Hailing from a lineage of educators, Maryland Smith’s Zeinab Karake always believed she’d find a career in the classroom. To her, teaching isn’t just a profession, it’s a calling. Originally from Lebanon, Karake described how teaching has shaped her family’s lives. Her great-grandfather was the first teacher in their village and of her six brothers and sisters, four of them became teachers as well. In that sense, Karake says, her career path and future were set early on.

A sense of vibrancy led by the “energetic Dean Rudy Lamone” and a core of high-quality faculty inspired Michael O. Ball to join the University of Maryland’s College of Business and Management faculty in 1978. Looking back,  he wouldn’t have made any other choice.

Prabhudev Konana Is Leading with Purpose A stranger’s incredible act of generosity charted the trajectory of Maryland Smith Dean Prabhudev Konana’s life. It made him see the impact one person can have and it set the course for his life and career. And it happened 80 years ago, before Konana was even born.

Michael Faulkender’s career in finance has been a pursuit of answers to age-old questions: Why are economic decisions made the way they are and how we can make them better? The longtime Maryland Smith finance professor has dedicated his educational and professional career to searching for those answers.

Maryland Smith’s Neta Moye says her career path hasn’t exactly been linear, but it has had what she calls her “red thread” running through it, connecting her experiences together, like the ancient Chinese legend of an invisible thread intertwining fate.

For Gary Bulmash being in the right place at the right time was the catalyst of his decades-long teaching career. The Maryland Smith professor, who began teaching at the school in the late 1960s while studying in the doctoral program, got his start when a faculty member was hospitalized and sidelined for an entire semester. Bulmash knew he had found his calling.

What does computer science have to do with business school? A lot, says Louiqa Raschid, professor of information systems at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “If you go back a long time, business schools tended to be where certain technology areas started,” she says. “If you look at origins of data management, that was also very mathematically driven from optimization.”

Ritu Agarwal’s career in academia is more than a job. To her, it’s a calling and a chance to make a positive impact on the world. Since the earliest days of her career, Agarwal’s mission has been clear: finding the ways that education and technology can be used to solve big societal problems. It’s the reason why, six months into her first job after finishing her MBA with a specialization in information systems and development in India, she knew where she needed to be.

Adams Steven’s career began with a test. “In countries like Sierra Leone, you don’t really choose where you work, but you hope you get the job,” he says. “It’s not uncommon to see people with, say, physics degrees, working with you.” In his case, he had an economics degree. He took an exam which earned him employment at shipping giant Maersk, in his home country of Sierra Leone. Soon after, he was immersed in supply chain management, managing the complex web of shipping and port operations for the company. And he realized how much he enjoyed it.

Lemma Senbet’s finance career was launched by a queue. He was waiting to register at Addis Ababa University with hopes of getting into the engineering school. But then he noticed another line, an even longer one, forming. He asked someone what it was for, and that person said that a consortium of universities started a new business school.