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Leeds’ MBA Ranks No. 12 of Top MBA Public Programs for Career Growth

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 16:29:04 +0000

Leeds’ MBA Ranks No. 12 of Top MBA Public Programs for Career Growth Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/16/2023 - 09:29

LinkedIn’s inaugural ranking recognizes Leeds as one of the best MBA programs for alumni career success.

Return on investment, otherwise known as ROI: it’s one of the top reasons students pursue a Master of Business Administration. For most, that means new career opportunities resulting in professional connections, promotions and higher wages—results that MBA graduates have come to expect from Leeds, one of the nation’s best programs for setting up their alumni for career success. Others are taking notice too.

On November 14, social media platform LinkedIn released their inaugural list of the top 50 business schools to grow students’ careers and ranked CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business the 36th best MBA among all AACSB-accredited, full-time programs in the United States, and the 12th best public program in the country. To compile the ranking, LinkedIn used aggregated public member data from active LinkedIn profiles and alumni profiles associated with the programs to evaluate hiring and demand; ability to advance; network strength; leadership potential; and gender diversity.

“We are very proud of our alumni and the professional success that they continue to experience after graduating from Leeds,” said Kristi Ryujin, associate dean of graduate programs at the Leeds School. “Our faculty and staff work incredibly hard to support our students and help them succeed during the program so that they continue to thrive after walking across the commencement stage.”

For Amy Link (MBA’16), the decision to attend graduate school at Leeds was influenced by the school’s close relationships with the Boulder business community. After graduating from the program, she started as a product manager with Zayo Group, a privately-held company specializing in communications infrastructure, rising to the level of vice president after multiple promotions over the years.

“I wouldn’t have been considered by Zayo without my MBA,” Link said. “Leeds was an introduction to a new network of close friends and professionals.”

Over the last several years, Leeds’ MBA program has grown significantly by adding new MBA formats, including the Hybrid and Executive MBA programs, and has also diversified the student body including the percentage of women across cohorts.

In April 2023, the full-time Leeds MBA was ranked No. 60 overall by U.S. News and World Report. Among public schools, it has steadily improved, going from No. 39 in 2022 to No. 36 last year, and to No. 32 in the most recent rankings. It remains the best full-time MBA in Colorado.

“It’s an honor that our MBA program continues to be recognized,” Ryujin said. “Leeds continues to invest in student success and it shows.”

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Media Day Highlights Dean Khatri, State’s Economic Outlook, Faculty Experts

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 17:26:41 +0000

Media Day Highlights Dean Khatri, State’s Economic Outlook, Faculty Experts Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/31/2023 - 11:26

Dean Vijay Khatri, faculty members showcase research and discuss third-quarter economic indicators.

Vijay Khatri, Tandean Rustandy Endowed Dean of the Leeds School of Business, was among the faculty members who met with journalists during Leeds Media Day.

Leeds Business School held what organizers hope will be an annual Media Day on Oct. 24, featuring faculty experts and the release of Colorado’s third-quarter economic indicators report.

Attended by local and regional media including 7News, BizWest and the Denver Gazette, the event at the Koelbel building included remarks from Colorado’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Dean Vijay Khatri, the Rustandy Endowed Dean of the Leeds School of Business.

Khatri welcomed members of the media and highlighted strategic initiatives for Leeds, including developing a framework around a culture of care; enhancing momentum in research; accelerating student-centered education; and engaging alumni, recruiters and the community.

Four Leeds faculty members then provided brief overviews of their research and expertise:

Jeffrey York, associate dean for strategic initiatives and research director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, discussed what drives the success of entrepreneurial organizations.
Kai Larsen, a professor of information systems in the Division of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics, highlighted the use of artificial intelligence in an ongoing study about the drivers of stress.
Tony Kong, associate professor of organizational leadership, reviewed his research on building inclusive workplaces.
Heather Kennedy, a teaching associate professor and consumer marketing specialist, spotlighted Boulder’s unique place in the natural and organics industry.

The event included the release of the Quarterly Business & Economic Indicators report, produced by the Leeds Business Research Division on behalf of the Colorado Secretary of State.

