It's no secret that Texas has long been a leader in energy production, but it may surprise you to learn that Texas leads the nation in wind-powered generation, producing 28 percent of all US wind-powered electricity in 2019.
Could you incur an unexpected $400 expense if it hit your bank account today? According to Jeff Price '20, founder and CEO of Houston-based Pronto Pay, many hourly workers could not. He's set out to change that.
Read through our interview with Rice MAcc alum Sean Kim (Class of 2020) and discover how he used the MAcc to transition from a high school teacher to a career in business.
Read through our interview with Rice MAcc alum Sean Kim (Class of 2020) and discover how he used the MAcc to transition from a high school teacher to a career in business.
I am a former high school science teacher. I earned my undergraduate degree from Rice back in 2014 with dual degrees in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Spanish. After graduation, I spent the better part of the next five years teaching the gamut of high school science classes: biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science, plus one semester of middle school math. I taught in rural eastern Washington State and also back home in Houston.
I now work for PwC in Los Angeles and moved to L.A. around Christmas time last year after starting remote. I work in PwC’s asset & wealth management practice under its financial services arm.
Prior to the MAcc, I had never taken a business course in my life! That all changed after having a phone call with Dr. Lansford, the MAcc Director. That was the catalyst for an 18-month long journey into the business world which continues today.
I had known about the MAcc through a close friend of mine (Jane Ren, MAcc Class of 2018), so it was kind of always in the back of my mind. But it wasn't until my last year of teaching, when I wasn't quite sure what my next step would be, that I remembered the MAcc program and thought to myself - why not give this a chance?
I followed up the phone call with an in-person meeting with Dr. Lansford and Danielle Riley, Assistant Director of the MAcc, and soon thereafter was registered for my first ever accounting course. My last semester of teaching was a busy one, as I juggled full-time teaching with financial accounting homework sets on the weekends. But I really enjoyed my intro class, and the following summer I found myself taking six more business classes (MAcc prerequisite requirements), as my MAcc journey took off full-steam. It was a whirlwind to say the least, but if I had to I would do it all over again.
The one-year timeline of the program was ideal for me at the stage of life I was in. I could commit to a one-year program for a career pivot.
It was also the future career opportunities that would be available after completing the program that attracted me. At that time, I didn’t know if I wanted to go into audit, tax, or advisory services, but it seemed clear that whatever path you chose after the MAcc, there would be plentiful opportunities available across the business landscape. The MAcc really did change my life.
Some of my favorite memories stem from the various social opportunities provided through the MAcc and our Social Committee to help build a sense of community for our cohort in one short year. Valhalla (graduate bar on-campus) Thursdays, group workouts at the Rice Recreation Center, group yoga sessions at Black Swan, Top Golf, Christmas party in the Village, and Hopdoddy happy hours – just to name a few!
All of the courses in the MAcc program were great, but one that stands out to me was MACC 512 – Financial Statement Analysis & Valuation, taught by Dr. Lansford himself. The course involved taking key concepts and ideas learned throughout the program (e.g., ratio analysis, profitability analysis, and equity valuation) and applying them to real-world case studies. The learning experience was very hands-on, practical, and teamwork-based – much like my job today!
Work hard! If you are planning to make a career change, it is not going to be easy, but like most things in life that are truly worthwhile, I think all of the hard work and effort will pay itself off in the end.
Learn as much as possible, and take advantage of every opportunity – one year goes by quick. Soak up as much as you can from the courses that you take, the internships you pursue, the interactions you have with potential future employers, and of course, your community at Rice.
This will probably sound cliché, but I do love that I learn something new every day. So far, I have mostly worked with real estate clients, and I have learned about things I had never heard of or had minimal prior exposure to (e.g., gross-up provisions, triple net leases, and fund accounting). I am constantly learning, and I am constantly challenged by the work.
With a firm as large as PwC, there is almost no limit to the professional development opportunities and resources available to you. In our financial services practice, we have something called infinite learning day – a full workday set aside each quarter for “digital upskilling” your technical proficiency with different software tools, leadership development, and cross-team collaboration. Within my first few months of the firm, I even had the chance to be a featured guest on a podcast available across the entire firm to share my experience on what it is like to start at PwC in a virtual environment.
Does the Rice MAcc program sound like something you’d like to pursue? Reach out to us!
The world’s financial markets are demanding greater corporate transparency and higher quality financial reporting. As a result, there is growing need for highly trained accounting professionals with superb critical thinking skills and integrity.
During the summer before the one-year Rice Master of Accounting program, Rice MAcc student Jasmine Lee interned with EY, one of the “Big Four” public accounting firms. She writes firsthand about her experience.
Read through our interview with Rice MAcc alum Sean Kim (Class of 2020) and discover how he used the MAcc to transition from a high school teacher to a career in business.
Ten years after graduating from the Jones Graduate School of Business and starting her photography company, April M. Frazier reflects on her journey into photography — an unconventional path, in which she spent 15 years working in the oil industry.
How the head of one of the nation’s top urban medical centers protected staff, students and patients in a crisis.
How the head of one of the nation’s top urban medical centers protected staff, students and patients in the midst of a pandemic.
