Smith School students explored design thinking in Spain through hands-on experiences, from paella-making to site visits at iconic landmarks. Led by Professor J. Gerald Suarez, the short-term abroad course fostered creativity, innovation, and a global perspective on problem-solving.

When “Quiet Quitting” went viral on social media in 2022, it brought a new meaning to absenteeism in the workplace. A year later, employers are flipping the script with their own trend – “Quiet Cutting.”

When Milan Chaudhary ’26 began making shirts in high school for local school basketball teams, it was just a passion project. Fast forward four years later, and now his apparel company is changing the game.

Finding work-life balance may not guarantee your success, but without it, failure is almost inevitable. The pursuit of work-life balance feels like a race without a finish line – people are trying to win the battle of doing more of everything while doing it well. The fruits of those labors create sentiments of disharmony, exhaustion, inefficacy, frustration and disappointment – also known as the warning signs of an imbalanced life.

The unimaginable happened in March 2020. Many employers shuttered their offices and told their employees to work from home. Today, although office workers are still not coming in every day, offices across 10 major U.S. cities are over 50% filled for the first time since the pandemic started. 

Burnout. It’s the reason 40% of professionals have sought new career opportunities recently, according to a 2021 Limeade survey.

Students returned to in-person classrooms this fall, but one Maryland Smith class broke the boundaries of geography by collaborating (virtually) with students from Elisava University School, the Design and Engineering College of Universitat de Vic, Spain.

While there is no single playbook for successfully bringing employees back to the office after pandemic restrictions have waned, Maryland Smith’s J. Gerald Suarez says there’s a crucial element that leaders can use to ease the transition: empathy. One of the toughest things that anyone can do, Suarez says, is starting something new or stopping something old.

Kimberly Lumpkins and Patricia Turner, representing the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, are featured among the world’s “Best and Brightest Executive MBA Graduates” in the class of 2020, by Poets & Quants, the digital news outlet dedicated to global coverage of business education.