The Association of Former Students handed out three college-level awards in teaching excellence this fall to Finance Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Advisor Lanny Martindale, Associate Professor of Accounting Mary Lea McAnally and Professor of Management and Mays Research Fellow Ramona Paetzold.

Assistant Professor of Management Elizabeth Umphress was also named a Montague-CTE scholar. The Montague award is given to the most promising pre-tenure teacher/scholars, who each receive a $5,000 grant to pursue research on innovative teaching techniques.

Texas A&M’s new recruiting and marketing video, “Welcome to Aggieland,” made its debut on campus this fall and is being broadcast at Kyle Field and on TV during football games. Mays’ Reliant Trading Center is part of the final video that shows off Aggieland. Check it out at http://www.tamu.edu/home/video/.

Want to know the story behind the new promotional video? Find it athttp://www.tamu.edu/home/spotlight/marketing.html.

Speaking of Texas A&M… to stay up on the latest initiatives that are driving progress at the university, President Robert M. Gates’ 2006 “state of the university” address might be of interest. You can find the text of his Sept. 8 speech at http://www.tamu.edu/convocation/convaddress/gates06.html.

First-year MBA students gained a career’s worth of advice in management process and careful yearly planning when former Emerson CEO C.F. Knight stopped by Mays in mid-September. “Set tough targets, develop plans and programs, set up measures to make sure it’s working, and then pay people for the results,” Knight said of the annual planning reviews held for each of 80 Emerson subsidiaries. “It really is that simple, don’t let politics get in the way.”

Knight’s 27 years as CEO included dividend returns each and every year. The Emerson visionary was also on hand to sign copies of his 2005 book Performance Without Compromise: How Emerson Consistently Achieves Winning Results.

For the third consecutive year, the last week of summer break for some of Mays’ students consisted of much more than alarm-less mornings. This year 28 management information systems undergraduates attended a three-day retreat in Navasota, Texas, to focus on leadership and team building.

With a wake up call at 7:30 a.m. and lights out at midnight, the students took full advantage of their days. The Center for the Management of Information Systems’ Leadership Retreat was an informative student getaway full of useful tips and techniques for the workplace.

A unit on team building focused on job skills ranging from communication to trust and patience. Retreat speakers addressed conflict resolution, wellness and motivational practices. Students also attended an etiquette session and visited with representatives from Dell, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Anadarko. The retreat was also sponsored by OfficeMax.

Tim O. Peterson, Mays’ director of undergraduate learning assurance, stressed the importance of understanding conflict resolution in business. His primary focus was on the change in the workplace that IT professionals initiate. “You are change agents,” he instilled in them, “and employees are going to resist you.”

While the retreat’s purpose is to teach undergraduates the importance of leadership, senior Jennifer Smith said it did more than that. “When I attended the first CMIS Leadership Retreat I had not even decided if I was going to declare my major as INFO (information and operations management),” Smith said. “But they offered so much advice and encouragement that even before leaving the retreat I had decided INFO was where I wanted to be.”

Potential employers say the retreat broadens students’ perspectives—and makes them even more attractive to the workforce.

“The course work is important, but students get exposure to other aspects that really will pay dividends in their careers—teamwork, wellness, manners, networking and fun,” says Carl Wilganowski, manager of ITS Customer Service for Anadarko. “This really will differentiate you from your peers.”

“Jon (Sean) Jasperson, clinical assistant professor in information and operations management, won the 2006 Best Published Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Communications and Information Systems Division.

He won the award, along with co-authors Pamela Carter and Robert Zmud, for the September 2005 MIS Quarterly paper, “A Comprehensive Conceptualization of the Post-Adoptive Behaviors Associated with Information Technology Enabled Work Systems.”

This isn’t the first time Jasperson’s work has won best-paper accolades. His research entitled “Power and Information Technology Research: A Metatriangulation Review” about the role of power and information technology in organizations was recognized as the best paper published inMIS Quarterly during 2002.

Jasperson joined Mays in 2005 from the University of Oklahoma. His research has also been published inCommunications of the ACM, Communications of the AIS, Journal of Information Systems Education andJournal of Information Systems.

How do you swing a pickaxe, sheetrock a wall and learn what it’s like living in the shadows of the legendary Count Dracula’s castle?

For the first two weeks of classes this fall, two Mays students encountered a different set of lessons when they joined a group of Mitte Foundation scholars in a Habitat for Humanity build in the Transylvanian Alps of Romania.