What does a hospital do when it runs out of surgical gowns? Ordinarily, order more surgical gowns. But nothing was ordinary in New York during the spring of 2020, when a surge in coronavirus cases made personal protective equipment nearly impossible to find.
As president of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, a teaching hospital in Brooklyn, New York, Wayne Riley oversees nearly 5,000 employees serving a population of over 2.3 million people in one of the most diverse communities in the country. When the coronavirus pandemic hit New York, it hit Brooklyn disproportionately hard, taxing the medical center like never before. Like most hospitals, SUNY Downstate had long embraced the principal of “just in time” inventory, keeping virtually no stockpiles of medication, equipment or supplies. And when protocols changed overnight, requiring everyone in the hospital to wear masks and surgical gowns — not just surgeons and ICU staff — they started burning through PPE at an unprecedented rate. By early April, they only had enough gowns to get them through another 36 hours, and no prospect of resupplying. So Dr. Riley got creative. He checked with his maintenance staff and found that they had plenty of garbage bags.
Those became Plan B.
“We never did run out of gowns, but we got dangerously close,” he says.
“We probably use 500 to 600 gowns a day in normal times, but then everyone had to wear gowns and we went to 7,000 gowns a day. You can see how fast that erodes your just-in-time inventory.”
Riley, who has an MBA from Rice Business along with a medical degree from the Morehouse School of Medicine, a Master of Public Health degree from Tulane University and a BA in anthropology from Yale University, had to adapt quickly in a crisis that brought new challenges daily.
“Every day there was a supply chain issue. It was like Whack-a-Mole. I might need 10,000 swabs today; tomorrow I need 30,000 gowns. Then we run out of masks, then it was gloves, then it was drugs — we needed medication to sedate patients to put them on a ventilator,” he says. “I had never heard the concept of supply chain management until I went to business school at Rice, and during COVID I kept thinking back to those discussions. This was the problem we were dealing with in New York City: The supply chains we were relying on for all of our needs — gowns, syringes, pharmaceuticals — got disrupted within weeks.”
For the entire healthcare industry, the normal rules of operation no longer applied. Medical centers that had been fierce competitors suddenly embraced a new role as allies in a humanitarian crisis that spared none of them. One Friday night, the head of a nearby hospital called Riley, desperate for help. “They said, ‘We’re down to our last 5 cans of oxygen. We have 200 patients on ventilators. Can you spare any until Monday morning?’ ” Riley recalls. Oxygen, luckily, was one thing he did have. He sent it over.
“Everybody knew this was different. This wasn’t capturing market share or trying to rise in the rankings — this was trying to save lives,” he says.
To keep his staff safe and ensure the highest level of care for their patients, Riley dove into advocacy and negotiation, wrangling new sources of PPE wherever he could. “My management training tells me you have to roll up your sleeves and manage by walking around,” he says. “Leadership is a contact sport, and by showing that I’m willing to jockey for masks and swabs, that I’m making the calls and that I’m passionate about making sure our staff has PPE, it gives people confidence and support.”
Riley’s students and staff needed the support, especially as a second crisis gripped the country over the summer following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis, along with numerous other Black victims of police violence nationwide.
“In the Black and brown community around the country, we’ve had a twin pandemic. You have the disproportionately high incidence of COVID-19, and high mortality from it. Then you have superimposed on that the social justice movement in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,” he says. “We’ve had to deal with both. It’s really caused a soul-searching in all institutions, including the medical profession: What have we done in the past that may have contributed to this?”
That’s not a rhetorical question. In the healthcare field especially, the effects of institutional racism still reverberate — including a deep mistrust for vaccines among the Black and brown community, Riley says. “It goes back to the days of slavery, when they tested new treatments on slaves to find out if they were safe for their owners, up to the Tuskegee Study that lasted through the 1970s. That parade of horribles did happen, but this pandemic is wiping out people young and old, people in the prime of their life, and I will be the first to take a vaccine on the front steps of my hospital to show my community that it’s safe.”
Vaccination will stop only the first part of this twin pandemic, of course. Riley will keep battling the second long after COVID stops spreading. Of his many board memberships, perhaps the most notable is with the New York Academy of Medicine, where he is the first Black board chair in the organization’s 173-year history. Its mission is to alleviate healthcare disparities of the kind that made Brooklyn one of the epicenters of COVID mortality in the U.S.
“If nothing else, this pandemic has elevated the awareness of healthcare disparities in this country. Why do African-Americans have hypertension at a rate of three to four times the rest of the population, as well as higher rates of obesity and diabetes — which happen to be the three top preexisting conditions that this pandemic has targeted like a laser beam? My hope, when we get to the other side of COVID, is that we have a very fulsome discussion of how we address these disparities. It’s not healthy for our country to have a large segment of the population whose lives are cut short and who get sicker at a much greater rate. We may not ever be able to eliminate health disparities entirely, but we can lessen their impact with an all-hands on deck approach. Healthcare institutions, the government and the private sector all have a big role to play.”
