SPRING 2006
VOL. 7 NO. 2

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Smith’s new Undergraduate Fellows program leverages big-school advantages to create a unique small-school learning experience.

250 Freshmen Come Together for Orientation Several Robert H. Smith School of Business freshmen got to know their classmates even before the fall semester began Aug. 30. The approximately 250 first-year students played games, bonded over meals and helped each other complete a ropes course and climbing wall as part of their orientation to the Smith Undergraduate Fellows Program. [more]

With 1800 juniors and seniors and 700 freshmen and sophomores, the Smith School undergraduate student body is a force to be reckoned with. But a crowd is not necessarily a community, and in some cases size can actually be a hindrance. But not for the Smith School. Watch us leverage our big-school advantages to reinvent the future of undergraduate education. Welcome to the Undergraduate Fellows program.

Size Matters

The Smith Undergraduate Fellows program was birthed at the intersection of two ideas. The first idea sprang from a benchmarking exercise conducted by the Smith School at a management retreat in 2004. Smith School Dean Howard Frank and his team noted that schools offering the very best undergraduate education differed from Smith in two significant ways: they were much smaller, and they were very highly funded. Fewer students and an abundance of cash allowed for more enrichment activities and a greater feeling of community among students. Frank and his team began pondering ways to create a small-school feeling in Smith’s big-school environment.

The second idea came from University of Maryland President C.D. Mote, Jr., who in his September 13, 2004 State of the Campus Address issued a promise: that all students at the University of Maryland would have the opportunity to participate in a special program during their time here. The university devised the President’s Promise initiative to encourage the creation of such special programs.

Together, these two ideas became the recipe for the Smith Fellows Program: a series of specialized tracks which would create small communities of scholars within the larger Smith School community. “Once we realized the potential of these tracks,” says Frank, “we looked at our size in a completely different way. It was no longer a matter of how to fix a liability, but of how to mine the potential.”

Several specialized tracks already exist: the Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) program, the Business Honors program, and College Park Scholars, the university’s living/learning honors program. All are tremendously successful—and tremendously competitive. “We always have more students wanting to be a part of QUEST or the honors program than we have slots available,” says Patricia Cleveland, associate dean of undergraduate programs. “We have such an incredibly talented student body. We wanted to make these special opportunities available to every student.”

Starting in fall 2006, the Freshman Fellows program will give students those opportunities from the very beginning of their time at the Smith School. The large freshman lecture course BMGT-110, Introduction to 21^st Century Business, will be divided into eight sections, creating eight cohorts of 40 to 45 students within the freshman class. Co-curricular activities will help develop relationships within the cohorts and a sense of community. Throughout their freshman year, students will have the opportunity to participate in large group activities and cohort activities, ranging from field trips and movie nights to service projects. Freshman Fellows replicates the advantages of a small-school environment—close-knit relationships and community—with the advantages of a big-school environment—diversity of options and plenty of opportunities.

Learn by Doing

One advantage of the Smith School’s size is the breadth of specialized tracks we are able to offer. Some of the tracks under consideration include: Sports Management Fellows Fellows Leadership Fellows Consulting Computational Marketing Fellows Real Estate Management Biotechnology Management Business and the Arts Philanthropy and Not-for-Profit Management Certification in Reuters, Bloomberg, Six-Sigma In order to make good on the President’s Promise, the Smith School will eventually offer 20 or more such tracks—in effect creating a series of smaller schools within the larger school.

In their junior and senior years, students will again have the opportunity to participate in a Fellows track that allows them to specialize in a specific area of business. This will help them prepare for the marketplace without sacrificing the depth of their general education. The Entrepreneurship Fellows track, to be launched in fall 2006, will offer four courses on the principles and practices of entrepreneurship, as well as co-curricular activities with the Smith School’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Fellows will participate in projects and workshops, help organize business plan competitions, and meet both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. It’s a learn-by-doing approach that will give students a jump-start as they head to the business world.

Smith already offers a Research Fellows track, where students work on research projects with faculty members, and a Smith Technology Fellows track, where students apply information technology to business problems. By fall 2008, a wide range of Fellows tracks will be offered. “Many business schools have honors programs, but no one is offering anything like the scope and scale of the Smith Fellows program,” says Cleveland. “We’re able to support this breadth of programming because our faculty span such a wide range of excellence. We’re not just strong in one academic discipline. We’re strong in all of them.”

“No one else is really in a position to do what we’re doing,” agrees Frank. “No school has better students than ours, and we have a great faculty. The fact that we are a large school is no longer a disadvantage. Now it’s a competitive advantage, because it gives us the means to create and support so many specialized tracks.”

In fact, the Smith School’s size—large, but not enormous—is perfectly and rather uniquely suited to offer the Fellows program. “Small business schools don’t have enough students to offer a large number of tracks, while huge business schools would also need commensurately huge financial resources to support it,” explains Frank.

Co-curricular activities—extras that support what students are learning in the classroom—are a key component of the Fellows program. Internships both in the United States and abroad, field trips to the floor of a Midwestern factory or the New York Stock Exchange, retreats and conferences to foster leadership skills, all contribute to a student’s personal growth and development. The final result is a series of experiences that could only happen at the Smith School.

