Sarah Mazur addresses incoming students at a START session July 13.
START sessions aimed at helping new students, both transfers and freshmen, make a smooth transition toward the College of Business in fall 2015 are under way and will continue periodically throughout August, with a final session scheduled for late September.
A group of about 50, students and parents alike, filed into Austin Hall’s Stirek Auditorium for one of the sessions on Monday, July 13. Advisors Daniel Schwab and Sarah Mazur briefed the audience on a wide range of topics ranging from core requirements to academic honesty to the importance of networking – an overview of everything a new student needs to know to be successful in the College of Business.
“This makes me feel more focused, more ready,” said freshman to be Sarah Ryner of Oregon City, who’s interested in entrepreneurship. “I’m excited.”
Ryner was accompanied by her sister Rachael, a junior majoring in microbiology.
“I’m playing the role of parent today,” Rachael joked.
The rest of the START sessions are scheduled for July 21 and 24, Aug. 24 and 26, and Sept. 21. The July 21 and Aug. 24 sessions are aimed at freshmen, the July 24 and Aug. 26 ones are geared for transfer students, and the final one is a catch-all.
For more information, visit the advising office, 122 Austin Hall, or call 541-737-3716.
Nine students majoring in either apparel design or merchandising management spent six days in New York last month, earning two senior-level credits apiece while touring and analyzing various locales in the hub of the fashion world.
“The trip was incredible,” said advisor Allison Ramsing, who accompanied the students. “I went on a study tour in ’08 as a student, so to go on the instructor side was incredible. The city has changed a ton; there are always new things happening in the fashion industry.”
The students – Lu Lu, Ruochen Huang, Duncan Miller, Monica Nguyen, Yin Hung, Shelby Dodrill, Gabrielle Palazuelos, Marie Recine and Meagan Amos – went on “educational shopping trips” to the flagship stores of three retailers: Urban Outfitters, Forever 21 and Brooks Brothers.
“They’d go into the store and see how many markdowns there were, how much product there was, what was the fitting room like, how long the line was,” Ramsing said, ticking off just a few of the more than three dozen study questions the students had to answer as part of their store-experience analyses.
Other parts of the coursework included keeping a reflective journal, doing a portfolio page, and following up with and writing thank-yous to each company the students interacted with – Tiger J, Kleinfeld Bridal, Ross Stores, JPMA Global, Wanderlust Girls, Tuleste Market, CHF Industries, Fashion Snoops, Maran Inc./Squeeze Jeans, Mood Designer Fabrics, Macy’s, Kenneth D. King and Tibi, in addition to the three stores previously mentioned.
The group trip to New York has been an “every other summer” offering for apparel design and merchandising management students “for quite a few years,” Ramsing said.
The advisor shared some of her favorite student comments from the trip in a presentation to her colleagues after returning home:
“Just knowing that there are possibilities in New York City has expanded my thoughts on what I am able to do in the future.”
“So thankful for all of the people I’ve met, and the bonds I made with the people on this trip will last a lifetime.”
“Overall this experience has been eye-opening for a lot of jobs in the industry.”
Jeremy Banka affixes lettering to the wall of the display area at the Autzen House.
Sometime this summer, drop by the Autzen House, home of the OSU Center for the Humanities, and check out the collection of Occupy Movement posters from around the world put together by Andrea Marks, a graphic design professor, and one of her students, freshman Jeremy Banka.
Inside the exhibit room at the Autzen House, 811 S.W. Jefferson Ave., are 30 posters selected by Marks and Banka; the works on display are a small part of the Occuprint collection viewable at occuprint.org.
“The posters were chosen for their visual variety and cleverness in communication,” Marks said.
Banka designed the typeface, which he named Ergata, used on the various pieces of text that accompany the posters.
“There is no better visual artifact to record history than the poster,” the professor said. “Protest posters give the viewer a snapshot into a country’s political and social history.”
The poster project stems from a Center for Humanities Grant that Marks received in 2012. The posters will be on display through mid-September; viewing is free.
MBA candidates take their seats before the graduation ceremony in Stirek Auditorium.
Eighty-eight students representing eight nations were recognized June 13 for having completed their MBA studies during the 2014-15 school year. The Oregon State MBA program features eight different tracks, and the graduation ceremony honored students from all eight: research thesis, commercialization, business analytics, marketing, accountancy, wealth management, global operations and executive leadership.
