— Robert H. Allen ’50 was elected this spring as chair of the Baylor College of Medicine Board of Trustees. Allen, a Mays benefactor who recently pledged a $1.5 million estate gift to support an endowed scholarship program for business students, has served on the Baylor College of Medicine board since 1980.

Allen is also a former Texas A&M University System Regent. A private investor who has been instrumental in the startup of several natural resource companies, including Getty Resources Ltd., Allen retired as chair and CEO from Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation in 1982. He is now the managing partner of Challenge Investment Partners, a diversified natural resources-based partnership.

— Joel Robert Lang, a 2004 MBA graduate, is the third in a recent string of Mays MBA students to be featured in BusinessWeek Online. He is profiled at:http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jul2006/bs2006076_5470_bs049_0.htm. A simple registration is required to view Lang’s profile.

— Glenn B. Voss, a 1994 marketing PhD graduate and currently a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Suzanne “Zannie” Voss, a 1992 MBA graduate currently on faculty at Duke University, are winners in the Marketing Science Institute Research Competition on Nonprofit Marketing.

The duo, along with co-author Wooseong Kang, won $7,000 for their research proposal “Managing Dynamic Customer-Donor Portfolios: A Lifetime Value Approach.” The competition, co-sponsored by the Jagdish and Madhuri Sheth Foundation and the American Marketing Association Foundation, focused on the under-researched area of nonprofit marketing to encourage further study of the nonprofit sector’s marketing competencies.

— 2005 MBA graduate Thomas McMillan, a senior marketing specialist at Lowe’s corporate offices in North Carolina, was recognized this spring with the Lowe’s Unsung Hero Award. McMillan manages all of the commercial appreciation events and has developed a new standard of excellence in offer assortment, premiums, staging, advertising, vendor participating and event execution.

MBA student Jake Fullwood is a 2006 recipient of the Texas Business Hall of Fame scholarship.

MBA students seeking a scholarship from The Texas Business Hall of Fame must be nominated by the dean of their school, maintain a 3.5 grade point average or better, and demonstrate entrepreneurial spirit. The Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation is a non-profit organization of 100 directors who are business leaders from cities throughout the state.

“The road less traveled” was the only path for 21 high school seniors to take during an organizational maze activity at a Mays session this summer. The students who attend Texas A&M’s Summer Honors Invitation Program (SHIP) are potential National Merit Scholars, selected because of their high Pre-SAT scores. The two-day program includes a two-hour session for students to explore and gain knowledge about their desired major.

The SHIP students, prospects for Honors at Mays, took only 25 minutes of trial and error to find the correct path for the entire group to cross without triggering alarms on certain squares of carpet. Each student had to complete the exercise without losing their resources—three poker chips per student—which were taken away for talking or stepping on an incorrect square twice.

Kris Morley, director of the Business Honors Program, hosted more than 100 students during the business school’s portion of SHIP this July. Her goal was to demonstrate to the pre-college students the importance of resources, especially during their first semester. Crossing the maze required figurative representations of college resources such as books, libraries, peers, professors, alumni—and most importantly, said Morley, time.

Students such as Courtney Rothe, a student at D’Hanis High School in Hondo, Texas, were at Mays because they felt the college could satisfy their desire to work with numbers.

Justin Wang, another participant, has aspirations that extend further than Texas A&M, though. The Westlake High School student, who will begin his senior year in August, plans on earning a degree in finance from Mays and to someday work at the New York Stock Exchange. His reason? A friend’s sister who was also a business major explained to him what the field has to offer—lots of fun, and with hard work, lots of money.

Business disciplines claimed 5 of the top 10 spots on Money magazine and Salary.com’s best jobs list this spring. The list was compiled based on projected growth over the next 10 years and ratings by stress levels, job flexibility and advancement opportunities.

Coming in at No. 3 is financial advisor; at No. 4 is human resource management; 6th is market research analyst; 7th is computer/IT analyst; and at 8th is real estate appraiser.

Where does your job rank? Find out at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/.

Since the inception of the week-long summer Business Career Awareness Program, 45 of the gifted students who are exposed to business careers and opportunities at Mays have chosen to attend Texas A&M as business students.

That’s 30 percent of the students who are now college-aged and have attended BCAP since the first summer it was held in 2001. This is a competitive group of students, many of whom represent the top 10 percent of their classes when they come to campus before their senior year in high school. The majority are also from under-represented groups, including Hispanics and African-Americans.

The 24 high school students in this summer’s BCAP, held in June, had average Pre-SAT test scores a full 10 points above the national and state averages. They were, on average, in the top 9.7 percent of their class.

Learn more about the program, which brings 24 to 40 students to campus each June, athttp://maysbba.tamu.edu/unique/bcap/index.html.