“We enjoyed meeting our media partners in person and connecting them with our school priorities and incredible faculty expertise,” Khatri said. “We're grateful for all that they do to inform and educate the public. Having Colorado’s Secretary of State on-site made the event especially memorable and newsworthy for all of us.”

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold discussed the Quarterly Business & Economic Indicators report, produced by the Leeds Business Research Division on behalf of the Colorado Secretary of State, during Leeds Media Day.

According to the indicators report, Colorado’s job growth cooled significantly in 2023, but the number of jobs increased 1.4% throughout the state in September versus September 2022.

“Today’s quarterly economic indicators report underscores the resilience of Colorado’s economy with continued job growth and growth in GDP, dropping inflation and evidence that existing entities in Colorado are staying in business,” Griswold said.

Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division, and Richard Wobbekind, associate dean and senior economist of the BRD, who prepared the report in conjunction with Colorado’s Secretary of State, provided context on employment and job growth, business filings, inflation and other state-level economic measurements.

“This has been an interesting year, to say the least, when you talk about the national economy,” Wobbekind said. “I don’t think anybody anticipated two quarters of GDP growth being as strong as they were in the first two quarters of the year, but certainly not the third quarter being as strong as it is right now.”

He said economists expect GDP to be over 3% in the third quarter, and some see it slowing dramatically in the fourth quarter or into next year.

“The real crux of the issue is the consumer and the ability of the consumer to come to the table,” Wobbekind said.

Following the indicators report release, Griswold, Lewandowski and Wobbekind answered reporters’ questions from members.

Dean Vijay Khatri and faculty members showcased research and discussed third-quarter economic indicators.

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Leeds’ Incoming Class Hits the Mark

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 18:23:35 +0000

Leeds’ Incoming Class Hits the Mark Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/06/2023 - 12:23

After years of rising momentum, Leeds exceeds enrollment goals and welcomes a class like no other.

The Class of 2027 poses in front of Koelbel.

It’s been years in the making—a momentum-fueled achievement reflected in this year’s incoming class, which surpassed every enrollment goal to become the most diverse and academically gifted in Leeds’ history, while reaching gender parity for the first time and becoming the largest class in nearly a decade.

Jessica McGregor, director of undergraduate recruitment and scholarships at Leeds School of Business, said, “Meeting all of our enrollment goals is incredibly exciting. It can be very challenging in the ever-changing admissions landscape to meet these benchmarks. To finally reach this point is a testament to years of work by everyone at Leeds who helps us recruit new undergraduate students.”

“Great students attract great students.”

Laura Kornish, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs

This year’s incoming class is the largest Leeds has seen since 2014. The school welcomed 684 first-year students in the Class of 2027—increasing the student body to over 4,000 strong. Poised to succeed academically, the class entered with an average 3.94 GPA (including both weighted and unweighted GPAs) and higher standardized test scores than last year.

“Great students attract great students,” said Laura Kornish, associate dean of undergraduate programs. “Leeds has so much momentum. These enrollment numbers are just one example of that momentum.”

She also noted that retention and graduation rates have reached new heights. “As exciting as our enrollment numbers are, our 2023 4-year graduation rate is even more exciting. Over 80% of students who entered in Fall 2019 graduated within four years. This is a big deal.”

Also exciting is the fact that more students in this year’s class identify as coming from a diverse background (33%) than last year. The enrollment of students of color has been steadily rising over the past few years.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCrvpMblcgM]

A surge of women

For the first time ever, Leeds welcomed more women (55%) than men (45%). This marks a monumental step toward the goal of achieving gender parity across the student body—an initiative started in 2017 called “End the Gap.”

McGregor offered her take on the influx of women: “It’s been six years of building a pipeline of female applicants through high school engagement, marketing campaigns, outreach efforts and special women’s programs. As a result, Leeds’ focus on gender equity has become more well-known.”

Zoe Cope Leeds first-year finance student, member of the Business & Engineering Women in Technology (BEWiT) program.