In June, Dr. Wayne J. Riley, MBA ’02, received the Arnold P. Gold Foundation National Humanism in Medicine Medal, which honors caring and compassionate mentors in medical school education. Riley, the president of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, NY, was honored alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
The prestigious award honored Riley’s leadership of SUNY Downstate when its teaching arm, the University Hospital of Brooklyn, was designated a COVID-only hospital in one of the U.S. hot spots hit hardest by the pandemic. It also recognized his advocacy for health equity and anti-racism in medicine. Riley sits on the New York Governor's Vaccine Equity Task Force and joined with other Black leaders to create a task force to ensure that the COVID vaccine was readily accessible to Black New Yorkers and to address concerns in Black communities about the vaccine’s safety.
A roundup of news from Rice Business and beyond.
A roundup of news from Rice Business and beyond
One silver lining of working from home during the pandemic is that we’re more available for our pets, and many of us have taken the opportunity to foster an animal in need. By the end of 2020, however, Casey Sherrod ’21 had fostered 138.
“We’ve really capitalized on the work-from-home situation,” says Sherrod, who lives in Crosby, a rural community just northeast of Houston, with her wife and son. They have a four-bedroom house and a spacious yard with plenty of room for foster animals — in addition to their own four dogs and three cats. “It’s been eventful.”
Sherrod’s wife, Amanda, was in the habit of collecting strays even before the pandemic. “My wife just brings home animals all the time. I don’t know what’s going to come through the door,” Sherrod says. But since they both started working from home, they’ve partnered with animal rescues in Houston and elsewhere, including a Massachusetts-based nonprofit called Sandy Paws Rescue.
“A lot of rescues all over the country pull from Houston because of our high euthanasia rate,” she explains. “We have a real problem with overpopulation of stray animals here. But it’s not hard to find homes for dogs in other states. If you go to New England, where a lot of the dogs go, their shelters are pretty empty.”
Most of the dogs who come through Sherrod’s home only stay for a couple of weeks — long enough to get their shots and a clean bill of health — before being transported out of state. The cats tend to be placed locally.
Then there are the more unusual animals Sherrod has fostered: a pygmy goat named Pepper, Mr. Pickles the pig, and Milkshake the calf. Pepper the goat had run away from a nearby home, and Sherrod was able to reunite him with his owner. Mr. Pickles had been adopted as a piglet by someone who lived in an apartment complex and couldn’t keep him when he was fully grown. Potty trained and willing to walk on a leash, Mr. Pickles lived in a pen in Sherrod’s dining room for more than a month until she was able to find him a home on a farm.
Milkshake had been born with a cleft palate and unable to feed normally; his owner, a farmer, gave him up because he didn’t have time to bottle-feed the calf multiple times a day. So Sherrod did, often during her Rice Business classes over Zoom.
“My classmates started saying, ‘I’m just waiting to see what animal will appear on your screen today,’ ” she says.
Her classmates weren’t the only ones eager to see the animals. At the beginning of the pandemic, Sherrod started a TikTok account — @caseyriveter — to document her animal rescue journey. By April 2021, she had 1.7 million followers.
“With TikTok, the point was to spread awareness of why spaying and neutering animals is vital, and why adopting from a shelter is so important and rewarding,” she says. “It’s been awesome to be able to give back. We’ve even talked about starting our own rescue one day.”
This year, Rice’s internal startup competition, the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, is splitting into two separate competitions: one for students and one for alumni. The two tracks mean judges can offer more finalist spots — and more cash prizes — to Rice entrepreneurs.
Students and alums will pitch their ideas for everything from small businesses to high-growth ventures to a panel of judges. Audience members will then vote on the winning proposals. The virtual competitions will be held on April 22 for student startups and June 3 for alumni startups.
To attend the competitions and support Rice students and alumni entrepreneurs, visit lilie.link/nrlc. Attendance is open to students, alumni and friends of Rice.
Between the COVID-19 pandemic, economic uncertainty and visa challenges, 2020 was a uniquely difficult year for higher education. But despite — and sometimes because — of these challenges, Rice Business achieved our highest enrollment ever, and even added a third cohort to the full-time MBA program.
Thesize of the incoming full-time MBA program increased by nearly 50%.In fact, we expanded all of our MBA campus programs and had our largest-ever enrollment in the MBA for Professionals cohort and the MAcc program. Weadded137 more MBA students overall and increased enrollment in MBA@Rice, with an October 2020 cohort of 106 and a January 2021 cohort of 59.
The total number of students enrolled at Rice Business has nearly doubled in the last five years, and faculty size is also growing rapidly. As of January, our full-time application submissions were up 25% versus a year before, giving us a pool of talented candidates to fill the three cohorts that will help right-size Rice Business for the university, Houston and Texas.
| Current Enrollment (all years) | |
|---|---|
| Full-Time MBA | 281 |
| MBA for Professionals | 342 |
| MBA for Executives | 129 |
| MBA@Rice | 390 |
| MAcc | 41 |
| PhD | 29 |
| Undergrads | 225 |
| Total All Classes | 1,437 |
Yan “Anthea” Zhang, the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management at Rice Business, was named the new president-elect of the Strategic Management Society (SMS), starting Jan. 1. This prestigious post requires her to serve two years as president-elect, two years as president and two years as past-president.
