News
Wall Street could learn something from baseball, investment guru John W. Rogers Jr. said during Smith’s Diversity Fireside Chat on Oct. 9, 2015. “Major private equity firms have basically never had a Jackie Robinson moment,” he said.
Word spread quickly about the Smith School’s online MBA program, launched in January 2014. After attracting 70 students during the inaugural year, enrollment more than doubled to 158 in 2015.
Smith School marketing professor Rebecca Ratner reached millions of news consumers with her study on the upsides of solo consumerism.
A new $10 million gift from the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation will support MBA scholarships, undergraduate leadership programs and facility enhancements for the Smith School. The gift, announced in September 2015, will also continue to fund the school's Center for Social Value Creation.
The Smith School will celebrate its fifth annual Women Leading Women event with a panel discussion featuring the four previous honorees, who will all return to campus in spring 2016.
Joyce Russell, Smith’s senior associate dean of learning, will moderate the discussion on women in leadership roles.
More than 10,000 Smith School graduates live and work in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, and now they have an alumni chapter to help them connect with one other.
The initiative came about from a push by Smith alumni working with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, which has focused in recent months on engaging more regional alumni.
Nearly 850 alumni, faculty and staff gathered Dec. 18, 2015, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the holidays. It was the largest turnout for the Smith School’s annual Alumni Holiday Gala, now in its third year. Of the attendees, 50 percent were returning alumni, with graduates from 1965 through 2015 represented.
Smith undergraduates Kirk Morris and Hamza Choudery both landed dream internships in summer 2015 with Facebook. The current juniors will return to the social networking giant this summer for another internship as part of the 37-person inaugural cohort of the two-year Facebook University for Business program.
Binge watching television — taking in a season of “Mad Men” or “Silicon Valley” in a day or two — has become a new pastime, made tempting by streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.