The balance point between work, down-time and life responsibilities is constantly changing, but women must be prepared to find an equilibrium as they advance in their careers. That’s the message a panel of seven leading women in information technology shared with 75 students during the Center for the Management of Information System’s annual Women in Information Technology conference.

Though IT workers can expect more flexible work schedules, you have to earn flex-time by first proving you can work hard, said the top IT executives from ConocoPhillips, Dell and Texas Instruments who gathered in February.

“I have to let everybody know that this is my life and there’s going to be peak times at work when I’m there at all hours,” said Kim Harrison, project execution manager for Texas Instruments’ enterprise applications wing. “But there’s also going to be times when I’ve got to get home and have dinner with my son before his bedtime.”

Panel members stressed prioritizing work tasks — because, says Dell’s Global IT Director Aga Webb, you can’t tune out of a meeting like you sometimes can in college classes.  They also stressed life-long learning skills to keep your mind refreshed and always having some “me” time, whether that’s a hobby or work-out time.

The Women in IT forum encourages female students to pursue a career in the IT field by sharing the opportunities and rewards in the industry. It also provides women in the IT industry a forum for networking and developing mentoring relationships. Students spent the day sitting side-by-side with corporate IT representatives and discussed real-life issues in workshops.

The Center for the Management of Information Systems and conference sponsors Dell, ConocoPhillips and Texas Instruments also sponsored five scholarships for student participants, randomly chosen from among the attendees. Those winners are: Dinara Yunusova, Elizabeth Gillespie and Tiffany Seaman from Mays and Paviflle Benson and Erin Jones from Prairie View A&M.

Accounting Professor L. Murphy Smith received one of two university-wide Assessing Technology in Teaching Awards at the Texas A&M Assessment Conference in late February. His project assesses student learning outcomes in the use of auditing expert systems. The award includes a $1,500 prize from the Office of Distance Learning.

A manuscript detailing his learning outcomes project has also been accepted for publication in Accounting Education, an international journal published in the UK. Smith pioneered use of expert systems in accounting and was previously awarded the Outstanding Educator Award from the American Accounting Association’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies section.

MBA students Rajnish Srivastava, Sivakumar Ingersoll, Pardeep Duggal and Amitoj Arya have entered the third round, joining a field of 24 teams from an original pool of 600, in the National University of Singapore’s Global MBA Challenge.

If they advance in the third round, the team members will take their business case analysis to Singapore. There, they will present their findings and business plans to the CEO/top management team of their chosen company in addition to a panel of leading industry experts.

The NUS Business School competition is a hybrid of a business plan and business case competition. Students develop an actionable business plan that can be used by their case company to enter/expand into a target market.

Starbucks is looking for 39 store managers and will need skilled staff for the 150 stores it expects to open in the greater Houston area over the next three years. That’s just one reason Starbucks recruitersdescended on Mays for the first time at this spring’s Retailing Career Fair.

The other? “We knew to expect this, but the students are professional and their questions for us are very poignant. They understand what we do and are finding out how they can fit it,” says Starbucks recruiting coordinator Heather Russell.

The Retailing Career Fair hosted a record 40 companies this February, the same month the Business Student Council brought 122 businesses and their recruiters to campus.

Senior management major Sharon McGowen said the Business Student Council Career Fair was a great starting point for her job search. “Companies are looking for applicants in my major, which helps a lot. It’s a big reassurance.”

H-E-B has been attending Mays’ career fairs for more than 10 years. Senior Human Resource Manager Andrea Sharayha says the company’s A&M alumni employees have proven track records and move up within the company. She also says that H-E-B appreciates the values that Aggie graduates bring to the job.

Another H-E-B recruiter, Unit Director Rich White, summed it up with a smile. “Who wouldn’t want an Aggie working for them?”

Dean Jerry Strawser’s co-authored 2004 text, “Auditing & Assurance Services,” was named the Outstanding First Edition of the Year Award from McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

The book, written with Tim Louwers, Robert Ramsay and David Sinason, is a market leader in coverage of fraud. It covers the creation of the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and provides an in-depth discussion of ethics and moral reasoning.

More than 70 accounting faculty members and doctoral students from the major research schools in Texas gathered at Mays in February for a pow-wow envisioned by one of our newest accounting professors, Anwer Ahmed.

The inaugural Lone Star Accounting Research Conference hosted researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, UT-Dallas, SMU, Rice, University of Houston and A&M. The conference, co-hosted by Mays and the Department of Accounting, allowed accounting faculty to present research, gain peer feedback and explore mutual interests. It exposed PhD students to cutting-edge research as well as prospective employers.

The conference is expected to rotate among the Texas schools each year.

Associate Dean Martha L. Loudder was named a Texas A&M University System Regents Professor at the Board of Regents meeting in January. With the title comes a $9,000 stipend.

Loudder was also recently honored as the 2005 Texas Society of CPAs Outstanding Accounting Educator and was named to a 2005 Texas A&M Presidential Professorship for Excellence in Teaching by A&M President Robert M. Gates.

For more on the Regents’ award, see:http://tamusystem.tamu.edu/news/releases/2006/2006_01_26_01.html.

Accounting PhD candidate Anup Srivastava is one of 10 doctoral scholars in the nation this year to be awarded a $25,000 Deloitte Foundation Fellowship. Srivastava was among applicants from 100 universities across the United States who vied for $5,000 in support during a final year of course work and another $20,000 funding for dissertation work.

The Deloitte Fellowship program, part of the non-profit arm of accounting services firm Deloitte & Touche, has provided financial support to outstanding students in doctoral accounting since 1956. Past Fellows include Mays accounting professors Anwer Ahmed, Mary Lea McAnally and Linda Myers.

Srivastava’s dissertation examines the role of executive stock-based compensation on financial reports of public companies. His research on the relationship between CEO stock options and accounting misstatements, conducted with Mays Accounting Professor Edward Swanson and 2004 PhD graduate Jap Efendi, was featured in Business Week Online, CFO Magazine, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal.

Five Mays undergraduates are writing about their college experiences for an audience of prospective high school and transfer students in web logs (blogs) launched this spring.

The students will write at least once a month, dishing about such topics as campus life, classes, financial aid and student organizations. Their style is informal, intended for the web-savvy generation as it conducts its college search. The new approach to recruiting allows potential students to learn, through the words and stories of current students, just what college life and life in the business school is like.

Visit the blog at http://maysbschool.tamu.edu/blog/.

Leonard L. Berry, Distinguished Professor of Marketing and M.B. Zale Chair in Retailing and Marketing Leadership, will receive the 2006 Academy of Marketing Science Outstanding Teacher Award. He will be one of three recipients recognized for the award at the 2006 Academy of Marketing Science annual conference in May.

“Len enjoys a stellar reputation for excellence in teaching at Texas A&M
University,” says Rajan Varadarajan, head of marketing. “He is a role model — a distinguished scholar who excels in research, teaching and service — worthy of emulation.”

Berry will also be inducted as Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science at the conference. He is one of only two being honored with this distinction this year. No more than 3 percent of all active members of the academy can receive this designation.

Berry has received other national awards, including the Outstanding Marketing Educator Award and the Pinnacle Award for Marketing Educator of the Year, both in 2000. He is also the founding director of the Center of Retailing Studies at Mays. In 2001, Berry embarked upon a lengthy research project as a scholar-in-residence at the Mayo Clinic to gain insight on service in the healthcare industry.

“I consider teaching a privilege and always enter my classroom well-prepared and excited,” Berry says. “My students know they have a teacher who cares.”