Poets&Quants’ 2024 Stories You May Have Missed

We publish a lot of stories at Poets&Quants and a lot gets missed. We get it, you’re busy people. That’s what end-of-year collections are for! So here is a group of the best stories that didn’t get the love we think they deserved. Now is your (second) chance to give it to them!

What It’s Like To Teach In A North Korean Business School

IT WAS A WEEK that had many of the elements you’d expect at a business school startup week: pitch sessions, students presenting their business models through slick PowerPoints, a venture capitalist on hand to give his two cents.

But that week in 2016 was very different for one reason: It was in Pyongyang, North Korea, and the students were pitching ideas they likely will never get to pursue, at least not for the foreseeable future.

“I still use my experience in North Korea to show some examples of teaching in extreme settings,” says Ewald Kibler, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Aalto University School of Business in Finland.

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The Tenure Project: Increasing The Number Of Black, Hispanic & Indigenous Business School Faculty

ONE THING NOTICEABLY MISSING in Zachariah Berry’s undergraduate classrooms: Professors who looked like him.

A second-generation Mexican American, Berry grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his experience often felt far different from the faculty at his small liberal arts school. As he pursued higher degrees at more elite institutions – including a PhD in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University – doubts inevitably crept in: Could he do it? Were PhDs actually possible for students like him?

Berry joined The PhD Project during his second year at Cornell. He found a community of people with similar identities and struggles and a support system to push him through. PhD in tow, he joined the faculty of University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business just a month and a half ago.

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‘Unlike Anything Anywhere In The World’: Inside Towson’s Open-To-All StarTUp Accelerator

TOWSON UNIVERSITY’S BUSINESS SCHOOL has no full-time MBA program. For aspiring entrepreneurs, what the university does offer is probably more practically — and certainly more immediately — useful.

Just off campus in the suburbs north of Baltimore, Towson’s StarTUp Accelerator is a co-working hub based in a 26,000-square-foot former National Guard building that has been retrofitted to include more than 6,000 square feet of co-working space, including six conference rooms, plus a second floor of office space. The Armory is big, it is brightly lit — and it has a Starbucks, too.

What really sets Towson’s StarTUp apart: The co-working space is free to use and open to all, not just Towson students. “I have toured dozens of other accelerators and can attest there is absolutely nothing like what we do,” says Patrick McQuown, executive director of entrepreneurship and founder of The StarTUp, which launched in September 2021. “No fee, no membership, and no affiliation to TU needed. We have VPs from healthcare companies to solo business owners and everything between that use it daily. It’s open five days a week, 8:30 to 5:30. And it’s awesome.”

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How Stanford Went STEM: A Story About ‘Doing The Right Thing’

IN HIS LATEST BOOK, 7 Rules of Power, Stanford authority on power Jeffrey Pfeffer speaks of the importance of persistence and resilience and being “willing to do what it takes.” A crucial part of this, Professor Pfeffer writes, is “sticking with efforts … and getting things done in the face of opposition, criticism, obstacles, setbacks and failures.”

My MacBook has nostalgically informed me that it has been four years — to the day — that I had published my opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. The day after, Stanford University Graduate School of Business classified ALL its degrees as STEM — guaranteeing three years in the United States for international students such as myself, instead of just 12 months. I started getting word from friendly sources ahead of the official announcement while I was in my STRAMGT 355: Managing Growing Enterprises Zoom class. Just when I (incorrectly) assumed that I had a few minutes to process all the texts and calls and my own adrenaline and relief about this epic development – I got cold-called. I believe I survived honorably.

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Stanford MBAs Say ‘Yes’ To Pickleball But ‘No’ To Defense Tech

LIKE SO MANY OF the MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Evan Szablowski is one impressive dude. He graduated from West Point with a degree in math, earned the honor of being a Rhodes Scholar, picked up two master’s degrees from Oxford University, and was a U.S. Army officer for more than nine years.

But when he tried to create a student club as an MBA at Stanford, he was turned down. His fellow students chose to support and fund a pickleball club instead of the club he proposed that would have served students interested in defense technology.

