emerging Technology Partners, Jai Saboo, principal of the Saboo Business Group, and Amir Hudda, CEO of Apptix.

All members of the Smith School community (alumni, students, faculty, staff, and partners) qualify for the promotional discount rate of $55 (vs. $75 for non-members). Be sure to use promotion code RHS for the Smith School discount. The event fee includes a full breakfast.

►Find out more and register online today!

Second-Year Full-time MBA Candidate and Mayer Fund Member Sachin Agarwal Recounts his Memorable Trip to the NYSE, Calling it the "Highlight of My MBA Experience!"
On the recent 2007 Wall Street trip, when Mayer Fund Portfolio Manager Tray Spilker (Smith MBA candidate 2007) presented the Mayer Fund members with the choice of either having a breakfast meeting at one of the world’s best known investment banks or ringing the opening bell at the NYSE, it took the Mayer Fund members approximately 0.005 seconds to reach the unanimous decision that we would like to ring the bell. Needless to add, we were all extremely excited at the prospect of not just ringing the bell, but meeting NYSE CEO John Thain and getting a tour of the historic building. For some strange reason often when I am extremely excited about an upcoming event, the actual event turns out to be a rather dull affair. However, I am happy to report that this was not one of those times. In fact it is one of the highlights of my MBA experience at the Smith School.
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Best-selling Author Seth Godin to Speak at Smith on Feb. 9

Author of Purple Cow, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and All Marketers Are Liars, among other print and e-books, Seth Godin will speak Friday, February 9, 9-11 a.m. at the Smith School of Business. Registration, a continental breakfast and networking will begin at 8:00 a.m. in Van Munching Hall's Pownall Atrium.

Godin will speak to approximately 200 students, faculty, administrators, and corporate guests. After Godin’s speech, he will be available for a book-signing in the atrium. Many students have already obtained Godin’s latest book, Small is the New Big, for the event.

“Seth Godin provides a unique view of the business world that is applicable not only to marketers, but also to any business discipline,” says Dan Phelps, president of the Smith Graduate Marketing Association (GMA). “We are excited to have brought Seth to Smith, and hope that the attendees come away from the day with fresh ideas to use in both their businesses and in their daily lives.”
►Full Story and Registration Information

Monte Carlo Night a Huge Success!

Second-year MBAs Lisette Gonzalez, Pablo Ortega, Sophie Shuklin and Christina Schoen enjoy Monte Carlo Night. Photo courtesy of Sophie Shuklin.

MBA students gathered in downtown DC Friday, February 2nd, to celebrate the start of the second semester at the annual Monte Carlo Night. Featuring gambling tables, a loaded buffet, a fabulous DJ spinning tunes for a packed dance floor, and plenty of friends, Monte Carlo Night was a huge success. Held at the National Press Club, the event was oversubscribed with nearly 170 attendees.

Second-year MBAs Nathan Groce and VP of Community Relations Hima Dasika, who arranged Monte Carlo Night, enjoy the evening. Photo courtesy of Nathan Groce.

Many thanks to outgoing VP of Community Relations Hima Dasika and the rest of the MBAA for producing such a fun event!

Smith Entrepreneurship Club Announces 2007 VCIC Local Competition
The Entrepreneurship Club announces the 2007 Venture Capital Investment Competition, which will be held Wednesday, February14 – Friday, February 16, here at the RH Smith School of Business. In the competition, MBA students judge the business plans and pitches of local start-up companies currently seeking funding, choose a company in which to invest, and produce a term sheet for the investment. In turn, the MBA students are judged by real life venture capitalists.

Teams of five students each will participate in the event. At least two students from each team participated in a mandatory training session, which featured learnings from local VC John LaPides and Cooley Godward Kronish Partner Tami Howie.

On Wednesday, February 14th, each team of five will receive the business plans for three companies. They will have a day to review and discuss these plans, before watching pitches from the entrepreneurs involved on Friday, February 16th. Each team then interviews each of the entrepreneurs before making a final investment decision and producing a term sheet and a presentation on their investment decisions. VCs from area firms listen to each team’s rationale and plan, and then chooses a winner for the local competition.

The winners of the Smith local competition will go on to the Southeast Regional Competition at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Ga., which will be held March 8-10. Winners of the regional competition go on to the international finals, which are held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School from April 12 through the 14. Kenan-Flagler started the VCIC 10 years ago to provide business school students with real-life practice in the art of the deal.

Dr. J. Craig Venter to Speak at February’s BIO IT Coalition Meeting
The founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute will speak on “Genomics: From Medicine to the Envrionment” during February’s BIO IT Coalition Meeting. Dr. J. Craig Venter will speak Wednesday, February 21, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Institutes’ Rockville offices. Registration is free for members and $25 for non-members. For more information on the BIO IT Coalition or event details, and to register for the event, please visit www.bioitcoalition.org or call Judi Giannini at (202) 220-1242.