Prior to the ceremony, six MBA graduates one other College of Business student were inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, an international honor society serving schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The inductees were Sinae Cho, Casey Miller, Yuriy Mikitchenko, Gary Phibbs, Kevin Russell, Halley Todd, and Phil Walter.
Erick Frack, president of Katapult Partners, LLC, and a 1981 College of Business graduate, delivered the keynote address at the MBA graduation ceremony. Frack’s talk centered around leadership, which he believes centers around caring about other people and listening to them.
“Your ability to show yourself as a good leader will help you more than anything,” Frack said.
Three of the MBA graduates also addressed the audience: Perren Baker (business analytics), Feng Qiu (research thesis) and Lauren West (commercialization). Baker urged his cohort to strive for a work/life balance, Feng talked about the challenges of being an international student while thanking his major professor, Keith Leavitt, for changing his life, and West told her fellow graduates, “When opportunity comes knocking, always say yes.”
The ceremony also recognized Grace Berczel, Casey Miller, Thomas Nguyen, Sara Kelley and Dan McCain for completing their combined doctor of pharmacy/MBA degree.
Following the 75-minute program, graduates and their guests repaired to Austin Hall’s third floor for a reception.
It was the second celebratory event of the day at Austin Hall, which in the afternoon hosted an outdoor reception for the College of Business’ newest bachelor’s degree recipients and their families and friends. Each of the 753 graduating seniors who stopped by received a COB business card holder as a gift from the college, and the event also included a photo booth and a group picture of all of the graduates on hand.
Associate dean Jim Coakley, right, congratulates MBA graduate Ryan Perry.
Proposed logo for Western Washington football team.
Branding a college football team.
Integrating individuals’ compostable household waste into a green network that includes a community garden.
Building a campaign for an ongoing food drive by encouraging, via a popular online comic strip, grocery consumers to purchase “Just One More” item to continually bolster food banks.
Putting together apps to help you shop, cook and travel more enjoyably and efficiently.
Creating tools to keep young girls out of the sex trade, and to extricate them if they’re already there.
Those were just a handful of the roughly two dozen capstone projects on display June 3 in the Robert Family Events Room as graduating seniors in graphic design showcased and talked about the signature works of their academic careers in the College of Business.
The two-hour reception featured a steady bustle of students, faculty, staff and parents, all of whom could view the design work the students had put together and also hear them talk about the projects one on one.
The crowd included various business and design faculty, Dean Ilene Kleinsorge and community members such as Kari Rieck, the executive director for Court Appointed Special Advocates of Benton County. An interview with Rieck was part of the research conducted by student Chloie Parsons, whose work involved branding for nonprofits.
Project topics varied widely. Kevin Bradley’s focused on how to brand a college football team, specifically the one at Western Washington University in Bellingham. The university dropped football several years ago, but if it opts to restore the sport, it could do worse than to lean on the efforts of Bradley, who designed and prototyped everything from game schedules to decals to fan gear to team helmets.
Bradley’s premise is that strong branding leads to potent recruiting and an overall successful program.
He chose the topic simply because he’s passionate about college football. Professor Andrea Marks encourages students embarking on the two-term projects to begin by picking something that truly excites them – that’s the thesis stage – and then branching into considering the design aspects of what they’re doing later as the work progresses.
Marks marveled at the work of the 2015 graphic design cohort, and of OSU graphic design students in general.
“Their interest never wanes,” she said. “Our graphic design graduates go to work in graphic design; they’re not just getting a degree.”
Students Jasmine Hart, left, and Alyssa Johnson, center, visit with professor Andrea Marks.
Sakura Hamada addresses the audience during “Japan Matters.”
Planning to do business with a Japanese person?
Then among other skills, you better learn the proper way to hang up a land-line telephone.
That was one of the lessons May 8 during “Japan Matters,” a presentation at Austin Hall co-sponsored by the College of Business, Oregon State’s Japanese Student Association and INTO OSU, which helps international students make smooth transitions into the local culture after they arrive in Corvallis.
Among the speakers was Yosuke Masuda, a graduate student and kengido instructor at Oregon State; kengido is a Samurai-based combination of martial arts and performing arts.
Masuda, who holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Yokohama National University, explained to the audience of two dozen the wrong way and the right ways to hang up a phone if you’re interested in showing respect to the person on the other end of the line.
Wrong way: Set the receiver down noisily.