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On The Rise: How Marquette’s B-School Is Making A Name For Itself, In The Midwest & Beyond

IN FEBRUARY 2020, THE unthinkable happened at Marquette University: Joe Daniels, the James H. Keyes dean of the College of Business Administration, was killed crossing the street near campus. He had been elevated to the top job just a few weeks earlier.

The sudden and tragic loss of a dean would have been enough to put any business school on its heels, disrupting the kind of big plans that a new leader always brings with them. That was even more the case at Marquette, a Jesuit B-school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where Daniels was, in the words of the school’s president, “a campus fixture for more than 30 years”: professor, department chair, adviser, friend.

“It was devastating — sudden and unexpected,” says Karen Rinehart, currently assistant dean of graduate programs at Marquette’s COBA. “He had previously served as interim dean, and we had gone through the dean search process and he had been selected and was just in his first few weeks in that role. It really felt like it was a moment of takeoff and an on-ramp, and to so quickly have that change, it was really hard.”

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An AI Makeover: A Business School’s Ambitious Effort In Artificial Intelligence

OVER THE PAST 18 months, some 25 CEOs have trekked to American University’s Kogod School of Business to share their expertise and wisdom with students. But it was two of those executives that prompted Dean David Marchick to lead one of the school’s most ambitious initiatives ever.

When Google President Kent Walker came to campus in February of last year to discuss the development of artificial intelligence, he noted that CEO Sundar Pichai likened AI to the discovery of fire and electricity. Shortly after, Brett Wilson, a San Francisco venture capitalist and managing partner of Swift Ventures, told students that “AI won’t replace your job, but another person who knows AI might replace you if you don’t know how to use AI in whatever you do – accounting, investing, marketing, or management.”

“Those two speakers made me just click,” recalls Dean Marchick. “They really shaped my thinking. I said to my senior associate dean we have got to run, not walk. It is a revolution and we are trying to get in front of the parade.”

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DEI Is Dead In Florida. How Will That Affect The State’s Business Schools?

MARCH HAS COME IN like a lion at the University of Florida — a lion that has ripped to shreds efforts to increase diversity in the school’s student ranks.

Florida’s public university flagship this month announced the elimination of 13 full-time positions and cancellation of 15 administrative appointments for employees who worked across campus on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. The move is a result of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signing legislation in 2023 that banned public colleges from using tax dollars to implement or promote DEI initiatives, and the Florida board of education’s redefinition of DEI as “programs that categorize individuals based on race or sex for the purpose of differential or preferential treatment.”

The University of Florida has not published details on all the affected positions or departments. However, among the eliminated jobs was the university’s chief diversity officer, Martha McGriff. The school announced March 2 that all affected employees will receive 12 weeks of severance pay and be considered priorities should they apply for different jobs on campus; and that it would reallocate about $5 million to a faculty recruitment fund that had previously been designated for diversity programs.

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‘WOW’ Factor: Berkeley Women’s Finance Group Takes Off

BEFORE BEGINNING HER FINAL year at the University of California at Berkeley last fall, Abigail Copeland realized that something was missing from her campus experience — and that of countless others.

The epiphany hit during the summer: The missing piece was a club for women, like herself, and non-binary individuals who intend to pursue careers in finance.

Copeland, who spent last summer working at an investment bank in New York, knows firsthand that it’s hard to be a woman in finance. But she also knows that the challenges don’t begin in the workplace: They start in college. So she was determined to create a place where women could support each other in their drive to succeed in a male-dominated field.

And that’s how Women on Wall Street at Berkeley — the university’s first-ever independent student organization for women in finance — was born.

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Turning Quants Into Data Storytellers: The Value Proposition Of B-School Network QTEM

In a world where business increasingly looks to big data to help craft their strategies, companies need employees that can crunch and analyze all that data. As importantly, they need people who can tell stories with what the data is telling them.

Since 2012, the QTEM (Quantitative Techniques for Economics and Management) Master’s Program has worked to bridge the gap between quants and poets, teaching students to translate data analysis into compelling stories used to make strategic business decisions.

Today, the network includes 21 top-tier business schools and universities on four continents and in 16 countries. It has an alumni class of nearly 600. It’s now working to expand its network of elite business institutions (50% of their current members are triple accredited), particularly outside of Europe as well as its corporate partners.

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