Zoe Cope is a first-year finance student who chose to attend Leeds after being selected for both Leeds Scholars and the Business & Engineering Women in Technology (BEWiT) program. Through her participation in BEWiT, she has learned that women are entering male-dominated industries at a higher volume than ever before.

“This program demonstrates the support system I have as a woman studying finance, and this would not be possible without the amazing programs at Leeds that support women,” said Cope, whose interest in finance came from watching her mother start an edtech company and search for funding.

MBA and MS on the rise

Graduate programs at Leeds also saw big wins this year:

The number of first-year students in all four MBA programs together rocketed 19% over last year.
Both women and diverse students rose in the Hybrid MBA.
The percentage of diverse students increased in the Evening MBA.
Leeds’ six master’s programs experienced a 24% increase in enrollment and a 31% rise in diverse students.
The (newly revamped) MS Real Estate program’s enrollment numbers soared from 10 last year to 29 this fall.
The MS in Business Analytics class experienced improved diversity.
The number of women and diverse students rose in the MS in Supply Chain Management class.

The magic of momentum

Welcoming his first incoming classes as Leeds’ new dean, Vijay Khatri said, “It is so exciting to celebrate the staff’s tireless efforts to support students: from a promise made in recruitment to the retention and graduation rates that reflect a promise kept.”

When she tried to name the specific elements that went into this year’s recruitment successes, McGregor said, “I’m not sure that I could pinpoint any one factor–I think it’s a complex web of various factors, many of which have been building momentum for some time.”

But she was sure of one thing: “It took a Leeds village to get them here.”

Why Leeds Women in Business Programs

After years of rising momentum, Leeds exceeds enrollment goals and welcomes a class like no other.

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A Brave New World of Business, Where Change is Faster Than Constant

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 06:00:00 +0000

A Brave New World of Business, Where Change is Faster Than Constant Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/04/2022 - 00:00

From Business at Leeds 2022 | Full issue

As the lines blur between business and business schools, Leeds' innovation and adaptability are keeping alumni in the driver's seat.

In the business world, change was once said to be constant.

Today, that word fails to capture the relentless pace of disruption, one in which a company’s fortunes can change seemingly overnight as a result of an innovation that unlocks a new market, enables new ways to connect to customers, or radically realigns established industry categories.

Businesses have been forced to find new ways to be agile, to anticipate change and to rethink risk as they navigate this new world. A core piece of their strategy is finding ways to partner with business schools, which have created and revamped programs to ensure graduates add value the moment they start work.

With its emphases on entrepreneurship, innovation, technology and analytics, it’s no surprise Leeds is a frequent partner of companies seeking nimble professionals.

“The field is always moving so fast—something new comes up every year,” said Dan Zhang, interim chair of Leeds’ strategy, entrepreneurship and operations division. He brings his extensive consulting experience to bear in refreshing his Advanced Data Analytics course each summer, and “if you do not do regular updates, you can’t keep up to date with industry. It’s a necessity.”

‘Data are not going away’

Industry, meanwhile, is appreciative of Leeds’ willingness to anticipate the new skills businesses will need in the years to come. Libby Duane Adams, chief advocacy officer at Alteryx, has had a front-row seat to the changes in industry since she and Dean Stoecker (IntBus’79) co-founded the software company. As Alteryx has grown, it’s begun offering scholarships to schools like Leeds to ensure graduates have the right set of skills for a workplace driven by change.

“Data are not going away,” she said. “The ability to work with data is a required skill now—and the more students invest in that skill set, and develop their ability to work with data, the richer their career opportunities are.”

Alteryx also co-sponsored a conference at Leeds over the summer that brought the directors of business analytics programs together to address and begin solving some of their shared challenges. The two-day event, which attracted representatives from nearly two dozen programs nationwide, also featured industry input through panel discussions and a keynote. Kai R. Larsen, faculty director of the master’s in business analytics at Leeds, said industry involvement showcased the scale and pace of change that has disrupted companies across the spectrum.

Poet warrior, meet Python

“Every time we ask chief information officers what they want in a recent grad, it’s always the same thing. They want a poet warrior,” Larsen said. “But in reality, they want a warrior who also knows how to program Python, and that’s what they test for in their entry interviews.”