Right ways: Replace it quietly, depress the hang-up button with a finger, or wait for the other person to get off the line before putting the receiver back in place.
Masuda also described proper etiquette for the exchange of business cards: Bow, hold the car with two hands and so the writing is right-side-up to the recipient, and, if the recipient is also trying to give you his business card, try to get your card below his. This double exchange, Masuda admitted, can be awkward as each attempts to get his card under the other, but somehow it works out.
“In general people in Japan pay more attention to the respect of others compared to the U.S. or other countries,” Masuda said.
Masuda also noted that in Japan, people making each other’s acquaintance don’t shake hands but rather just bow and exchange business cards.
He added that the U.S. features more workplace gender equality than Japan, and a somewhat less driven workforce; in his country, he said, it’s not uncommon for workers to sleep in their offices.
Danielle Lucia and Gabe Fleck talk about their Northwest Trek product line of hiking accessories.
Cooperation, creativity and the art of building a bridge from the historical to the modern all come together for students in Christine Gallagher’s DHE 360 class, Collaborative Studio.
The course is designed to examine a variety of collaborative methodologies and situations; students work across design disciplines to complete various and complicated projects.
Exemplifying that mission is a roughly two-week undertaking that saw three- and four-person teams draw inspiration from historical textiles to create product lines based on those fabrics and what they learned about and from them; the lines had to include at least one prototype.
The vintage pieces at the core of the project are part of the School of Design and Human Environment’s Historic & Cultural Textile and Apparel Collection.
As the project description explains, the collection “was started in the 1940s through the efforts of several professors in the Department of Clothing, Textiles, and Related Arts in the School of Home Economics. The collection … consists of Euro-American apparel, non-Euro-American cultural textiles and cultural apparel but also includes fabric samples, tapestry fragments, and accessories from many cultures. While the bulk of the entire collection is from the 19th and 20th century, there is cultural wear, textiles and textile fragments from the 15th, 17th, and 18th centuries.”
Among the items the student teams used as their creative muses were a civil rank badge from China’s Ch’ing Dynasty, a navy wool bathing suit, embroidered silk, a Guatemalan huipil, a tent coat and a skirt suit. The product lines those artifacts spawned were “conceptually rich and very interesting,” Gallagher told her students following their class presentations.
Examples:
Pacific Picnic, a “modern beach experience” inspired by the wool swimsuit; products included the Nautical Napkin and the Beach Basket.
The Bodhi Meditation Line, a set of home goods designed to foster meditation, such as a specialized lamp and floor mat; the civil rank badge led to this line’s creation.
Northwest Trek, a collection of hiking accessories (boots, field journal, picnic blanket) inspired by the huipil.
Chambri, a coffee shop and related products aimed at women seeking a break from day-to-day life; the Chambri are a woman-dominated tribe in Papua New Guinea, and the company and products were inspired by the tent coat of the 1960s, a time when women were beginning to enjoy new freedoms in American society.
Gallagher teaches two sections of Collaborative Studio, and the product lines developed by both will be reviewed by jurors for an exhibit that will be presented alongside the SDHE’s annual Spring Fashion Show on May 30.
Jessica Hammock and Cameron Lambert describe Chambri, a coffee shop by and for the modern woman.
Austin Hall hosted a display of design students’ work May 1.
Jordan Clausen and her parents, Troy and Malissa Clausen of Salem, were among the happy throng of design students and their mothers and fathers on hand May 1 at Austin Hall.
“This is a great school for her,” Troy said of his daughter, who was among the honorees being recognized at the afternoon reception.
Jordan, a junior, is one of 19 recipients of a Cecelia T. Shuttle Worth Scholarship.
In all, some five dozen students in merchandising management and apparel, interior and graphic design were honored with various scholarships and awards during the event – recognition for their teaching, research, scholarship, creativity and overall excellence.
Among the honorees are five students selected as School of Design and Human Environment All-Stars: Ashtin Crawford, Lauren Davis, Eliot Frack, Haley Lillybridge and Sara Winick-Brown.
The event, which helped kick off Mom’s Weekend on the OSU campus, included a gallery of work by design students in multiple disciplines.
“This is so much fun,” textiles instructor Brigitte Cluver said as she toured the exhibits. “I never get to see what the other classes are doing.”
Design students Sarah Wilson, left, Sydney Juell and Brendan Spencer.
