For Alejandro Smith ’18, MBA ’23, broadening his horizons has always been at the core of his decisions. “I am a first-generation college graduate,” Smith says. “It has always been a passion of mine to pursue higher education to set a good example for my family. Coming back for my MBA made sense.”

It was September 2021 and Ayelette Halbfinger ’23, was struggling. “I suffer from hearing loss and have since I was a little kid,” she says. “However, I never really felt like I needed academic accommodation until I was thrown into an environment where everyone in class was wearing a mask and microphones weren’t working all the time.” Halbfinger, now a senior finance and operations management and business analytics major, says her studies suffered.

“I feel like for a human being, it’s really hard to be in the middle.” That’s what Ksenia Popovich says about being a Russian citizen of Ukrainian descent, as a war between the two countries continues.

Oscar Casasola ’24 is working toward obtaining his finance, marketing and management degrees, but his career as a social media influencer is already off to the races.

I wanted to be at Smith since it’s a hardworking, collaborative environment where all students and faculty are committed to the success of one another.

Ilan Orgel has always had an entrepreneurial drive – and a sense of style. Before coming to the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School and beginning his finance degree, Orgel lived in New York, where he’d often wait in long, early morning lines to buy sneakers he would later resell at a profit.

He’s just a semester into his college career at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, but freshman Michael Zhao already knows exactly what he wants to do for the rest of his life – use a finance and computer science education to make the world a better place.

For undergrad Alexia Ayuk ’23, advocating for the less fortunate and serving as a changemaker have always been top priorities. The Maryland Smith junior, studying operations management and business analytics, is president of the Smith Undergraduate Student Association. She helped launch Smith’s Inclusion, Accountability and Oversight Coalition, which holds school leaders to the practices of diversity and inclusion.

Lee-Ellen Myles believes businesses are ideally positioned to leverage their influence to make impactful change. It’s a belief that has been validated in her coursework at UMD and Maryland Smith, and during her 2021 summer internship with Council Fire, a consulting firm that works to help purpose-driven organizations thrive by creating lasting economic, social and environmental value.

Octavia Davis couldn’t picture herself going to college right after high school. She hadn’t yet decided what she wanted to do with her life, with her career. Joining the military, she thought, would give her time to decide what she wanted, while giving her a rich, worldly experience.