The SMS consists of over 3,000 members from more than 80 countries, including academics, business practitioners and consultants. Members work on developing and sharing strategic management insights around the world. Zhang aims to increase SMS’s international reach, further engage practitioners and leverage the diversity of SMS membership.
She has previously served the society as associate editor of its Strategic Management Journal, representative-at-large for its Global Strategy Interest Group and representative-at-large for its Corporate Strategy and Corporate Governance Interest Group.
“I am honored to have been part of SMS for the past two decades. … I intend to work closely with all members to make SMS a more inclusive and impactful society,” Zhang wrote in her nomination statement.
Arun Gopalakrishnan, an assistant professor of marketing who teaches electives on Customer Lifetime Value and Advanced Marketing Research, was selected as a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar for 2021. The Marketing Science Institute classifies the selection of scholars as the “best young marketing academics in the world.” All are scholars three to six years post-Ph.D. who are conducting research on critical marketing topics such as emerging technologies, consumer decision making, and quantitative marketing research.
The 2021 Young Scholars will convene in Charleston, South Carolina, in June to share their research and explore future collaborations. They will be joined by representatives of member company sponsors, who are interested in sharing their business challenges and establishing ongoing ties with marketing academia’s future leaders.
In March, Linda Capuano was appointed to lead the Rice Business energy initiative. Her official title is advisor to the dean on energy initiatives, and she chairs a working group focused on the future of energy education at Rice Business.
As of July 1, she will assume the role of professor in the practice of energy management. Capuano earned a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering and an M.S. in engineering management from Stanford University and has served Rice as a faculty member in the MBA for Executives program and a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. She brings broad commercial, government and academic experience to the role, having held leadership positions in large and small businesses, startups, universities and the U.S. Department of Energy.
During a time of extreme market uncertainty and pandemic-induced changes in how companies recruited, hired and on-boarded new talent, Rice Business alums proved how resilient and adaptable they truly are — and how competitive in the job market. In 2020, 89% of our graduates accepted post-MBA jobs within 3 months of graduation, with an average salary of $123,786. Over 74% of accepted offers came through the Rice Business community — a testament to the network of alumni, faculty, staff and employer partners dedicated to the success of our students. In addition, 100% of our Class of 2021 students secured summer internships and other project-based work, even in an environment where companies were scaling back their hiring.
Here’s a snapshot of where our alumni went to work:
|
School-Facilitated Activities |
||
| Scheduled Interviews on or off campus for full-time employment | 5 | 5.4% |
| Activities supported by career center (i.e. job fairs/conferences, employer events, information meetings, school promoted job boards) | 14 | 15.2% |
| Conversion of Internship; Internship obtained through School sources | 35 | 38.0% |
| Job Postings on school career systems, resume books, resume referrals by career center | 3 | 3.3% |
| Other School-facilitated source | 5 | 5.4% |
| School network/resources (i.e. faculty referrals, alumni referrals, classmates, campus speakers, treks, club events, class projects) | 6 | 6.5% |
| Total School-facilitated Activities | 68 | 73.9% |
|
Graduate-Facilitated Activities |
||
| Personal contacts (i.e. previous employers, family, friends outside of school, etc.) | 6 | 6.5% |
| Conversion of internship; internship obtained through graduate-initiated sources | 4 | 4.3% |
| Online job postings (i.e. social media/LinkedIn, Indeed, company websites) | 10 | 10.9% |
| Other graduate-facilitated sources | 4 | 4.3% |
| Total Graduate-facilitated Activities | 24 | 26.1% |
|
Total |
92 |
100.0% |
| No Response by Graduate | 3 | 0.0% |
Renovations at McNair Hall are ongoing, and now the second floor is preparing for its facelift, which will begin at the end of this semester. The Business Information Center is moving to the dean’s suite, while the dean’s suite is shifting into part of the BIC, leaving the main reading room as a space where the Rice Business community can have small events and gatherings.
The construction that affects the second floor hallway and classrooms will be completed by the start of the fall semester. The remaining construction on the BIC, the dean’s suite and the admissions suite will be completed during the fall semester.
Meanwhile, our new work of public art, “Triple Virgo,” a hanging sculpture by artist Pae White, was installed in the McNair Hall rotunda this spring. White’s colorful disks, suspended from the ceiling of the rotunda, form a dynamic, ever-changing sphere. As White describes it, “My hope is that the artwork will reference a globe in flux, a globe where nothing is solidified or congealed — a colorful, shifting sphere of excitement, intrigue and agility.”
Earlier this year, the rotunda was redesigned and a new state-of-the-art video wall was installed outside the admissions office, while Classroom 116 was redesigned into a new high-tech learning facility: the Judy Ley Allen Innovation Classroom. Previous improvements included the construction of Audrey’s coffee house, a new student lounge and conference room, and a new home for Rice Alliance. The Office of Technology has since moved into the former home of Rice Alliance, and the operations staff now occupies the suite vacated by the Office of Technology.