More Latest News

♦ Research@Smith Winter 2007

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♦ Winter Commencement Highlights

♦ Smith Strategic Plan 2006-2011 (Available Online)

♦ Fall 2006 Smith Business Magazine

Spotlight: Christopher Gleeson
Lotus Administrator in Smith IT

Christopher Gleeson joined the Smith School three months ago when he came on board as the Lotus Administrator in the Office of Smith IT. Although Gleeson is new here at Smith he is very familiar with the Lotus program. Previously, he worked as the Exchange and Lotus Administrator for a multinational law firm and has spent some time doing consulting work with Lotus. His expertise is being put to good use here at Smith as his main responsibility is to make sure the school’s e-mail, Domino application and Web servers run without a hitch. Gleeson provides his expert assistance to the help desk staff on your requests, and is also available by appointment to answer your questions.

Gleeson is not only ensuring that Smith’s servers run smoothly, he is also spending time improving them; which he says is what he enjoys most about his job. “Currently I am greatly enjoying re-designing and improving the back-end infrastructure for all the Lotus servers, so the users can get a better more consistent experience with their daily computing needs.” Gleeson’s daily work is going to make studying and working here at Smith a more enjoyable experience.
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Student Spotlight: Chris Van Horn, VP of External Relations, MBAA

You could argue that there are four cornerstones to a good business school program: excellent research faculty and administrators; interested students; technologically advanced facilities; and committed alumni. Vice President of External Relations Chris Van Horn has worked the most with this last group as the MBAA’s liaison to the Office of External Relations (OER).

“I visited Smith among a bunch of schools,” says Van Horn. “Smith was the total package in terms of class size, technology, and the total community.”
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Smith School in the News

►Washington Post – Feb. 4, 2007 – Business professor Peter Morici is quoted in a story about home construction declines, particularly in Loudoun County, Va. ►Read more

►The (Baltimore) Sun – Feb. 4, 2007 – Management and Organization professor Ken Smith is quoted in a story about AirTran Airways growth as the nation’s No. 2 discount airline. ►Read more

►The (Baltimore) Sun – Feb. 2, 2007 – Finance professor Albert “Pete” Kyle is quoted in a story about the U.S. savings rate. ►Read more

►Wall Street Journal – Feb. 2, 2007 – Business professor Peter Morici reacts to the latest jobs report in the Economics React feature. ►Read more

►Traffic World – Jan. 29, 2007 – A story about logistics education focuses on Smith’s program and an interview with Bill DeWitt, Professor of the Practice, Logistics, Transportation and Supply Chain Management.

►Washington Business Journal – Jan. 26, 2007 – Smith student managers of the Mayer Fund and Lemma Senbet Fund, investment funds respectively run by MBAs and undergraduates, were pictured ringing the Jan. 19 opening bell of New York Stock Exchange, accompanying a story about the students’ experience. Mayer Fund manager Harold “Tray” Spilker was quoted in the story.

►Wall Street Journal – Jan. 26, 2007 – Business professor Peter Morici is quoted in a story about the slumping real estate market for homes in the $1 million range.

►Business Gazette – Jan. 26, 2007 – Assistant Marketing professor Rebecca Hamilton is profiled after she was recently honored by the Marketing Science Institute as an up-and-coming Young Scholar. ►Read more

►Associated Press – Jan. 25, 2007 – Business professor Peter Morici is quoted in a story about Wall Street’s response to President Bush’s State of the Union address. Saturation Coverage. ►Read more

More Smith School in the News

Smith Business Close-Up on MPT

Thursday, February 8, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, February 9, 6:00 a.m.

Point and Click: More Consumers Go Online
Online retail sales reached an all-time high last year – a total of $102 billion, jumping 24 percent from $82 billion in 2005, according to comScore Networks, an Internet information company. Last year also marked an important milestone for online retailing – it is the first year online sales exceeded the $100 billion level.

In the next edition of Smith Business Close-Up, Jie Zhang, assistant professor of marketing at the Smith School and a recognized expert on online marketing, talks about the reasons why online shopping is more popular than ever and what trends and improvements consumers can expect in 2007.

Smith Business Close-Up can be seen bi-weekly on Maryland Public Television's Business Connection. Watch Jie Zhang Thursday, February 8 at 7:30 p.m. and Friday, February 9, 6:00 a.m. on public television stations throughout Maryland and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region, including:

    ■ WMPB-TV (Ch. 67), Baltimore
    ■ WMPT-TV (Ch. 22), D.C. metro/Annapolis
    ■ WCPB-TV (Ch. 28), Salisbury
    ■ WFPT-TV (Ch. 62), Frederick
    ■ WWPB-TV (Ch. 31), Hagerstown
    ■ WGPT-TV (Ch. 36), Oakland

Have an idea for Smith Business Close-Up? Contact Kathy Marmon at kmarmon@rhsmith.umd.edu (or at ext. 59568) to discuss appearing in an upcoming edition of Smith Business Close-Up and to make suggestions for a future segment.

►Watch previous episodes online.

Faculty Up Front

Gregory Willard

Mark Loewnstein

Finance Faculty at Smith Win Smith Breeden Award
The American Finance Association has honored two professors at the Smith School of Business with the prestigious Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize. Gregory Willard and Mark Loewenstein won the award for their paper, “The Limits of Investor Behavior,” published in the February 2006 issue of the Journal of Finance. The prize was presented at the association’s annual conference, held January 5-7 in Chicago.