A culture built around honesty, commitment, passion, innovation, inspiration, teamwork, empowerment and student engagement has earned adidas this year’s Distinguished Business Partner award.
That culture is in sync with that of the College of Business, adidas executive Nic Vu said.
“The professors and other educators focus on placement,” said Vu, a senior vice president and a 1995 College of Business graduate who spearheaded his company’s partnership with the college. “College of Business students are very well versed in team dynamics, group projects and results orientation, and they’re open to learning.
“I work with lot of Ph.D.’s and consultants who have master’s, MBAs, whatever, and they don’t have all of that packaged together as well as some of the undergrads I see coming out of Oregon State,” he said. “That’s a compliment to the dean and all the educators at Oregon State.”
Beavers who have joined Vu at adidas have taken note of a supportive environment that mirrors that of the college that prepared them to launch their careers.
“The College of Business stresses networking and adidas allows recent grads to take networking to an entirely new level,” said OSU senior Jacob Knightley, who’s majoring in finance and business information systems and works 30 hours a week for adidas’ finance reporting team.
“All managers — junior, senior and above — are extremely approachable and will take time out of their day to talk with you. My CFO walks around and talks with everybody on a first-name basis and will make the effort to learn your name as soon as possible.”
Knightley said he and others consider the adidas culture to be an extension of their university life.
“We make sure our work is getting completed to the best degree, but we have fun while we do it,” he said. “Adidas benefits (from the College of Business partnership) by getting great local talent who bring new and fresh ideas about how to win in America, and the college benefits by having a local company that loves to recruit local talent.”
Adidas will be honored May 11 in Portland at the college’s annual Celebration of Excellence, along with the rest of the 2015 award winners as well as retiring Dean Ilene Kleinsorge.
The evening begins with a reception at 5:30 p.m., followed by dinner and the awards presentation. For more information or to register, contact Elsa Frey at elsa.frey@oregonstate.edu or call 541-737-6648, or register online at http://business.oregonstate.edu/awards.
Nathan Fuller delivers his winning Shark Tank presentation
Nathan Fuller and his startup, Fused Machines, took the top prize April 24 at the Civil War Shark Tank at Austin Hall.
The event, sponsored by the Austin Entrepreneurship Program, included three startup companies from Oregon State and two from the University of Oregon, and the evening also featured an Elevator Pitch competition open to any student with a business idea he or she wanted to present to a panel of judges.
Fuller, a junior studying mechanical engineering, has developed a CNC tool head designed to improve the performance of 3-D printers. His first-place finish earns his company a $1,000 prize and entry into the Willamette Angel Conference scheduled for May 15 at the CH2M HILL Alumni Center on the OSU campus. At the conference, startups compete for seed funding.
Placing second at the Civil War Shark Tank and earning $500 was another Beaver entry, Steady Budget (http://steadybudget.com/). OSU computer science students Chris Vlessis and David Teofilovic are company cofounders along with CEO Jon Davis. Vlessis is chief technical officer and Teofilovic chief information officer of the company, which aims to provide a software budgetary solution for pay-per-click advertising analysts. Another OSU student, marketing major Dominique Catabay, is Steady Budget’s financial manager.
The third Oregon State entry in the Shark Tank was Sona, a company whose founders include business administration major Kristin Johannes, prebusiness student Jacob Harvey and chemical engineering major Jacob Lum. Sona, whose product is a crowdsourcing disc-jockey app, was the people’s choice winner – the top vote-getter in balloting among the roughly 150 people in the audience. The company’s motto is, “It’s your music, it’s your persona,” and its app lets attendees at a party cue up their favorite tunes on the event’s sound system.
The UO startups in the Shark Tank were consulting company Smarter Marketing and used-clothing-exchange network ThriftSwap.
In the Elevator Pitch contest, which kicked off the evening, 11 students presented their business ideas and leading a top-two OSU sweep was Steven Miller, whose proposal was ConnectMD, a televideo medical consultation service.
Placing second was Miranda Crowell (who pitched Asian carp as food and fertilizer), and tying for third were EJ Albaugh (monthly healthcare service), Katie Breeden (schedule-organizing consultancy for students) and Steve Gessling (an app for learning which beers are on tap and where to find them). Breeden is from the University of Oregon and the other two are OSU students.
The Elevator Pitch winner received $250, the runner-up earned $100, and the third-place finishers each won $50.