For the second year in a row — 2020 and 2021 — the Princeton Review ranked Rice Business No. 1 in U.S. Graduate Entrepreneurship.
This is the fifth time Rice Business has ranked in the top 3 nationally and the 12th year in a row we’ve ranked in the top 10. The rankings were based on a survey of leaders at more than 300 schools offering entrepreneurship studies, who considered the schools’ commitment to entrepreneurship studies inside and outside the classroom. Criteria included the percentage of students taking entrepreneurship courses, the number and reach of mentorship programs, the number of startups founded by recent alumni and the cash prizes offered at school-sponsored business plan competitions.
“Earning the top spot again this year and our decades-long leadership in entrepreneurship education, anchored by Lilie Lab, and outreach, anchored by the Rice Alliance, is a testament to our visionary and world-class faculty, the enormous success of the Rice Business Plan Competition and of our commitment to our students and the community we serve,” said Dean Peter Rodriguez.
According to the 2021 Princeton Review rankings, we’re also:
#5 Best MBA for Finance
#5 Most Competitive Students
#6 Best Online MBA Program
#6 Best MBA Program in Consulting
#10 Best Classroom Experience
Additionally, the 2021 U.S. News & World Report rankings put us at No. 6 for online MBA programs for veterans, No. 9 for online MBA programs overall, and No. 11 for best business analytics in an online MBA program.
When full-time MBA student Tyler Clason ’22 volunteered as a missionary in Nicaragua, he contracted a severe case of Dengue fever during a regional outbreak. He later returned to the village of La Dalia determined to help relieve the suffering of the community he’d served. OneWater grew out of his promise to provide water filtration systems and clean water education to families to help save lives, reduce waterborne illnesses and ensure sustainable access to clean water. To date the nonprofit has installed over 200 water filtration systems, filtered over 2 million gallons and provided clean water education to hundreds of families.
Now Rice Business Global is collaborating with OneWater for a socially-minded case competition focusing on the clean water crisis in rural Nicaragua. In the midst of a pandemic, when international travel isn’t possible, Rice Business Global has developed innovative offerings for international exposure and immersive programs — no passport required. The partnership with OneWater also initiates programmatic expansion into Nicaragua. It offered Rice Business MBA students international consulting experience with a social responsibility focus, in addition to the core Global Field Experience consulting projects, which typically focus on for-profit businesses.
The case competition attracted 14 teams with a total of 42 students across full-time, executive, online and professional MBA programs. Strategies from the winning teams will be implemented to help provide families in rural Nicaragua with clean water filtration systems. OneWater will work with these winning teams after the competition. To learn more, visit One-Water.org.
A new Rice Business alumni podcast, “Owl Have You Know,” went live in October, with its first two episodes featuring Bethany Andell ’01, president of the Rice Business Alumni Association Board, and Aaron Knape ’08, also a member of the board. But even though the podcast premiered this fall, it had been in the works since at least 2018. “I was part of the original two-person planning team with Karen Crofton [’10],” says Tim Okabayashi ’05, one of the board members backing the project from the start. “We managed to spark some enthusiasm, support and creativity from fellow board members to get the approval to move ahead with the podcast.”
Their next task was finding a host. Fortunately, quite a few Rice Business alumni have experience in podcasting, and one recent alumna happens to be a professional, Emmy award-winning journalist: Christine Dobbyn ’20. “I started working at a radio station when I was 18 and have since worked in three television markets, so interviewing is in my blood,” says Dobbyn. “The podcast is a perfect way for me to use my past skills and assist in telling the many stories of Rice Business, its students, faculty, staff and alumni.”
Dobbyn is joined by co-host David Droogleever ’12, who says it was a “natural segue” to join the team because he was already publishing podcasts — although none have quite resembled “Owl Have You Know.” “This is the first time I’ve worked with seasoned professionals to access their broader network and to generate this type of content backed by a production team and funding to make it all come together,” he says.
By February, Dobbyn and Droogleever had interviewed almost 20 student, alumni and staff guests. “I hope that alumni get a stronger sense of who all is ‘out there,’ so they can make new connections or strengthen existing ones,” says Droogleever. As of this spring, the podcast had surpassed 700 downloads, and the number is growing. “Listen, subscribe and spread the word!” says Dobbyn. “Post it on social media for others to start following. It’s all part of building the Rice Business name, which ultimately increases the value of our degree — not just in Houston, but on a national level.”
You can listen and subscribe to “Owl Have You Know” wherever you get your podcasts, or visit business.rice.edu/owlhaveyouknow.
In response to strong demand from current and prospective undergraduate students for a deeper business education, Rice has announced a new undergraduate major in business beginning in the fall of 2021. The new degree was approved by Rice’s faculty senate in February with the support of the Rice Board of Trustees, President David Leebron, Provost Reggie DesRoches and Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez.
“We strive to be a forward-thinking business school for the next generation of global leaders,” said Rodriguez. “I am thrilled to say we will now be educating tomorrow’s leaders a little bit sooner.”
The new major joins the business school’s current offerings for undergraduates, which include minors in business and entrepreneurship. Current freshmen and incoming undergraduates will be eligible to participate in the new program and there will be no limit on how many undergraduates can take part in it.
