People with a global mindset have spent time understanding, accepting and leveraging similarities and differences among cultures and business practices. For Ernst & Young Managing Director, and Global Service Coordinating Partner, Ellen Polansky ’87, developing this mindset starts with breaking down stereotypes and barriers and for some, fear. No one’s success equations should be based on fear. As a Maryland Smith graduate, success comes from being “Fearless” exclaims Polansky.

A global mindset is essential for success in an increasingly interconnected world. For Kristin Fallon '11, that means developing boundaryless thinking, with no set geographical reference. “It is about thinking outside of your immediate world and really accounting for the world at large. We are in the U.S. and so we are thinking about the world from the perspective of the U.S. – as someone from Europe looks at the world from a European perspective. However, trying not to have a fixed perspective is key,” says Fallon, the director of content and storytelling at GE Healthcare.

Heather Maier, MBA ’91, has always had a creative and business-oriented mind. Her interests in design and art were balanced with her skills in math and finance. And now, her year-old business, Hedy’s Gems, combines all of these. Maier was born and raised in the DC area and earned her bachelor’s degree in math & business from Wake Forest University. After college, Maier moved back to DC and worked in retail banking with the goal of making a career in the world of finance.

When Charlotte Cullen graduated from Maryland Smith in December 2019, she did so at the perfect moment – the prelude to tax season.

When students enroll in the Advanced R Workshop, they will be taught by someone who stood in their shoes before them. Ravi Pandey, a 2016 Smith graduate of the Master of Science in Information Systems program, leads the class. He knows what it takes to succeed professionally, and he teaches graduate student weekend workshops on R, machine learning and Python.

For Nick Gardner ’18, a marketing degree was the perfect opportunity to pursue two of his passions: storytelling and connecting with others. “Marketing is really about communicating a message through a story,” he said. “Whether that is through video or podcast, it’s really about trying to connect with someone.” Now a podcast host, and video producer and editor at Adweek in New York City, Gardner has turned his passions into his profession.

For Meg Goldthwaite, MBA ’96, taking on the chief marketing officer role at National Public Radio, one of the country’s most trusted news organizations, was like coming full circle in what she calls a serendipitous career journey. Journalism is where it all started. “My first job out of school was working at a local TV news station,” she says. “I pretty quickly learned that I didn’t have the chops to be a journalist, although I admire journalists immensely.”

For senior global trade compliance manager, Larry Legates, MBA ’04, developing a global mindset goes far beyond the workplace. Legates studied abroad in Spain, Chile, and Mexico. His work has included on-site projects in Brazil, China, Japan, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and Peru and he is fluent in Spanish, proficient in Portuguese, and has translated two books on Mexican customs requirements.

The problem, says Rachel Epstein Klausner ’11, isn’t that she wasn’t giving to charity, the problem was her giving habits. Although she set aside money to donate each year, Klausner found she was spending most of it contributing to peers’ pet causes via social media, rather than focusing her contributions on issues that mattered to her. “Anytime someone would ask me, I would give,” she says. “It was very reactive and had no correlation with impact or what I cared about. It was totally embarrassing, actually.”

For Dan Robillard, community has always been important. After working in the U.S. Navy for eight years, Robillard was looking for a community to call his own as he transitioned back to private life. And while pursuing an online MBA at the Smith School of Business, that’s exactly what he found. “There was this community of veterans that really helped each other out,” Robillard says. “It was an environment that I wanted to be a part of.”