Data and analytics are, of course, driving conversations in business. But that’s not all you need to stay current. Tim Weiss (MBA’16), co-founder and chief operating officer of Boulder-based Optera, said in his industry, new regulations and changing attitudes around climate are keying rising interest in the sustainability management software provider’s services.

“Leeds taught me new business skills and how to market myself for prospective opportunities, as well as become better engaged with the Boulder community,” Weiss said. He added, “I don’t know of any programs that specifically teach what you need to know for this industry. It’s moving too quickly.”

Faces of Leeds: Meet Tim Weiss

That said, a glance at the company’s roster shows more than a few CU Boulder alumni. “When we recruit, we try to hire the full package—which means ensuring we have fundamentally good people, for whom values are not optional,” Weiss said. “There’s a lot of great people from CU Boulder who fit that mold. We do have to train them in sustainability, but they come out with the skills needed to quickly adapt.”

Finding good people

Wanting to hire good people—not just skilled people—is an important consideration against the backdrop of shifting workplace attitudes toward ethics, said Joshua Nunziato, a teaching assistant professor in Leeds’ Social Responsibility and Sustainability Division and director of the Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative Collegiate Program. Increasingly, professionals want to work for companies that value their values; just ask Theranos, Facebook or Uber, which have all landed in hot water for conduct coming out of their C-suites.

In Nunziato’s classes, he sees a subset of students with a deep desire to make a positive social and environmental impact.

“But what interests me are those students who instead see sustainability and ethical leadership as inseparable from their own career ambitions,” he said. “It’s exciting to teach them, because they understand that ethical leadership is not an either-or choice.”

A focus on values helped Jenny Gerson (EBio’06; MBA’14) transition from working as an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service to creating a sustainability role at Zayo Group.

She’s now director of sustainability at DataBank; the company’s data centers enable the kind of cloud storage and computing power that have put data within reach at so many companies.

Too much information

“One of the ways I’ve stayed current with all the changes going on in my industry is something I learned at Leeds—networking,” she said. She started a group for sustainability professionals which numbers more than 100 people—including more than a few Leeds alumni—mainly at small to midsize tech companies in the Denver area.

“When you have a network like that, any time a question comes up, you can immediately go to someone and get a different perspective on what it means for own your work,” Gerson said. “There’s so much information out there—too much, really—and having peers who can help you focus is incredibly valuable.”

“Work has become almost a continuation of business school. Things come at you quickly, and you have to figure out how to prioritize them, solve problems and plan ahead.”

Jenny Gerson (EBio’06, MBA’14), director of sustainability, DataBank

Leeds is listening to its network, too, which helps shape its approach to academic programs. For instance, the school recently created an MBA pathway in natural and organic products in response to the needs of both small local businesses and large internationals seeking insights in an organics stronghold like Boulder. Students in this pathway spent their summers interning at companies like Jack & Annie’s, Danone and Clorox—proof that the perspective taught in the program is sought at companies of all sizes.

“Because natural and organics has become so competitive, it’s much more difficult to turn a passion project into a thriving business,” said Heather Kennedy, a teaching assistant professor and consumer marketing specialist who’s held marketing leadership roles at Whole Foods and Kraft. “These entrepreneurs need business acumen, so they can get their products to market. On the flip side, large consumer packaged goods companies see the growth of the natural industry and realize that, to stay competitive, they need to move in this direction.”

That, of course, speaks to the blurred boundaries between business and business school.

“Work has become almost a continuation of business school,” Gerson said. “Things come at you quickly, and you have to figure out how to prioritize them, solve problems and plan ahead.”

Business at Leeds magazine Graduate Programs Engage with Leeds

Curricular Updates

At Leeds, faculty leverage relationships in industry to ensure that when curricular changes are considered, they meet both current and future needs of the workplace.

Joshua Neil, faculty director of the accounting and taxation master’s program, said input from both the Big Four professional services companies and changing requirements for the CPA exam drove Leeds to add more technical courses to the curriculum.

