Smith undergraduates Kirk Morris and Hamza Choudery both landed dream internships in summer 2015 with Facebook. The current juniors will return to the social networking giant this summer for another internship as part of the 37-person inaugural cohort of the two-year Facebook University for Business program. Morris says the environment and culture at Facebook truly reflect the company’s mission: To make the world more open and connected. He and Choudery rave about the experience of working closely with Facebook employees on impactful projects.

Project manager Chau Hegg, OMBA ’15, knew her Smith School online MBA program would be challenging. But she got an extra surprise during the first week of classes. “Right after the opening residency, I came home and discovered I was pregnant,” says Hegg, who also has undergraduate and graduate degrees in industrial engineering.

Former New York prosecutor Michael-Sean Spence ’04 could have hammered the owner of an auto repair and body shop in April 2014. The paper trail pointed to under reporting of close to $1 million in income from various insurance companies, and the Queens District Attorney's Office had a case for full restitution and incarceration.

Nearly 850 alumni, faculty and staff gathered Dec. 18, 2015, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the holidays. It was the largest turnout for the Smith School’s annual Alumni Holiday Gala, now in its third year. Of the attendees, 50 percent were returning alumni, with graduates from 1965 through 2015 represented.

When Maj. Vickee Wolcott, PhD ’15, arrived at the Smith School to work toward a doctoral degree, she had to hit the ground running. The Army was paying for the degree, and it allows soldiers only three years to complete what takes other students four or five years, or longer, to accomplish. “Basically, every class assignment, every paper I wrote worked its way into my dissertation,” she says.  

’50s King Leatherbury ’56 was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame, with a career record of over 6,000 victories. Ed Snider ’55 received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Global Sports Summit. ’70s Dalbert Ginsberg ’76 has been elected Chair of the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation. Harvey Goodman ’77, SPPA, president and CEO of Goodman-Gable-Gould/Adjusters International, was named the National Association of Public Insurance Adjusters “Person of the Year.”

More than 10,000 Smith School graduates live and work in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, and now they have an alumni chapter to help them connect with one other. The initiative came about from a push by Smith alumni working with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, which has focused in recent months on engaging more regional alumni. The school already has active alumni chapters in New York and Baltimore. But with so many graduates living and working in the D.C. region, it made sense to extend Smith’s alumni outreach.

New technologies and employer expectations are pressuring traditional colleges to innovate instruction. Despite predictions of higher education disruption, “smart and agile institutions will respond and even thrive alongside new competitors in this changing environment,” says Sandra Loughlin, Smith School’s director of learning and innovative instruction, the Office of Transformational Learning.

More than $100,000 will be on the line in “Cupid’s Cup 2.0,” an expanded version of the 11-year-old entrepreneurship competition led by Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank ’96.

The Smith School will celebrate its fifth annual Women Leading Women event with a panel discussion featuring the four previous honorees, who will all return to campus in spring 2016. Joyce Russell, Smith’s senior associate dean of learning, will moderate the discussion on women in leadership roles.