Mays’ MBA Program has been designated a “military friendly” program by the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), a moniker that fits the program staff’s emphasis on aid for active-duty and recently active service men and women.

Among other benefits for military, the MBA office will waive application fees for those prospective students who are, or were recently, active in the armed forces. The staff has also helped military personnel meet deadlines or has granted deadline extensions when working with service personnel on assignment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Check out the faces of Mays’ military MBAs at http://mba.tamu.edu/military/.

James Laird ’83, a BBA management graduate, joined Mays’ administration in July as the assistant dean for finance and administration. He took over for the retiring Diane Conway, who held the role for 14 years.

Laird joined Mays from Texas A&M’s College of Science, where for nearly 14 years he held a similar role in charge of the college’s finances in the non-academic assistant deanship. As Mays’ assistant dean, Laird serves as a liaison between faculty and staff needs and the university’s dynamic financial policies and procedures.

“It’s clear there’s a team approach amongst the departments and the deans in this school to be the very best they can be,” Laird said. “It’s a distinct honor to be a part of this school’s future.”

Texas A&M University System Regent Lupe Fraga, a 1957 Aggie business graduate, and his family have endowed $40,000 in scholarships to support under-represented business students at Mays.

The gift creates the Lupe “Champ” Fraga ’57 Foundation Excellence Award, which targets students including minorities and those from economically or educationally disadvantaged backgrounds.

“We have made significant progress in recruiting a diverse student body at Mays Business School,” said Dean Jerry Strawser. “Gifts like this from Lupe perpetuate the “Aggie Miracle,’ where an individual of modest means has the opportunity to receive a world-class education because of the generosity of a former student.”

The son of Mexican immigrants, Fraga attended Texas A&M on a baseball scholarship. He joined the Army, spending three years in France as a lieutenant before returning to Houston in the 1960s to purchase a small office supply company. Tejas Office Products, Inc., is now one of Houston’s largest minority-owned businesses, recording $13.75 million in annual revenues.

“I’m really excited about what Dean Strawser and his staff have been doing with Mays,” Fraga says. “I really believe in what the school is doing, and this is my family’s way of saying that someone is looking out for under-represented students and helping them out, like I once was helped.”

Fraga and his wife Irene have been married for 40 years and have three children and two grandchildren. Fraga’s son Stephen, a 1997 Texas A&M finance graduate and Tejas Office Product’s president, is the gift’s co-donor along with his wife Michelle. Lupe Fraga’s daughters are Michele Fraga and Alisa Kautzmann, who has two children along with her husband Frank.

Fraga, recently named Hispanic Business Man of the Year for the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Region III, serves as board chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ Houston Branch and was aMays Outstanding Alumnus in 2003. He was sworn in as a Texas A&M University System Regent in May 2005.

May 2006 BBA graduates benefited from some rising trends in recruitment and salary offers.

They reported an 86 percent success rate in finding employment or a job offer or gaining admittance to a graduate program. From fall 2005 to spring 2006, 540 firms recruited our BBAs, a 9 percent increase over the previous year. And 97 of those were Fortune 500 companies, compared to 88 in 2004-2005.

Even more impressively, average salaries for undergrad business students rose 8 percent from May 2005, making the average salary $43,049.

Denise and David Baggett ’81 of Houston have committed $75,000 to enhance teaching excellence at Mays Business School’s Department of Accounting.

The gift creates the Denise and David Baggett ’81 Teaching Excellence Fund, which funds curriculum enhancements in the Department of Accounting’s Professional Program and establishes an annual teaching award for an accounting faculty member who demonstrates accomplishments in teaching effectiveness, innovation, curriculum development and student service.

“David Baggett has demonstrated a consistent passion for excellence and a genuine enthusiasm for life since I first met him at his freshman orientation in 1979,” said Accounting Department Head James Benjamin. “He has been an avid supporter of our accounting program from early in his professional career. I know that this significant gift reflects his belief in the importance of dedicated and caring faculty to the success of our graduates.”

More than 1,800 students have graduated since the Professional Program’s inception in 1992. Students in the five-year program earn a BBA in accounting and a master’s degree in finance, accounting, information systems, management or marketing.

“Texas A&M is a special place for Denise and me,” says David Baggett. “As a former student, I am pleased to support Mays’ emphasis on the teaching quality of its professors.”

David Baggett earned his accounting degree from Texas A&M in 1981, graduating magna cum laude in two years. He started his career with Touche Ross and became a partner with Deloitte before serving in executive capacities in the energy and construction industries. In 2005, Baggett founded Opportune LLP, a financial consulting firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions, dispute resolution and SEC matters. At Mays, he serves on the Accounting Advisory Council and the Dean’s Development Council. The Baggetts and their two children live in Houston.