Katelin Bliss and Toby in the courtyard north of Austin Hall.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the popular Humans of New York blog in which a photographer roams the city collecting life-story summaries of people he meets. His work is fascinating and often deeply moving as his subjects share what they consider to be some of the most significant aspects of their lives.
Inspired by his efforts and his subjects’ photos and stories, we’ve decided to launch our own version of the project, which we’re calling REAL People of the College of Business.
Our weekly series starts today with Katelin Bliss, a final-term senior in finance. Katelin grew up in Salem, attended high school at Western Mennonite, relies on service dog Toby to monitor her blood sugar (Katelin is diabetic, and Toby’s nose detects when her blood sugar is too high), and spent a year midway through her college education to teach in India.
Here’s more of her story, in her own words:
“I chose the College of Business because I am really organized person and I love numbers. I figured a finance degree would be the best opportunity to organize numbers. The COB has been an amazing experience. All my teachers have helped me tremendously understand the classwork and have encouraged me through the ups and downs of college, along with my fears of what comes after college. My passion is to assist people in seeing their worth and value in a harsh world.”
If you’re interested in being featured as one of the REAL People of the College of Business, please email Steve Lundeberg or come see him in Austin Hall 384D.
Without Toby to watch out for her, Katelin wouldn’t have been able to attend Oregon State.To Katelin, the Abacus sculpture is a fitting representation of the COB; she chose the college because she loves numbers.
The seven have studied at institutions around the globe and bring a wide range of academic and other types of professional experience and expertise to the college.
If you see them in Austin Hall or elsewhere on campus, please greet and welcome them and let them know they made the right choice in seeking to be a part of Oregon State and the College of Business.
OSIG members with Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman.
Eight of the top-performing analysts from the Oregon State Investment Group, a College of Business club aimed at finance majors but open to anyone interested in investing, spent a week in New York in early September.
“The goal is for OSIG members to get out and network with alumni on Wall Street, and at other firms willing to host us,” said club president Blake Hendricks, who made the annual trip for the second time. “We have so much appreciation for alumni willing to meet with us, take the time to help us get our foot in the door. One of our alums, Matt Derr at Credit Suisse, he brought in a recruiter who gave us a whole presentation on how to get a job.”
In addition to connecting with alumni, a highlight of the trip was meeting Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group. With a net worth of roughly $11.6 billion, Schwarzman, known as the king of private equity, is tied with Rupert Murdoch at No. 38 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.
“He was a very outgoing guy and gave great insight on what private equity is like,” said Erik Paige, an OSIG portfolio manager who took part in the club outing to New York for the first time. “He said he’s not a technical guy, he’s a big-picture guy, and he always tries to surround himself with the smartest guys in the room. It was really interesting for me – he’s the first billionaire I’ve ever met.
“Being on the floor of the stock exchange was really cool as well,” Paige said. “My impression going in, from the movies, was that there’d be a lot of yelling and people crammed into one space, but actually, there aren’t that many people.”
Hendricks, like Paige a senior finance major, noted the “very broad scope of finance” the OSIG members were able to absorb in New York, including economic research (at Strategas Research Partners), private wealth management (U.S. Trust) and corporate finance (Google).
“Talking to the executives, it puts everything you learn in theory into reality,” he said.
Andrea Anthony, assistant professor of finance, accompanied the group.
“The students really came prepared with interesting questions and unique perspectives,” she said. “They presented themselves professionally and I think strengthened the name of Oregon State University at the firms that we visited.”
OSIG members and Prof. Andrea Anthony with the Bowling Green Bull, a statue in New York’s financial district. A bull is the symbol of financial optimism.
An advertising agency owned and operated by a 1999 OSU design graduate will spearhead a new marketing and branding campaign by Oregon State University Athletics.
Watson Creative has signed on to produce materials for digital, print, radio and outdoor campaigns for Beaver teams in five sports: football, basketball, baseball, gymnastics and wrestling. The company’s president is Oregon State graduate Matt Watson, a former longtime designer at Nike.
The Oregonian reported on the partnership last month.
Stonehill Exchange students line up for a group photo.
The Vue in Corvallis last Friday was the site of a pair of welcome to the College of Business events for two groups of students.
First, a late-afternoon reception was held in honor of the international students enrolled at Oregon State this term through the Arthur Stonehill International Exchange Program.
The Stonehill program is a 30-year partnership that originally featured OSU, a university in Denmark and another in Australia. Named for the College of Business professor emeritus who spearheaded its creation, the program now includes a dozen institutions outside the U.S.; those are the schools where Friday afternoon’s guests of honor study when not taking classes overseas.
