he 2009 Winter Commencement for the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, will be held at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2009, in the Comcast Center. This semester, 145 undergraduate students, 129 Master of Business Administration students, 1 Executive Master of Business Administration student, and 5 Doctoral students will be graduating from the Smith School. Bob L. Johnson, the chief service officer for Sprint, will be the commencement speaker. Johnson is a University of Maryland alumnus and the co-chair of the Smith School Advisory Board.

The annual “Diversity at Smith” event was held at University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business on November 7, 2009. The main aim of the event was to provide prospective MBA candidates the opportunity to experience the Smith MBA. A large number of potential candidates turned up to benefit from the daylong event, where they could directly interact with Smith Admissions Team, alumni and current students.

College Park, Md. – October 26, 2009 – The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business today announced the winners of its third annual Mergers & Acquisitions Competition, held October 22-23. The event, organized by Smith’s MBA Finance Association, challenged 10 teams of MBA students from leading business schools to craft and present M&A pitches to a panel of executive and faculty judges. The student team from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University won the $5,000 first prize.

This fall, second-year full-time MBA students at the Robert H. Smith School of Business returned to campus after a summer of making recommendations and presentations to C-level executives and delivering value while leveraging the skills and knowledge they developed over the previous year.

Many in the world of finance and banking have compared the current recession to the Great Depression of the 1930s, hoping that leaders of today and tomorrow might learn from the mistakes of the past. With great clarity, Dr. Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance, conveyed the same historical analysis to the incoming full-time MBA class at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

College Park, Md. – May 15, 2009 — The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business today announced that William E. Mayer, senior partner of Park Avenue Equity Partners, chairman emeritus of the Aspen Institute and former dean of the Smith School, will deliver the keynote speech at the May 22 graduation ceremony. Mayer will address approximately 1,000 Smith School undergraduate, master and doctoral graduates at the 4 p.m. event at the Comcast Center on the university’s College Park campus.

The University of Maryland's Smith Association of Women MBAs (SAWMBA) and the undergraduate Smith School Women’s Society are sponsoring a "Dress for Success" women's business clothes drive, April 22-23, 2009 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Pownall Grand Atrium of Van Munching Hall). Dress for Success is a not-for-profit organization that empowers women back into the workforce. Gentlemen are encouraged to participate by asking for clothing donations from their female significant others, relatives and friends.

College Park, Md. – January 26, 2009 – The MBA program at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business is ranked No. 20 in the United States in the Financial Times MBA 2009 rankings, published today. The influential rankings place Smith No. 12 in the world for research, the third consecutive year in the top 15.

Every year, the Smith community gathers at Monte Carlo Night to celebrate everything Smith. This year, Monte Carlo night took place on Saturday February 7, 2009 at the Galleria at Lafayette Center in Washington D.C. For the first time, the event was expanded to include alumni, part-time, full-time, and executive MBA students.

Comcast Center was full of good cheer as the Smith School celebrated the commencement of 200 undergraduates, 120 MBAs, 48 MS in Business/Accounting students, and two doctoral students on December 21.