For Michael Kimbrough, accounting isn’t just about balance sheets. It’s about telling a company’s story. “There is a sort of level of creativity you have to have in order to do well, because there are certain objectives you’re trying to meet in an audit,” he says. For example, coming up with evidence on a financial statement line item that the client might not have on hand, and then actually writing the story in the form of a memo explaining the analysis and conclusion.

What does poetry have to do with business? That’s what the finance team asked when David Kressler, fresh out of graduate school with a doctorate in English lit and poetry, showed up to the finance committee meeting of the executive board on his first day on the job at Ford Motor Co.

For someone who teaches about taking risks and managing risk, Clifford Rossi, PhD, considers his own career fairly risk-averse. From the federal government, to government-sponsored enterprises, to financial powerhouses, Rossi’s career went from safe grounds to less career-stable institutions. However, he says, “there is a logical sequence to this career path, now looking back.”

Oliver Schlake has been teaching innovation since age 17, when he was tapped by his local community college in Germany to create a computer science program from scratch. In the early days of home computers, Schlake became one of the youngest professors in Germany. “I built the computer science program, because there was nobody else with that skillset,” Schlake says. “I was running the show for several years.” 

Finance professor David Kass first looked at the New York Times’ business section at age 12. Like many boys, he was mostly interested in the sports articles. He became invested, literally, when his grandfather gave him his first stock: Long Island Lighting. He had five shares at $20 per share of this electric utility. All of a sudden, Kass wanted to follow the market.

In classes taught by Shreevardhan Lele at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, lines blur between business strategy and philosophical dilemmas, and that’s the way his students prefer it. From security strategy to history to law — Lele imparts critical decision making skills that apply to many fields. “He has this knowledge about history, philosophy and politics that makes our experience in the class extremely rich,” says Ryan French, a second-year MBA student at Maryland Smith.

If you could make a Venn diagram of international beauty pageant winners and business doctorates, there wouldn’t be much overlap. In fact, Niratcha “Grace” Tungtisanont at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business says she is the only professor among her old competition friends in the Miss Thailand 2011 pageant. But this unusual career path helped answer her biggest research questions: How do you recover from a flood? Does citizen participation matter to post-flood recovery?

Demand for luxury goods exploded only recently in the 20th century, when consumers worldwide started paying for upscale items like Gucci flip-flops, Coach bags and Versace sunglasses. Yajin Wang, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, explores the expansion of exclusive brands in her research. But she takes a long view that stretches to ancient times.

Finance students have a place to go to practice their skills and test ideas at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Study groups huddle in the faculty office of M. Cecilia Bustamante, winner of the 2018 Allen J. Krowe Award for Teaching Excellence. Some students sit on a sofa facing Bustamante’s desk, while others work on a large whiteboard filled with graphs and equations.

Passion for math and science led Russell Wermers to a career in chemical engineering. His transition to finance came later, when he enrolled in an MBA program and discovered the need for quantitative rigor in a frontier industry with high potential for innovation.