Following the Stonehill gathering was a welcome reception for new MBA students.
The MBA program features seven tracks on campus — accountancy, business analytics, commercialization, global operations, marketing, research thesis and wealth management — plus an online/Portland hybrid format through which executive leadership and business analytics can be studied.
On a sun-drenched afternoon already full of good cheer and start-of-the-school-year enthusiasm, Kelsey Walker of Philomath received an extra boost Wednesday afternoon when Dean Mitzi Montoya announced her as the grand-prize winner of the annual College of Business Popcorn Social’s taste-test contest.
Walker, a sophomore transfer from Linn-Benton Community College, was the only contest entrant to correctly identify all four flavors used to enliven the popcorn offerings: Coffee, dill, ketchup and pumpkin pie.
Her prize: an iPad mini.
“This is quite a welcome,” she said. “More than a welcome.”
Walker was joined by dozens of her fellow first-year COB students – of whom there are more than 600 – as well as college faculty and staff on Austin Hall’s north plaza for an hour of refreshments, mingling and games.
This school year, which starts Thursday, marks the college’s second year in Austin Hall. Austin’s neighbor to the north, the Learning Innovation Center classroom building, makes its debut Thursday; together LInC and Austin combine for arguably the most technologically integrated, innovatively designed, collaboration-focused 1-2 punch on the OSU campus.
After announcing Walker’s victory, Montoya wished all of the incoming students well on their first day of class at Oregon State and looked forward to the college helping them join the ranks of Beaver alumni “in the very near future.”
State Sen. Richard Devlin was so impressed by Oregon State’s new Learning Innovation Center, Austin Hall’s new neighbor to the north, that “it actually makes me want to come back.”
“I’d like to get that degree in history I always wanted, that degree in English literature,” said the lawmaker, one of many speakers Sept. 22 during grand opening ceremonies for the LInC, a 134,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art classroom building.
LInC features 2,300 seats of formal teaching space and another 640 seats in student-directed informal learning areas. The $65 million project, paid for by a mix of state funds and out-of-state tuition dollars, is intended to serve every academic department on campus and is the new headquarters for the University Honors College.
Cassie Huber, president of the Associated Students of OSU, said, “Everyone I know has been talking about attending classes in this building.” Two of LInC’s classrooms are in-the-round style, one with a capacity of 600, the other 300. There’s also the curved Parliament Room, which was inspired by the layout of the British House of Commons and seats 175 more.
Classrooms were designed with collaboration and active learning in mind, allowing lecturers to easily roam and engage students directly.
Devlin noted that when considering requests for funding, he and his fellow legislators always think in terms of will it pay back more than it costs.
“The tens of thousands of students who will pass through this building will provide an excellent return for generations to come,” he said.
Oregon State’s student body president was among the speakers.
University Day 2015 had a decidedly College of Business flavor as COB members collected two of Oregon State’s highest honors during the awards presentation part of an all-day program Sept. 21 at the LaSells Stewart Center, Reser Stadium and the CH2M HILL Alumni Center.
Sandy Neubaum, Dale McCauley, Lauren Caruso and Vaerine Bauder accepted the Student Learning and Success Teamwork Award on behalf of the college’s Austin Entrepreneurship Program.
And Malcolm LeMay picked up the OSU Professional Faculty Excellence Award.
Neubaum is the AEP director, while McCauley serves as program manager, Caruso is civic engagement coordinator, and Bauder is an office specialist. Headquartered in the Weatherford Residential College, where roughly 400 budding entrepreneurs live each year, the AEP’s multifaceted mission includes outreach in the form of financial literacy education and social entrepreneurship, including a summer 2015 student trip to Uganda.
LeMay becomes the 22nd winner of a Professional Faculty award that dates to 1992. The COB’s director of operations, LeMay oversees both long-range administrative projects in the dean’s office and the college’s day-to-day operations. A former Marine Corps aviator, he was instrumental in organizing the college’s move from Bexell Hall to Austin Hall – which opened exactly one year prior to the day he received his award.
The honors for LeMay and the AEP were part of a full day of recognition and addresses, including remarks by OSU President Ed Ray, to kick off the 2015-16 school year.
Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, delivered the keynote address, titled “Aiming Higher Education at Great Jobs and Great Lives.”
