Meet UCLA Anderson’s MBA Class Of 2026

P&Q: What types of programs do you offer to sharpen your students’ soft skills? What areas do you emphasize and how do you instill these skills in your students?

Fraser: “In addition to growing Intercultural Competence as mentioned earlier, all students participate in SALT (Self Awareness, Leadership and Teams), a program geared to maximize the Learning Team experience.  At Anderson, all students are placed in 5- or 6-person diverse learning teams to model the real world. Each learning team will take their core courses and complete team projects together in their first year.  SALT allows teams to develop a Learning Team Agreement that establishes their group’s “rules of the road” but also creates a mechanism to address ambiguity, adversity, or any other challenging situation the group may face.”

P&Q: What types of programming – through classroom instruction, extracurriculars, and treks – does your school offer to expose students to country-specific and global business practices? What have students told you were the most educational and fun aspects of these activities?

Fraser: “UCLA Anderson offers a comprehensive suite of programs to prepare students for global business challenges, combining classroom instruction, experiential learning, and exposure to diverse cultures and practices. Key offerings include our Global Immersion courses focused on target regions like Asia and Latin America. These courses, which include one week in-country, expose students to a country’s economy, political environment, major industries, local culture, and historical events. Students engage with guest speakers, visit companies and startups, participate in cultural activities, and network with alumni.

Our Center for Global Management (CGM) offers a broad array of globally focused courses such as International Business Strategy and Global Healthcare, while also coordinating our specialization in global management. Students can also gain exposure to global business practices during their 2nd year Capstone Project by choosing a faculty-led option such as Global Impact Consulting in East Africa with Professor Gayle Northrup, which includes travel to Kenya and Ethiopia. Students have rave reviews for these academic and experiential opportunities, reporting that they appreciate the diverse perspectives gained and value the opportunity to learn about different economies, cultures, and business practices directly while also building closer bonds with their classmates and faculty through travel.”

P&Q: What are the most exciting new courses that your school is offering to MBAs this school year? What makes them so unique and valuable?

Fraser: “This year, UCLA Anderson added a course entitled The Global Ecosystem of Sport, taught by Andy Campion, former Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Nike, Inc., current Executive Chairman of Unrivaled Sports, a fast-emerging premium youth sports portfolio of businesses, and board member for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games. The course provides an invaluable opportunity to learn about the industry directly from one of its most accomplished leaders and innovators. The course uses a “challenge” format to allow students to defend a stance on hot topic issues in all segments of the ecosystem, including teams, leagues, events, venues, traditional and new media, interactive entertainment, betting, sports marketing, merchandise, youth sport participation, health and fitness, sports technology, services and agencies.

We’re also looking forward to a new course this fall entitled Climate Analytics and Strategy taught by Professor Magali Delmas, who serves as the Director of our Center for Impact at Anderson and is the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar award of the Academy of Management/Organization & the Natural Environment. In this class students will learn frameworks for measuring carbon footprints and greenhouse gas emissions, current regulatory requirements for climate reporting, and methods for establishing and fulfilling corporate climate emissions targets. These are exactly the sort of transformative leadership skills that our students are eager to learn so that they are equipped to facilitate meaningful environmental change in the business practices of some of the world’s leading organizations.”

P&Q: Who are two new professors who’ve joined your faculty in the past year? What do they teach and how will they be difference-makers in your MBA program?

Fraser: “This past year UCLA Anderson was thrilled to add the aforementioned Andy Campion to our faculty, as he became the Program Director of our Sports Leadership and Management Program. Andy brings nearly 30 years of experience in the sports and entertainment industries. For more than 17 years, Andy has served in executive leadership positions at Nike Inc., including as chief operating officer, chief financial officer and head of strategy. Andy joined Nike after more than 11 years at the Walt Disney Company, where he rose through the ranks of corporate strategic planning and finance, ultimately to serve as senior vice president of corporate development. Currently, he serves on the boards of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics organizing committee (LA28), Starbucks and the SpringHill Company. Andy and his wife Shelby (B.A. ’95) are also minority owners of Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer and the Utah Royals of the National Women’s Soccer League. As mentioned earlier, Andy also teaches The Global Ecosystem of Sport. His decades in the industry will provide a wealth of first-hand knowledge and acumen to our students who are interested in building careers in the sports arena.

UCLA Anderson’s faculty was also enriched this year with the hire of Professor Sarada, who holds a dual role as both Professor and Faculty Director of our Business Creation Capstone. Her research focuses on the economics of entrepreneurship and innovation, and her work has been published in leading economics journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics. She has received a commercialization grant from the National Science Foundation, and her published work on inventor demographics was cited by the US Patent and Trademark Office in its report to the U.S. Congress to influence the passage of the Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science or SUCCESS Act. She has presented her research at the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of Finland, the Census Bureau, the National Science Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her impressive research and accomplishments will directly benefit the many entrepreneurs in the Anderson community as she guides them through the process of turning their business plans into business realities via our Business Creation Capstone.”

P&Q: What types of support does your career center and alumni provide to MBA students? How have these services and relationships made your graduates more competitive in the marketplace?

Fraser: “UCLA Anderson’s Parker Career Management Center (aka “Parker”) provides a variety of resources and services to help MBA students pursue various career paths and equip them with life-long career development skills and perspectives. The services provided by Parker range from self-assessment to career discovery and research to in-depth job search skills training, all of which are required to be successful in the highly competitive MBA job market. Parker delivers these services through structured programming like the Parker Career Series, Anderson Career Teams (a small group peer support program), visits to hiring organizations entitled DOJs (Days on the Job), topic-specific career workshops, and individual career advising. Many of the programs that Parker provides often involve supportive alumni that provide real-world advice while also sharing their first-hand experiences to better prepare students as they work through their individual career development process.

Along with student programs, Parker has strong relationships with many of the top MBA employers and runs a robust school-facilitated recruiting program that connects those employers with interested students. In addition, to address the variety of career interests of our MBA students, Parker also provides extensive opportunities to connect with those employers with unstructured recruiting processes through career fairs and other employer events during the latter part of the school year. Alumni are often closely involved during these recruiting activities as advocates for the school and our students.”

Click on the links below to access in-depth profiles.

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergraduate Alma Mater	Last Employer
JP Cannistraro	Boston, MA	Stanford University	Boston Scientific
Lilia Diaz	Hamilton City, CA	UCLA	UCLA Carceral Ecologies Research Lab
Candace Graham	London, UK	University of Cambridge	BBC Studios
Jeffrey Hamilton	Tacoma, WA	University of Washington at Tacoma	Rushing McCarl
Katie Lee	Westminster, CA	University of California, Irvine	Kaiser Permanente
Jose Mendez	Santiago, Chile	Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile	Falabella Retail
Mariah Montenegro	Campina Grande, Brazil	University of Sao Paulo (USP)	AB-InBev
Clarence Narcisse	Gonaives, Haiti	American Military University	U.S. Marine Corps
Rex Sungyoon Yi	Sydney, Australia	Australian National University	Healius Digital
Smruthi Swaminathan	Chennai, India	Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	Gabriel & Company
Brenna Turner	Detroit, MI	University of Michigan	Sake High!
Kelly Young	Houston, TX

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