Welcome back to Campus Chronicles, our weekly look at the latest updates from the world of b-school campus newspapers. Spring has sprung and we hope that all are enjoying the sunshine and daffodils.
In sunny California, the Haas Newswire reports that final reports are being fine tuned for the Social Sector Solutions class, taught through a partnership between the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at Haas and the the global philanthropy practice at McKinsey & Company. The class has been widely admired for providing hands-on experience for the students, while also offering nonprofits access to intensive consulting services that otherwise might be out of their reach. Among the 11 projects addressed during the semester, this year’s accomplishments include creating a plan to attract global environmental leaders to a new institute near the Golden Gate Bridge, writing a strategic blueprint for Green Belt Movement International, which works to reforest Kenya, and building an evaluation tool for Lenders for Community Development.
Haas undergrads are also in the news because for the second year in a row, they defeated Stanford and San Jose State universities to take first place at the annual Deloitte-Cisco “Battle of the Bay” Case Competition. The competition asked students to create a go-to-market solution for a newly developed software product by Cisco called the Entertainment Operating System (EOS). The winning group credited their success to the intensive 10-week pledging process to become members of the National Honors Business Fraternity Beta Alpha Psi, which consisted of professional development, business education, and presentation training and helped distinguish them from the other participants.
Last but not least, the Haas-Columbia MBA Speaker Series welcomed Heidi Roizen, a former Venture Capilist turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO of start-up SkinnySongs, to campus. SkinnySongs creates music to inspire women to get and stay in shape. Roizen inspired many MBAs with both her experience and her lyrics, like “skinny jeans, skinny jeans, you’re still hanging ’round, in the back of my closet and that’s bringing me down.”
On the other coast, the Columbia Bottomline announced on page seven, that Columbia Business School will host the East Coast’s largest Business Plan Competition: the Draper Fisher Jurvetson $250K East Coast Venture Challenge (ECVC). The Private Equity & Venture Capital Club and the Private Equity Program, with the support of The Entrepreneurship Program will be busy coordinating this huge event that offers students at all eight Ivies, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU the chance to compete for $250,000 in seed stage funding. Teams will present their business plans to a panel of judges comprised of leading venture capitalists from the DFJ Network, a global VC network with approximately $6 billion in capital commitments, and to an audience of approximately 125 members of the academic and VC community. This presents a great opportunity for student entrepreneurs to showcase their talents, and to exchange ideas not only with leaders in the world of VC, banking, and law, but also with their peers at some of the world’s top universities.
On page ten, the Columbia Bottomline also covered the most recent Silfen Leadership Series event. Organized by a dedicated group of students in collaboration with the Dean’s Office and External Affairs, the Leadership Series by itself is worth mentioning because it has gained such a reputation for attracting top business leaders from New York and around the world to the School. This week, students welcomed a Wall Street legend – Abby Joseph Cohen. Abby Cohen serves as the President of Global Markets Institute (GMI) and as a Senior Investment Strategist at Goldman Sachs in New York. In addition to advising foreign governments, her institute does research into topics such as demographic changes, labor-force development, pension plans, health-care expenditures, capital-markets structure, regulation and the environment. Her talk and the question answer forum afterwards was wide-ranging. It was clear that even though she acknowledged the difficulties of the US economy, she doesn’t subscribe to the ‘sky is falling’ viewpoint. Despite the forecasted slowdown in economic growth globally for 2008, she remains optimistic because the contributions from Euroland and BRIC countries to global growth are expected to rise. These might be areas of focus for those seeking future employment or internships!
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