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About Dean Frank »
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As summer winds down, a new school year begins on college campuses
around the country...but here at Smith, it’s clear that we never really
took a break.
As the Smith School has become increasingly global, we have become a
7x24x365 operation. We celebrated spring commencement in College Park in
May, the same week students in Smith School’s newest Executive MBA (EMBA)
class in Beijing were getting started. Also that week 32 MBA students
from Smith’s U.S. program began a 12-day international study trip in
India, while Smith faculty taught students in Zurich in our Global
Executive MBA program.
In June, a group of executives from India’s renowned Management
Development Institute (MDI)–Smith’s newest international
partner–participated in a corporate transformation workshop at our
College Park campus. In July, we opened a national resource center to
help firms compete in the global business environment, while we hosted
50 European students from our Global EMBA program in College Park. And a
few weeks ago, we welcomed representatives of the Chinese Ministry of
Health for a forum on the future of healthcare management in China.
Because of Smith’s globalization, each new school year now begins
with new international learning opportunities for students. Five MBA
students enrolled at India’s MDI will spend the next six months at Smith
as part of the second year of their MBA program. They’ll take classes,
work in teams, and share personal experiences with Smith MBAs. Soon our
own MBA students will travel to MDI to complete a portion of their MBA
program in India. Students in our newest Shanghai Executive MBA class,
which begins in November, will take courses in Zurich, where Smith
delivers its Global EMBA program with the Graduate School of Business
Administration. And in January we will send U.S. students to Tunisia,
the location of Smith’s newest Masters of Science program.
With operations on four continents (at last count), we are indeed
building a global Smith community. Why? Because to be a global
enterprise (or individual), you must do more than be internationally
minded—you must operate internationally. With a strong and dynamic Smith
community we can accomplish anything. Our growing global community
provides terrific opportunities for our students and for you, our
alumni, located in 72 countries around the globe. We look forward to
bringing you international lifelong-learning programs, which you will be
hearing about soon. We are bringing together alumni in several European
cities for networking events. And Smith’s China alumni chapter, started
by Nancy Jiang (College Park MBA ’01) is becoming one of our most active
and supportive alumni chapters, with more than 100 members.
As we build programs in important locations around the world, we
further strengthen the Smith network, with people like James Li, a
graduate of our first EMBA class in Beijing. James was a regional
manager for Microsoft in China when he began the Smith program and he is
now the country manager for Lexmark in China.
Please seek out your fellow alumni, like James Li, Nancy Jiang and
more than 40,000 others, via
Smith’s
eAlumni Network. This portal provides an unparalleled opportunity
for you to experience the power of Smith’s global community.
Globalization is transforming the Smith community, just as it is
transforming people and organizations everywhere. As we continue to
expand the global Smith community, the opportunities are endless for all
of us.
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