The amount of time a student will spend on his or her fellowship, outside of regular classes, varies from track to track. QUEST students attend retreats off-campus, take team-based courses and participate in an intensive senior-year consulting project. Entrepreneurship Fellows will take four extra courses and participate in activities at the Dingman Center. Supply Chain Fellows may take one additional specialized class to ground the program, but most of their extra time will be spent attending trade shows and doing an internship on Fridays throughout their junior and senior years. International Fellows, who will carry a double major in international business and a foreign language, will study abroad for at least one semester.

Participating in a Fellows track will represent a significant commitment of time and energy for students. Cleveland knows that not every student will be interested in taking on extra responsibilities outside of the Smith School’s already-demanding regular course load, but she expects that at least 75 percent of students will choose to participate in a Fellows track.

Managing the Cost

Students may have to worry about managing their work when they’re in a Fellows track, but they won’t have to worry about managing the cost. Fellows tracks are included in tuition, aside from a few nominal fees for events. In fact, some students, like the Research Fellows, receive generous scholarships or stipends for participating in a Fellows track.

The Smith School has committed to running the Fellows program without additional costs to students, but that doesn’t mean that the program is cost-free. Additional courses will mean extra faculty teaching time. Extra activities will mean extra staff time. And all of that extra time means extra money.

Much of the initial cost of the Fellows program is being absorbed by the Smith School, with a jump-start from a former undergraduate. Alumnus Robert H. Smith ’50 made a major commitment to the University in 2005. “About $9 million of his gift is being put toward making the Smith Fellows program a reality,” says Frank. “That $9 million will flow in to the school over the next eight years.” The university has also made a significant financial commitment to the program. And other alumni and corporate partners have already shown their support as well—for example, Citigroup gave $10,000 to send emerging student leaders (a future Fellows track) to leadership conferences.

Alumni will also have opportunities to contribute their time, talents and experience to the Fellows program.  Tracks will need mentors, guest lecturers, and expert advisors. Alumni can hire student interns, sponsor student consulting projects, or host field trips to their places of business.

“There won’t be a better buy for undergraduate education anywhere,” says Frank. “We have the resources, we have the commitment, and above all we have all these excellent students. I’m convinced we can offer the best undergraduate business education on earth. This is the kind of challenge worth doing.”

	Twenty-two students participated in last semester’s launch of Smith Research Fellows, which allows undergraduates to partner with faculty members pursuing research projects. Students learn through the research process and participate in data collection and compilation, modeling, presentation and other tasks under faculty supervision while earning a stipend for their efforts. The Fellows worked on a variety of projects, including: writing white papers on the state of electronic markets in various industries gathering data for a study that examined the self-serving bias as it affects auditors’ beliefs about tradeoffs between retaining audit clients versus improving audit quality testing and demonstrating auction mechanisms for a variety of applications including industrial and government procurement, real-time ticket sales for sporting events, allocation of landing/take-off slots at airports gathering data about private security offerings by public firms collection, coding, organization, and analysis of detailed data about patents, and corresponding data about the companies that use them for research on the changing nature of intellectual property managing the distribution of the survey instruments, collecting of survey instruments and coding and inputting of data for a study of the motor carrier industry’s adoption of information technology to manage safety performance Web-based coding and analysis of data regarding how young start-up ventures in the biotech sector evolve » Learn more about the Research Fellows program, including a complete list of this year's research projects.

Research Fellows Experience

by Janelle Downing

I applied for the opportunity to be a Smith Research Fellow in the fall of 2005. It is a unique experience because it provides me with an opportunity to gain transferable skills like learning statistical software packages, using scholarly resources, developing and testing research hypotheses, and writing research articles. 

I am the Research Fellow for the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS), which was initially formed to encourage and sponsor research to improve the delivery and quality of healthcare through the use of Health Information Technology (HIT). I joined this research center because I am interested in learning more about the U.S. healthcare system and in the future I wish to apply and develop this knowledge in developing nations. There has been an increased focus by President Bush, as well as other politicians and administrators, on improving our healthcare system which makes it exciting to be at the forefront of this type of academic research. 

I am currently collaborating with Corey Angst, PhD candidate and associate director of CHIDS on a paper which examines a relatively new innovation known as an electronic Personal Health Record (PHR). The PHR is receiving a lot of media attention and we are exploring various aspects of the design and use of the technology.  It is exciting because we are working with real data that was collected from clinicians and other stakeholders using a Web-based survey. We hope to submit this for publication to a health informatics journal, which is an exciting experience for an undergraduate, not only for the exposure, but also for the opportunity to understand how the academic publishing cycle works.

I also had the opportunity to attend the CIO Forum sponsored by Smith School which featured discussions on the challenges of managing firms when technology is changing so rapidly. There was a good discussion of the application and use of information technology in the healthcare industry which was presented by a prominent panel of speakers from pharmaceutical and medical information systems companies. This was a terrific networking experience that allowed me to gain an understanding of the importance of a center like CHIDS outside academia.