Our Priorities
Mays Business School’s most pressing challenge is attaining resource parity with our peer business schools. With the average public business school endowment at almost $100 million, Mays must increase its resource base to better support our top priorities:
Faculty
Recruiting and retaining top quality faculty is central to all of our goals. Because, great programs require great faculty. Mays already has an internationally recognized faculty that ranks 14th nationally among public universities in research productivity.
Yet to move Mays forward, we must take every possible measure to retain this great faculty. In addition, it is critical that we aggressively recruit additional nationally recognized faculty. These actions will ensure that we attract and support a faculty that is passionate about teaching and the discovery of new ideas. A top priority during the upcoming One Spirit One Vision Campaign is to create additional faculty endowments to accomplish these objectives.
- Eminent Scholar Chairs provide resources to attract and retain “star” faculty members. Star faculty members are the single most important component to attracting other star faculty, great students and top corporate partners.
- Faculty Chairs provide resources to attract and retain faculty members who are in slightly earlier stages of their careers but are on track to achieving star status.
- Faculty Fellowships provide resources to attract and support junior faculty members. These endowments create the support necessary for junior faculty to build and develop their research programs as they move toward achieving star status.
- Faculty Opportunity Funds provides support for promising junior faculty members and visiting scholars at Mays on a temporary (1-3 year) basis. This support is critical in an environment where permanent funds may not be available for faculty in a given year. It is our intention that these temporary appointments would eventually become permanent in nature, once funds become available.
Students
To continue attracting the nation’s best minds—at both the undergraduate and graduate level—our financial packages in the form of scholarships and fellowships must be competitive with other top business schools. This is particularly important for graduate students because many rely on spousal employment to defray their educational expenses.
While the Bryan/College Station area is a wonderful community, spousal employment opportunities are quite limited compared to some of Mays' urban competition, making support for graduate students even more critical. An important priority during the One Spirit One Vision Campaign is to create additional endowments to support top students.
- Graduate Student Fellowships support the study of students in our graduate (MBA, MS, and PhD) programs.
- Undergraduate Student Scholarships support the study of our undergraduate students.
Programs
Top business schools create meaningful learning experiences that provide both faculty and students with an opportunity to apply knowledge learned within the classroom. While Mays offers numerous unique learning opportunities specifically for our students, such as Freshmen Business Initiative, Aggies on Wall Street and Business Fellows, we would like to do more. That is why generating greater support for our unique programs is a key goal for the One Spirit One Vision Campaign.
- Centers of Excellence support curriculum development, faculty scholarship and industry partnerships. These centers also support unique learning opportunities, such as student competitions involving Mays students and students from other top business schools. In addition to creating an awareness of our programs, these centers of excellence also serve as a magnet to attract top faculty and students within a particular discipline.
- Distinguished Lecture Series are critical mechanisms to bring top business executives and academicians to Mays. These programs provide a unique educational experience for our faculty, staff and students. Further, these programs provide Mays an opportunity to showcase our quality faculty and students to today’s academic and business leaders.
- Program development activities include actions to promote Mays’ programs; communicate important messages about Mays to key constituents; benchmark Mays programs against those of top business schools; more aggressively recruit top graduate and undergraduate students; more effectively place graduate and undergraduate students with top organizations; and further identify and secure resources to support Mays’ activities.