Busteed noted how surveys of academic officers indicate a strong belief that universities are producing graduates ready for the work force, but similar surveys of employers and the general public show something entirely different. He also talked about how university mission statements, of which he has read more than 1,000 – “It’s a terrible hobby to have,” he joked – love to talk about goals such as instilling critical-thinking skills but uniformly avoid wording related to trying to place graduates in terrific jobs.
Busteed also focused on the topic of well-being and its impact on everything from on-the-job productivity to the need for medical care (the more well-being you have, the more productive you are and the less health care you need, research has shown). Given those sorts of factors, Busteed pointed out, well-being isn’t just something that’s nice for employees to experience, it’s economically vital.
Gallup uses survey methodology that breaks well-being into five types: Purpose, social, financial, community and physical. Especially with what’s at stake beyond simply happiness, society is best served when higher education and employers team up to help each person attain well-being in as many of those five as possible.
OSU Faculty Senate President Mike Bailey, onstage with a sign interpreter, introduces keynote speaker Brandon Busteed of Gallup Education.
Tyler Kluempke, far left, joined other students for a panel discussion last winter to talk about internships.
For 2015 marketing graduate Tyler Kluempke, when Oregon State’s football season started without him in Corvallis to cheer for the Beavers in person, that’s when it hit him that he’s part of the real world now.
The good news for the former Marketing Club president is that his first stop after the College of Business is “exactly what I wanted to get into.”
Kluempke is a sales and business development representative with Oracle, and as the school year approached in Corvallis, he was wrapping up five weeks of training – the final three at corporate headquarters in San Francisco, the first two in Boston, where Kluempke will be based.
“It’s been a crazy couple weeks to say the least,” Kluempke said Sept. 14.
In his role with Oracle, he will serve as an account manager with current cloud ERP systems clients and also try to grow revenue streams. ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, and Kluempke describes the systems as “software packages that are the essential backbone of all businesses across all industries.”
“Financial reporting, procurement, project management, everything a C-level employee needs to run a business,” he said. “My territory is the Pacific Northwest and all of western Canada, mid- to small-size businesses up to $500 million in revenue. I’ll try to generate new business, warm calling, cold calling. It’s a sales role, a killer job, exactly what I wanted to get into. I always wanted to be in the tech world.”
Kluempke said the Career Success Center in particular and the College of Business in general “really put the opportunities in place for me to learn a lot of essential material, to really excel.”
“You hear a lot of material, it’s like drinking out of a firehose, and things kind of piece together once you’re out of the school zone and in the workforce,” he said. “I went to a lot of guest speaker events and talked to executives. There were a lot of similarities in the answers when it came to people successful enough to reach upper-level management or the executive level, and it usually came down to putting your head down and just working, just doing your job. Those are simple concepts that kind of get masked in the tech world, where everyone thinks they’re going to have the next Facebook or Snapchat and it’s going to go boom overnight. They’re not paying attention to those long hours, going to the events they need to go to, going to a networking event.”
Kluempke, third from right, says his education is coming into particularly sharp focus now that he’s in the workforce.
Karl Mundorff, an entrepreneur and business development expert, has been named senior program manager for the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator/RAIN Corvallis.
“The Accelerator is key to creating an innovation culture at Oregon State and creating impact in the local economy and beyond,” said Mitzi Montoya, dean of the College of Business. “The college’s and university’s investment in creating this culture, and in assuring a pipeline for startups, is an important part of the pipeline we have for student and faculty to contribute to the entrepreneurship community.”
Mundorff most recently was the director of research programs for Oregon BEST, a state signature research center focused on developing the Cleantech economy, in which he worked with university and national laboratory technologies. He helped secure an Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership designation from the Economic Development Administration, which created an opportunity for the Pacific Northwest Manufacturing Partnership to compete for more than $1billion in new federal agency grant opportunities.
Mundorff was also president and chief executive officer of BioReaction Industries, an air pollution control technology firm, and has created and taught master’s level courses in business model generation and commercialization at Portland State University and Concordia University. He is a graduate of the OSU College of Business and holds an MBA from Concordia.
The OSU Advantage Accelerator/RAIN Corvallis, recently designated an I-Corp site, is an integral component of the Oregon Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network, or Oregon RAIN, which is a collaboration of OSU, the University of Oregon, local governments, communities and economic development agencies.
Since its launch more than two years ago, the OSU Advantage Accelerator/RAIN Corvallis has admitted 30 business startups into the program. The companies that graduated from the program have generated over $6.6 million in revenue and grants and the creation of more than 40 jobs.