Designed for highly qualified students who seek a well-rounded and in-depth foundation in business, the major will be administered by the business school and taught by our faculty. It will offer leadership and business fundamentals, including accounting, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy and communications. To complete a major in business, students must also complete a finance or management concentration, which requires additional advanced courses. Both concentrations provide the knowledge, research and analytical skills to solve a broad array of today’s business challenges.
Learn more at business.rice.edu/undergraduate-business-major.
What we've been up to on social media.
What we’ve been up to on social media
Dean @profp_rod and Brad Burke, managing director of @ricealliance, celebrate the back to back #1 entrepreneurship ranking and thank students, faculty, staff, alumni and donors for helping the school sustain its momentum!#RiceBusiness #YouBelongHere pic.twitter.com/jF1V3hJygy
— Rice Business (@Rice_Biz) November 17, 2020
Wonder what it's like to be a #Rice #MBA? Check out this day in the life video of one of our first year students! https://t.co/1eltXx7X4y #Rice #MBA #DayintheLife pic.twitter.com/Pa4Fi6IJIu
— Rice Business (@Rice_Biz) October 2, 2020
We're proud to have the 2nd highest gains in women MBAs over the last five years in the full-time program, according to @PoetsAndQuants and @fortefoundation! #RiceBusiness #YouBelongHere https://t.co/5Ngizi7mPx
— Rice Business (@Rice_Biz) November 30, 2020
Through a partnership with NASA's JSC and DivInc, The Ion has been awarded $1.4MM in federal funding to create its Aerospace Innovation Hub. The hub will support and develop regional minority business enterprises addressing aerospace-related challenges.https://t.co/oZX99V48aa pic.twitter.com/mgvBh4nluZ
— Rice Business (@Rice_Biz) December 8, 2020
Rice Business Professor @KunalSSachdeva has won the 2020 Moskowitz prize from @KelloggSchool! His award-winning research, The Real Effects of Environmental Activist Investing, was co-authored with Assistant Professor @lakshminyn and @VarunSharmaLBS of @LBS https://t.co/airPWqr5bx
— Rice Business (@Rice_Biz) November 19, 2020
Rice Business in the news
Rice Business in the news
“As an entrepreneur, it was important that I be in an entrepreneurial environment,” explains first-year MBA student Sophie Randolph. “I found this type of environment at Rice alongside myriad resources available to me will help me propel my entrepreneurial pursuits forward. Courses like the Entrepreneurship Labs, as well as resources such as Rice’s Lilie Lab, OwlSpark, and the Rice Alliance provide opportunities to work on growing my business while in school.”
October 14, 2020 | Jeff Schmitt
This marks the second consecutive year the two Houston universities have topped the list of entrepreneurship programs. For Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, this is its fifth time in a top 3 position nationally and the 12th year in a row ranked it has ranked in the top 10 graduate entrepreneurship programs.
“Earning the top spot again this year, and our decades-long leadership in entrepreneurship education, is a testament to our visionary and world-class faculty, the enormous success of the Rice Business Plan Competition, and of our commitment to our students and the community we serve,” Peter Rodriguez, the dean of the business school, said.
November 17, 2020 | Rebecca Carballo, Staff Writer
“It’s a kick while you’re down to all of the service industries, restaurants and others who were already battling through the pandemic,” said Peter Rodriguez, an economist and dean of Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. “So regrettably, it really exacerbates the pain for them, more than it creates new pains for other industries in particular.”
As for long term impacts, Rice’s Rodriguez fears employers may think twice about relocating their businesses, both to Texas generally and to Houston — no stranger to natural disasters — in particular. He said the prolonged outages could make it look like the state has unreliable infrastructure. “It’s true that this is very rare, but that’s not the way it will play into the memories of people making investment decisions,” Rodriguez said. “They’ll wonder about just our overall ability to manage crises.”
February 22, 2021 | R.A. Schuetz, Rebecca Carballo, Paul Takahashi, Staff Writers
Statistics illustrating the acceleration of building life cycles are scarce, but experts in the industry are starting to take heed. “The cycle of changing is becoming shorter,” said Jefferson Duarte, associate professor of real estate finance at Rice University. Projects that developers once could have collected rents on for half a century or more don’t allow that anymore. “Twenty years ago, we didn’t think about it,” Professor Duarte said. There was just an assumption that an office building would still be functioning a century later.
February 23, 2021 | Kevin Williams
“One of the things I found so exciting about what’s going on in Houston right now that, quite frankly, was incredibly attractive about the opportunity to come and join Lilie and Rice was that Houston has these big pillar companies in energy and health care and all these critical areas that the world, the economy, and the society needs,” Judah says in a September episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. “That’s all in Houston right now.”
January 6, 2021 | Natalie Harms
“There’s a demand for deeper business education from our current and prospective students, and Rice Business can deliver to undergraduates the high-quality degree programs we have always delivered to MBAs, Master of Accountancy and Ph.D. students,” said Peter Rodriguez, dean of the Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.
The business major will offer leadership and business fundamentals, the university said, including accounting, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy and communications. Students are required to concentrate in finance or management.
“We strive to be a forward-thinking business school for the next generation of global leaders,” Rodriguez said in a school announcement. “I am thrilled to say we will now be educating tomorrow’s leaders a little bit sooner.”
March 1, 2021 | Laura Gillispie
“Lower consumer confidence and uncertainty about the overall economy will shape Valentine’s Day spending trends — not the other way around,” wrote Constance Porter, assistant clinical professor of marketing at Rice Business, for WalletHub.
Over the past couple of years, Americans who felt good about the economy and their personal finances fueled strong spending on Valentine’s Day gifts, according to data published by the National Retail Federation. But this year, Porter believes, the pandemic will dampen Valentine’s Day spending.
She suggests more people will opt for alternative ways to celebrate at home — such as cooking a restaurant-style meal or taking online courses for at-home spa treatments. It’s the “physical labor of love” that will make these experiences special, Porter said.
February 2, 2021 | Adam McCann, Financial Writer
Dickerson helps advise the world’s biggest oil companies on how to navigate the great carbon transition by divesting old fossil fuel assets while shifting investment toward renewable energy and carbon capture projects.
Helped arranged $100 billion in energy company restructurings this year.
First job: “I had a vending machine business during high school. By my senior year I had over 400 locations across Texas and generated more than $100,000/year of revenue.”
Editors: Christopher Helman and Eliza Haverstock
News and Notes from Rice Business Alumni
News and Notes from Rice Business Alumni
Paula Wagner and her husband, CJ Wagner, welcomed their first child, baby Elizabeth “Elle” Rey Wagner on Oct. 25, 2020.
Sean recently joined the M&A Strategy, Diligence and Value Creation practice at Deloitte Consulting. The group helps clients with portfolio strategy, finding pathways to growth and value creation through M&A and diligence.
Daniel has joined Coya Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy platform company developing first-in-class therapeutics for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases, as a project manager. His role will be to assist in the commercialization of a novel therapy for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Tyler is excited to announce the birth of his daughter, Rylan Ella. Rylan was born on Aug. 9, 2020, so she is already almost 7 months old and clearly the coolest kid in school.
Meg has taken on a new role as a consultant at ZoomRx, a life sciences consultancy, in New York.
Samantha is now a principal at Mercury Fund. She is proud of the work she has done in the last three years at Goose Capital. Innovation is the key to solving many of society’s systemic issues, and she believes Mercury is a platform where she can make a significant impact as an investor. Samantha remains committed to helping serve underrepresented founders and is grateful to do that alongside her new colleagues at Mercury.
Emily joined Macquarie Commodities Trading at the end of 2019 as a vice president on the physical oil team after many wonderful years with Shell Trading. Emily still lives close to Rice with her husband Elliott (Rice MA ’19), and two children, Elliott (3) and Isabelle (2).
Chelsea moved to Boston in November to take a role as a senior manager with Amazon Robotics. She and Chad are expecting their first baby in April!
Charlie and his wife, Kathleen, started a new business in 2020 named Yard Vibes based out of Katy, TX. The business is focused on creating special moments for friends and loved ones during birthdays, graduations, retirements, engagements and other life events through staked yard messages. Business has picked up quickly and it’s been really exciting and rewarding to make connections with people during their special moments and milestones. More info can be found at yardvibestx.com.
Katherine and Justin welcomed their son, James David de Cordova Mitchell, on April 3, 2020.
Nick accepted a new job as director of treasury and investor relations with WillScot Mobile Mini. Caroline, Jillian, Nick and the two dogs are moving to Phoenix.
Leila and husband Gaspare ’16 welcomed a baby boy, Remy Aloi, on Jan. 10, 2021.
Lindsay was promoted to senior marketing manager, leading both the Downstream Sustainability and Petrochemicals teams for Nalco Water, an Ecolab Company. She and Jose recently welcomed their second daughter, Gemma Quinn Hernandez.
Co-owner and Global CFO of Houston-based Worldwide Oilfield Machine, Rani Puranik thrives at leading innovation, empowering others and inspiring collaboration. Rani and her father have led the privately held corporation to grow to more than $350 million in annual revenues. Rani’s debut book, “Seven Letters to My Daughters,” is slated to launch in 2021. This life lessons-focused memoir is from the perspective of a mother writing letters of encouragement and advice to her daughters. She realized that her life has been lived in seven-year phases, and she shares her experience as a woman and how womanhood has changed within each phase.
Atul used his COVID quarantine time to write a book on operational excellence, titled “Managerial Perspective to Operational Excellence: Using Lean Ideas to Compete Against Low-Cost Countries.” The book uses a case-based approach for lean implementation and presents a summary of lessons learned and insights on change management. A first-person story-based approach used in this book makes it an engaging read for operations leaders and middle management as well as postgraduate students. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.
Lloyd is now the chief strategy officer for a management consulting firm in California focused on leading business owners, entrepreneurs and executives through organizational transformation and reinvention to redefine their strategic goals and resolve their most difficult challenges at times of tremendous turmoil (e.g. COVID-19). He is moving to California with his wife, Delphine, and two children, Charlie (5 years old) and Leo (7 months old). Rice University and the Jones School have brought Lloyd to the best of his abilities professionally and he cannot thank enough the staff, professors and community for this amazing journey he is living today. Please feel free to reach out!
Britton has been appointed CFO of Genapsys, Inc., a privately held genomics and Next Generation Sequencing company with headquarters in Redwood City, CA.
After moving out of Texas right after graduation, Fernando just returned to Texas and is now living in the outskirts of Austin.
Priyanka has accepted a role with Amazon as a senior program manager.
Alison recently became an executive director with JPMorgan Securities, a division of JPMorgan Wealth Management. In this role, in her continued wealth management career, she continues to advise high and ultra-high net worth clients and families on investment and wealth planning decisions.
Sharmin has joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as an assistant vice president in the corporate planning department. In this role, she will identify strategic needs for the Dallas Fed and drive the development of department-level strategic plans and objectives. Sharmin comes to the bank with more than 10 years of experience in management consulting, primarily in the health care industry, with a focus on operations management, strategic planning, organizational change and project management.
On Jan. 30, 2021 Surge Energy signed a purchase and sale agreement to acquire leasehold interest and producing wells from Grenadier Energy Partners II LLC in Howard County, TX, for the aggregate purchase price of approximately $420 million. The transaction was expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. Linhua Guan is the CEO of Surge Energy America and the company was the only E&P company recognized for both the Best Places to Work and Middle Market 50 awards by Houston Business Journal in 2020.
On Nov. 17, 2020 Cameron welcomed a daughter, Sloane London, into the world. She couldn't be happier!
The Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Advisors recently certified Luka as a Certified Insolvency and Restructuring Advisor. Luka is the managing director of Erceg Partners in San Diego, a firm focused on turnarounds and restructurings of investment funds for investment managers, institutional investors and asset managers when faced with “zombie” fund issues.
Ross started a new role at Harvard University in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as executive director of strategic planning and marketing at the division of continuing education. As a member of the senior leadership team, he is responsible for overseeing strategy, marketing operations and professional development programs. He had previously been at Harvard Business School Online (formerly HBX) where he held a variety of roles in marketing, product management and business development.
Julian Bott passed on Jan. 3, 2021 in Houston. He was born in Cambridge, England, studied at Millfield School in Somerset and Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass. Julian’s career began in New York City with Banker’s Trust. He relocated to Houston, where he enjoyed a successful career in commercial banking within the oil and gas industry. Julian balanced his full-time career while simultaneously obtaining an MBA at Rice. Julian served as a board member at EQM, as the EVP and CFO of Sandridge Energy, and as the EVP and CFO of Southwestern Energy, where he led the recent acquisition of Montage Resources and continued his role until the time of his passing. He is survived by his wife Cecile, his mother, Gillian, and two sons, Ian (Rice 2014) and James (Rice MBA 2019). To those who enjoyed his comradeship, he truly loved and admired you. He found joy in your success and he would encourage you to live on pursuing excellence.
How the EMBA program is helping Luis Rodriguez '22 take his career to new heights
The EMBA program is all about learning from each other —getting the perspectives of a diverse group of seasoned professionals who have already accomplished a lot. Going through this with them in the midst of a pandemic, when we’re all facing challenges, we’ve really leaned on each other.
Luis Rodriguez, EMBA ’22
Luis Rodriguez has gotten where he is today by embracing risk, starting very early in his energy industry career. “I remember sitting in a young professionals meeting, and the regional CEO asked, ‘How many of you want to be CEO one day?’ A good percentage raised their hands — including myself. He said, ‘I hate to break it to you, but maybe only one of you will be a CEO. The reason is: You won’t take the risk. You won’t make yourself uncomfortable.’ ”
Rodriguez accepted the challenge. He took on a series of uncomfortably far-flung assignments in places like Israel and Trinidad and Tobago, among others, and later uprooted his young family from Texas for a post in Dubai. The risks paid off, and he advanced from a project controls position to strategy roles, and eventually to his current position as director of mergers & acquisition and strategy at KPMG. He decided to pursue his MBA at Rice Business to take the next step toward his dream job as strategic advisor to a CEO. “I want to take the tools I learned here and help an organizational leader not only develop a strategy but be able to execute that strategy,” he says.
Working full-time while taking classes and raising three daughters with his wife has been tough, of course. But Rodriguez is used to overcoming hardship. He originally moved to Texas from Puerto Rico as an 8-year-old who spoke little English, with a single mother who worked as a florist during the day and took classes at night. They lived with an aunt until his mother could afford a one-bedroom apartment, and slowly built a furniture collection paycheck by paycheck. “It took 11 years of sacrifice and hard work for her to be able to buy her own home,” he recalls.
Now Rodriguez takes nothing for granted. “For me, the Rice Business experience is unbelievable,” he says. “I never thought that from the background I have, that I’d ever have this opportunity. I still have to pinch myself sometimes.”
Rice Business professor Marlon Mooijman explains why too much power can breed mistrust — and make it hard for leaders to take an exit cue.
