I recently participated in a livestream interview with Lou Nanni, vice president for University Relations. During the interview, Lou asked me about my strategic vision for the College; specifically, he asked, what are my plans to take the College to “the next level”?
It’s an important question, which I interpret as asking where the College could be in five to 10 years. It’s also a challenging question, as we necessarily need to be very focused on managing the current changes and disruptions due to the pandemic, which makes it harder to continue to “elevate, cooperate and integrate”; i.e., to also work on our strategic vision.
I will mention a few of our strategic initiatives to advance our mission through initiatives centered on the imperative to Grow the Good in Business — to contribute, cooperate and compete with a view that centers on serving others, especially those who have the greatest needs:
Undergraduate Scholars and Honors Program: The aim is to elevate our undergraduate program by further challenging our most academically gifted and academically ambitious students in the Scholars Program by offering honors sections of existing courses as well as (mostly new) honors courses, where both honors sections and new honors courses offer accelerated and advanced content. The Honors Program would further allow students to write a thesis supervised by a faculty member. Associate Dean Jim Leady is taking the lead on working toward developing plans for both programs. We hope to launch the Scholars Program in the 2021-2022 academic year.
Business Analytics: We will continue to integrate analytics throughout our curricula. For undergraduates, the ITAO team of Sriram Somanchi, Fred Nwanganga and Xiaojing Duan with assistance from Rob Easley and Bob Lewandowski has been working hard to create a new course required for all business majors, Fundamentals of Coding. The course will give students a basic level of understanding that in turn allows us to integrate analytics and coding in all of their subsequent courses. Although I didn’t talk about this specifically in the interview, we have the same goal to integrate analytics throughout our graduate programs curricula. For example, we added a new data analytics concentration as well as a host of new accounting-focused data analytics courses to our MSA program.
Frontlines: As you know, we recently received a significant gift from Ken and Susan Meyer that will allow us to expand the Meyer Business on the Frontlines Program. The gift allows us to offer the Frontlines experience to all Notre Dame MBA students, as well as to pilot a domestic version this year, Frontlines in America. The team of Viva Bartkus, Joe Sweeney and Kelly Rubey also are creating a shorter term Frontlines Engagements course.
COVID-19 has been a challenge. At the same time, these past months have helped us recognize that we're here for a purpose, to work together, to help each other and to teach and serve our students. You have brought your “A” game! We’ve learned a lot, and because you have been willing to really step up and work together, we've been very resilient. It's times like this that show that we are very much a strong community, and I actually think that through the great adversity and the mistakes and the pivots and the changes and asking more and more of you, of all of our faculty, staff and students, we've become an even stronger community.
Lou also asked me what my first year serving as dean has been like and whether there have been any surprises. To the last question, I can answer, YES. A minor surprise is that I get way more emails than I could have imagined. More importantly, I have been surprised with how patient, gracious and generous you all have been with me as I started and continue in this new role, even as I’m making mistakes and learning, and I'm so grateful for all the help that I continue to receive.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn