Thomas Corsi’s faculty office has that homey look of someone who has really settled in. Decorations include framed watercolors of trainyards that his father painted, a University of Maryland logo an aunt cross-stitched, and sports posters from his hometown Cleveland teams. One poster shows the starting lineup of the 1949 Indians, “the year I was born,” Corsi says. Then there is the collection of miniature semi-tractor trailers and freight trains, fitting for a guy who has made his career studying the trucking industry, logistics and supply chains.

Recalling his early years in northern New Jersey, Joseph P. Bailey describes a teen wearing gold chains, a mullet haircut and plotting for a career to make a lot of money. “I blended right in to the 1980s cultural scenery,” he says.

Social media did not exist when Wendy W. Moe transitioned from business to academia. She first heard about sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook from her MBA students at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business when she arrived in 2004.

A lot can happen in 100 milliseconds. Research from Michel Wedel at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows that people may glance at online ads and look away in less than a blink.

Life’s unexpected and often rewarding turns are manifested in Rebecca Hann’s path to becoming a professor. Growing up in Hong Kong, she wanted to be a teacher. “I admired my good teachers — they loved what they did and they had a way to change the way you think about things,” she says. That impression inspired her in high school. “I tutored students to earn my allowance, but I always enjoyed it. It was gratifying when the student I helped had a light bulb moment." 

Wall Street traders play for higher stakes than Monopoly rivals collecting plastic houses and fake money. But finance professor Albert “Pete” Kyle, author of landmark research on market microstructure, sees both activities as examples of games. As a child growing up in Memphis, Tenn., Kyle enjoyed strategy games like checkers, chess, poker and bridge — especially when winning required a degree of speculation. He also enjoyed market simulations like Monopoly.

Teaching started as an act of defiance more than a career choice for Rajshree Agarwal, the Rudolph P. Lamone Chair and Professor in Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “I grew up in a traditional Indian family,” Agarwal says. “Along with the promise of an arranged marriage came the expectation that I would never work outside the home.”

In the year after graduating with her PhD, in what was financially a lean time, Margrét Bjarnadóttir and her husband decided to buy a new Macbook Pro to replace their aging one. It was a big purchase, and Bjarnadóttir, an expert in data-driven decision-making who would later come to work at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, was determined to make the smartest decision possible.

Henry C. Boyd III was just a kindergartner, living on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, Japan, when he began to grasp the importance of education.

Strict enforcement of the law sometimes rewards dirty-dealing and hypocrisy, which bothered T. Leigh Anenson as a business litigator. Her new book, Judging Equity: The Fusion of Unclean Hands in U.S. Law (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores a safety valve in the legal system designed to correct injustice.