“The accounting firms have been asking us what we’re doing in this space, probably for the last five years,” Neil said. “For students that were analytically inclined, we were able to steer them into some specialized elective courses. But data have become more mainstream in the last 18 to 24 months—you’re seeing textbooks now with tools like Tableau embedded in them, you hear from our students that they’re asked to use tools like Alteryx on their internships.”

This fall, an analytics course offered by Kai Larsen is being modified for accounting master’s students, with an emphasis on bringing in people from industry to show how these skills are used to help accountants do their jobs better.

“The CPA is doing the same thing—they’re responding to the industry, saying we need a license track in this area,” Neil said. “We’ve gone from what was a novel intersection to realizing we’re going to need a lot of jobs in this space, and you might be at a real competitive disadvantage if you don’t have these tools.”

Leeds also is increasingly intentional about hiring industry-qualified instructors, who bring real-world knowledge around topics like licensing requirements and disclosures—which may change faster than a textbook can reflect.

Ahead of the Curve

Close connections to industry and a roster of top faculty have helped Leeds create programs that meet—or anticipate—real-world demands. A few examples:

BASE. The sophomore year capstone each Leeds student completes, BASE—or B-core Applied Semester Experience—follows industry-intensive dives into each business discipline. Students learn to combine lessons from those disciplines on a real-world project that helps them determine their areas of emphasis as upperclassmen.

Business+Engineering. Much of the change driving the business world comes from technology and engineering. This program—symbolized by the new Rustandy Building—offers structured cross-collaborative opportunities between business and engineering students and faculty.

Buffs With a Brand. Developed by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship in partnership with CU’s Athletics Department, this program gives scholar-athletes tools to help them navigate the new rules around name, image and likeness use. That foresight helped CU roll out a partnership with INFLCR to create the Buffs NIL Exchange.

The pace of change has gone from constant to relentless. Leeds has the agility to provide leadership amid transformation.

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Heads of the Class: Leeds Recruits an Impressive Group of Faculty from Top Business Schools

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Heads of the Class: Leeds Recruits an Impressive Group of Faculty from Top Business Schools Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/22/2022 - 00:00

Cohort of 11 new professors brings degrees, experience from Yale, Stern, MIT, Notre Dame, INSEAD and others to Boulder. 

Leeds welcomed 11 new tenure-track faculty this fall, representing expertise in areas such as real estate finance, consumer behavior, natural language processing and risk. The new professors have taught at, and received their degrees from, some of the nation's most-respected business schools.

Amit Bhattacharjee has taught marketing in some of the world’s top schools, such as INSEAD and New York University’s Stern School of Business.

So when he says coming to the Leeds School of Business is professionally rejuvenating, that’s worth paying attention to.

“There’s a sense of joy and discovery here,” Bhattacharjee said. “To me, this place represents the reasons I got into this field, and why I chose this career in the first place.”

Bhattacharjee is one of 11 new tenure-track Leeds professors joining the �� this fall. The cohort is incredibly strong, with faculty coming from top schools (Notre Dame, Yale, HEC Paris, MIT) and boasting publication in the most prestigious journals, per the Financial Times.

“I’m so proud to welcome this new group to our outstanding faculty,” said Yonca Ertimur, acting dean of Leeds. “I’m confident each will contribute meaningful research that positively impacts industry, consumers, investors and regulators.”

MORE: Meet CU Boulder's new faculty for 2022

The research culture was a key reason Christophe Spaenjers accepted an offer at Leeds. His specialty is real estate and finance; Leeds is home to two Centers of Excellence in these disciplines.

“Leeds has a really good academic environment, with a lot of people who specialize in the topics I’m interested in,” said Spaenjers, who previously was finance department head at HEC Paris. “I’m really looking forward to working with my fellow researchers here.”

Another former Stern professor, Alix Barasch, cited the community in explaining why she came to Leeds.

“The group is so warm and welcoming and inviting,” said Barasch, a marketing expert. “It’s a rare combination of top-quality researchers who just happen to be a nice group of very genuine people.”

“The Leeds community is caring, and I feel very lucky to join the world-class faculty here.”