The Smith Breeden Prizes are extremely competitive and are annually awarded by the Journal of Finance’s associate editors for the top three papers covering any area other than corporate finance. This year the papers eligible for consideration included all those that appeared in the first five issues of 2006 and in December 2005.

“The highly coveted Smith Breeden Prize is awarded to a limited and elite group of researchers,” said Howard Frank, dean of the Smith School. “This is a great measure of the caliber of the Smith School’s finance department faculty and we're pleased to see them recognized for making significant advances in the field.”
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Professor Steve Loeb's Contributions to Accounting Ethics Are Topic of New Journal Article
For Dr. Stephen Loeb, Ernst & Young Alumni Professor of Accounting and Business Ethics, ethics isn't just his job, it is a part of his psyche. Each decision he makes is carefully contemplated, with absolute respect and consideration to moral principles. Ethics is something that Loeb was thinking about long before it was in vogue to do so. That's why he has been cited over and over again and is internationally known in the area of accounting ethics. There are few professors who have been at Smith as long as he has, since 1970, and earlier this year his contributions to the field of accounting ethics were immortalized in a journal article.

Steven M. Mintz, area chair and professor of accounting at California Polytechnic State University's Orfalea College of Business and a professional acquaintance of Loeb's, acknowledges the impact of Loeb's research and wrote an entire article devoted to "Loeb's Contribution to Accounting Ethics Education and Research." (Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting, Volume 11, p 31-46, Elsevier Ltd., 2007)

"As Loeb pointed out years ago, ethics is not viewed as a primary area of accounting teaching and research and that neglect is a risky career strategy," says Mintz in the article. The purpose of Mintz's paper was to look back at Loeb's 1988 article entitled "Teaching Students Accounting Ethics: Some Crucial Issues," and see how Loeb's goals have guided subsequent research, and how new meaning has come forth in the aftermath of accounting scandals and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
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Technology@Smith

Windows Vista
You may be aware that Microsoft has released or is releasing versions of a new operating system named Vista. Vista is being promoted by Microsoft as offering many benefits in the way of improved security and compliance, optimized desktop infrastructure, finding and using information, and enabling the mobile workforce. Vista is currently being tested against all of the PC hardware and software that the Smith School offers/supports. Due to a lack of support for Vista by third party software vendors (Novell among others), we do not currently have 100% compatibility between Vista and our environment. We will continue testing as hardware and software vendors release updates that move us toward that 100% compatibility. Until that time when we determine Vista is compatible with our environment, we will not support Vista on any PC. The Office of Smith IT will keep you updated as we evaluate Vista and determine the optimal strategy in rolling Vista out to the community.

Logging into Novell for Someone Else? Stop!!
Remember that when you log into any computer with your Smith Novell account that anyone who uses that computer while you're logged in has access to all your personal data on K: as well as data on the departmental drives that you and others in your department share. Please never log into a computer for someone else with any account. We can help you work out another way to accomplish what you need to do without breaching the security of the network. The Office of Smith IT can provide temporary accounts for visitors or student workers if you need them. Just fill out the New Account Request Form to request accounts on Novell or Notes.

Because of need for greater network security, we will be searching for uses of multiple logins. If you are currently able to login to more than one machine at a time, expect that ability to go away in the very near future. If you have any concerns about this policy, please e-mail helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu.

Update Your Virus Protection
Our installations of McAfee are set to automatically update virus definitions, however, when security exploits are announced, this needs to be done more frequently. To protect your computer please manually update your McAfee virus definitions as soon as possible. To do this,
1. Right click on the red "V" in the taskbar at the bottom right of your computer screen.
2. Choose "update now" and it will update to the latest version of "dat."
Of course, new viruses or "exploits" are most likely being created, so you should manually run McAfee updates daily.

Update Your Windows Critical Patches
If you have a computer with our software image (such as your office computer), that PC is set to automatically update critical Windows patches overnight. We recommend that you remain logged into Novell overnight, and THEN RE-BOOT YOUR COMPUTER IN THE MORNING. This will download the latest critical patches available for Windows, and when you re-boot your computer in the morning they will be installed. As always, the Office of Smith IT recommends that you distrust all communication (attachments, files, links, etc.) that comes unannounced to best protect yourself from malicious attacks.
►More information on the latest Microsoft Advisories

Bulletin Board

Leading the Digital Economy eNewsletter
You should have received the latest issue of the Smith School's quarterly Leading the Digital Economy e-newsletter in your mailbox last Wednesday, January 31. If you didn't, please make sure that "leading@rhsmith.umd.edu" is added to your list of safe senders. Check it out online, if you missed it at: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/newsletter/leading/

Research@Smith Gets New Look
Research@Smith unveiled a new design last month -- online and in print. The new look features expanded coverage of research conducted by Smith School's faculty. The free publication is published three times a year and is available online: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/research/ras/

Happy Hour Candids!

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