Jace Goodier, a senior in the Professional Program, and junior finance major Danny Pohlmann joined a dozen fellow Mitte scholars from across the U.S. in early September to help reconstruct a concrete apartment building that will house working-class families living near Pitesti, Romania. The work was grueling and labor-intensive as the team dug out trenches to connect the building to a water supply, knocked down walls and framed out doors to expand the original one-room apartments into living spaces for families.

Blisters that rose the first day of construction were still healing on the students’ hands weeks later. But the Mays scholars admitted the work tapped into in their sense of service and gave them an amazing week-long experience with tools and physical concepts.

“I was actually building and reshaping a family’s home, and I could see that as I would swing my pickaxe to knock out a wall,” Goodier said. “I could see the benefits as I worked alongside the moms and dads who would live there. In accounting with a client, you don’t always get to see the end results of your work.”

The duo also got to see the countryside, venturing into long-hidden crawlspaces inside Dracula’s castle and befriending their Romanian translator to learn more about the pride and pitfalls of the former communist country. Their day-long labor at the build site was offset by the comfortable hotels and three-course meals that greeted the workers at the end of the day, courtesy of the Mitte Foundation. “It was invigorating—some of the 12 best days of my life,” Pohlmann said.

The MBA program was ranked 16th public regional in The Wall Street Journal this year, coming in at 31 overall in regional rankings. In 2005, Mays’ regional ranking was 28.

The schools in the regional list in the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive 2006 rankings of graduate business schools tend to draw many of their recruiters from their local regions. The Journal also tabulates a national rankings list for schools it determines draw more national recruiters.

The rankings are based on how recruiters rated each school on 20 different attributes, their future plans to recruit at the school, and the number of survey respondents who said they had recruited recently at the school.

Kelli Kilpatrick joined Mays Business School as the MBA Program director this fall, arriving in September from her previous role as director of recruitment and admissions for Duke University’s top-ranked Executive MBA Programs.

Kilpatrick, who has spent much of her career in enrollment management consulting and strategy, is charged with helping expand the Mays MBA Program’s outreach to attract a broader base of students. She says that in turn will strengthen the program for students and faculty alike.

This year, 29 percent of Mays’ domestic MBA students were from outside Texas, and 46 percent of those seeking employment were hired by companies outside Texas. As Mays seeks to expand its appeal beyond Texas to recruit great students from a broader geographic base, Kilpatrick says the character of the MBA program will also change to reflect the input of new students.

The value of an MBA degree is directly related to what each student and faculty member brings to the overall experience both inside and outside the classroom, the new director says.  “We already have a great program, and we want to attract, retain and graduate outstanding students whose demographics reflect the ever expanding global landscape in which we live and work,” Kilpatrick explains. “We’re going to keep doing the things that work well for us, and we’ll bring in new ideas to continue moving student satisfaction in the program in an upward trajectory while maintaining the high placement rates of our MBA graduates.”

Of the MBA graduates seeking employment in 2006, 92 percent had offers at graduation and 98 percent accepted offers within 90 days of graduation. That already puts Mays’ MBA Program among the top programs on the globe in terms of placement: Mays was tied for 1st public program in the nation and tied for 3rd worldwide in that category in the London-based Financial Times‘ 2006 rankings.

Mays’ MBA Program enrolls 75 students a year in a compact, 16-month course of study that’s ranked among the top 15 public programs in the U.S., according to the 2007 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Kilpatrick, who takes over the director’s duties from Mays Associate Dean Bala Shetty, holds a master’s of education in higher education administration from the University of South Carolina. She spent six years consulting for enrollment management firm Noel-Levitz, and most recently served as recruitment and admissions director for Duke’s MBA-Global Executive, MBA-Cross Continent and MBA-Weekend Executive programs.

Thomas J. Saylak ’82, president of Merrill Lynch Global Commercial Real Estate in New York City, was appointed this July to the Texas A&M Foundation Board of Trustees.

Saylak, who grew up in Bryan, Texas, has been a special advisor to the foundation’s investment advisory board since 2002. At Merrill Lynch, he oversees real estate investment banking, commercial mortgage lending and principal investment activities worldwide.

Accounting lecturer Natalie Allen and finance clinical associate professor Tim Dye are both Fish Camp namesakes for 2006. Fish Camps, extended Aggie orientation camps for new freshmen, are named for those individuals at Texas A&M who make an impact on the lives of Aggies.