Tony Kong, associate professor

David Dobolyi, who joins Leeds from Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the collaboration Leeds fosters across departments—which enables professors to do unique research in areas where disciplines overlap—was key in his decision to join the faculty.

“The people we met at orientation today, they’ve all been here 15, 20 years,” Dobolyi said. “That just tells you this is a place you want to stay.”

The sense of community also was important to Tony Kong, previously faculty director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership at the University of South Florida.

“Leeds is entrepreneurial, vibrant, inclusive and growing,” Kong said. “The Leeds community is caring, and I feel very lucky to join the world-class faculty here.”

Meet this year’s incoming faculty cohort.

Accounting

Austin Moss. Moss completed his PhD in accounting from the University of Iowa in the spring. His research interests revolve around financial reporting and individual investor behavior, including the use of unique data and settings to study real-world financial market phenomena. He has co-authored several working papers concerning topics like ESG investing, fake news and politics.

Finance

Ran Shi. Shi comes to Leeds from the London School of Economics, where he recently completed his doctoral degree. His research interests are related to finance.

Jaehee Song (left). Song completed her PhD in economics from Yale University in 2022. Her research interests include urban and real estate economics, public economics and industrial organization.

Christophe Spaenjers (right). Spaenjers previously was the finance department head at HEC Paris, where he had taught since earning his PhD in 2011 from Tilburg University. Spaenjers’ research interests include investing, investor behavior, household finance, corporate finance and financial history; his work in these areas has been published in Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and Management Science, among others.

Marketing

Alix Barasch (left). Barasch joins Leeds from New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she hired as an assistant professor of marketing in 2016. Her research examines social aspects of consumption, and has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research, among others. She holds a PhD in marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Amit Bhattacharjee (right). Bhattacharjee joins Leeds from INSEAD, where he was an associate professor of marketing. He also taught at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and served as a visiting scholar at New York University and Dartmouth College. His research examines how moral psychology shapes consumer behavior, and has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and Harvard Business Review. His research was recognized with the Journal of Consumer Research Best Article Award in 2017, and he was selected as a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar in 2019. Bhattacharjee earned his a PhD in marketing from Wharton.

Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics

David Dobolyi (left). Prior to joining Leeds, Dobolyi was an assistant research professor at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business; he also was on the faculty of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce after earning his PhD in cognitive psychology from UVA. His work has been published in Information Systems Research, among others.

Abram Handler (center). An expert in natural language processing, Handler served as a research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst prior to joining Leeds. He has a colorful work history that includes internships with BuzzFeed and Agolo in the data science and natural language processing specialties, software development for the Louisiana Office of Public Health, and an investigator in a public defender’s office in the Bronx, New York. Handler earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Mass Amherst.

Dejun “Tony” Kong (right). Kong comes to Leeds by way of the University of South Florida, where he was faculty director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership. His research interests include leadership, culture, trust and negotiation; insights in these areas have been published in the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Business Ethics and many others. Kong was named to Poets&Quants’ 40 Under 40 list of best business school professors in 2019. He completed his MBA and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Kong also is an associate editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Rebecca Mitchell. Mitchell comes to Leeds fresh off her PhD at Michigan State’s Broad College of Business. She worked as a healthcare associate with Huron Consulting Group before enrolling in the doctoral program. She studies topics related to organizational research and behavior.

Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Operations

Ethan Poskanzer. Poskanzer joins Leeds from the Sloan School of Business at MIT, where he completed his doctoral work in economic sociology. Prior to enrolling at MIT, Poskanzer worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, specializing in risk management.

Notably, Leeds also hired 14 new nontenure-track professors for the fall, for a total of 25 new faculty members.

Ertimur is excited for the opportunity to help this talented new group settle in and create impact.

“The quality of our most recent cohort of new faculty, in addition to last year’s cohort, enhances the expertise our students are exposed to,” she said. “I’m excited about the enthusiasm these new professors bring to Leeds and look forward to the impact they will have on our students, our CU Boulder community and society.”

Why Leeds Faculty and Research Centers of Excellence

Eleven new tenure-track professors, from the nation's best schools of business, joined Leeds this fall.

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At Alteryx, Scholarships are ‘Our Responsibility’ to Help Aspiring Leaders Develop Skills for Changing Workplaces

Anonymous — Fri, 27 May 2022 15:57:52 +0000

At Alteryx, Scholarships are ‘Our Responsibility’ to Help Aspiring Leaders Develop Skills for Changing Workplaces  Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/27/2022 - 09:57

Software company’s co-founder says businesses need graduates who aren’t intimidated by data.

When she co-founded Alteryx 25 years ago, Libby Duane saw a need to bring business analytics to the masses. Part of that vision now includes scholarships for Leeds students like Jordyn Gerstle-Goodman (below right), who graduated in May.

When she co-founded Alteryx in 1997, Libby Duane and her partners had a clear vision for a future in which business analytics would go from being the role of a specialized set of knowledge workers to the responsibility of everyone throughout the organization.

It’s safe to say that the world, in the last 25 years, has proved her right.

“Analytics is no longer reserved for just a chosen few in the business,” she said. “It has become our responsibility, as business leaders, to ensure students are graduating with these data and analytics skills, to make them better job candidates and prepare them for long-term success.”

That’s a key reason that Alteryx has become a partner for life-changing scholarships at the Leeds School of Business at the ��. Beyond extending support for underrepresented and first-generation college students, Duane—now chief advocacy officer at the software company—said the business world needs graduates who aren’t intimidated by data.

“Data is not going away. And the ability to work with data is a job-required skill now,” she said. “And the more students invest in that skill set, and develop their ability to work with data, the richer their career opportunities are.”

That’s certainly true for Jordyn Gerstle-Goodman (IA, Fin’21; MSBA’22). She learned about data science during her undergraduate work, and thanks to an Alteryx scholarship, was able to immediately pursue her master’s degree while getting exposure to an invaluable set of tools.

“With the Alteryx scholarship specifically, it’s very much centered around my skill set,” said Gerstle-Goodman, who is returning to Disney following an internship in data analysis at the company. “The money obviously helps, but there are also these great learning opportunities. I got to attend coding boot camps and had access to Alteryx tools, in addition to job opportunities.”

While Gerstle-Goodman is a confident coder, Duane—who has a background in marketing—is not. But that doesn’t mean she abstains from analysis.

“Modern analytics is both code-free and code-friendly,” she said. “We need to be able to support all the learning styles and skills that every learner has, and that’s what the Alteryx analytics platform enables. It enables you to learn analytics as a code-free individual, which is me.”

“Data is not going away. And the ability to work with data is a job-required skill now.”

Libby Duane, co-founder and chief advocacy officer, Alteryx

That’s a key reason Alteryx is so invested in business school students, through scholarships as well as its SparkED educational initiative. The company does support students in other disciplines, from engineering and computer science to medicine, “but it’s business schools where we see all these departments and disciplines that have built pipelines to companies that are the biggest consumers of analytics right now,” she said. Alteryx and Leeds share another key connection—the company’s executive chairman, Dean Stoecker, is a Leeds alumnus who studied international business at CU Boulder.

A key feature of business programs

At Leeds, analytics have become a core feature of many academic programs, from undergraduate programs in information management and accounting to master’s degrees in supply-chain management and business analytics. Earlier this month, with support from Alteryx, Leeds hosted a conference for directors of business analytics master’s programs, to help schools examine best practices and figure out how to collaborate in keeping cutting-edge programs current with the requirements of industry.

And for those business schools, Duane said, it’s important to ensure graduates are comfortable with data while getting familiar with analytics, and learn how to interpret information and use data to tell a story to make better decisions—regardless of what industry they end up in.

“It does not matter where your passions are,” she said. “Whether you have an interest in entertainment, fashion, automotive, financial services, sports—analytics is everywhere, because data is everywhere. Students shouldn’t think, ‘I’m going to go into fashion, I don’t need analytics.’ Yes, you do.”

If your company is interested in supporting scholarships for Leeds students, please contact the industry and foundation relations team.

Why Leeds Master's in Business Analytics Support Leeds Scholarships

The software company's co-founder says businesses need graduates who aren't intimidated by data.

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