At 9:00 p.m. on Friday nights last semester, you could find students enrolled in Strategic Management for Multinational Corporations:

1. celebrating the end of a busy week by kicking back with friends over an evening snack and beverage
2. catching up with their families as well as on non-work and non-school responsibilities
3. riveted to their computers to see how they did in a class project

The answer: C. Members of the class hovered at their computers, waiting to see how they scored on an international web-based simulation called Business Strategy Game (BSG).

The image of paper planes flying around a classroom may bring to mind naughty elementary school children. But, in Operational Management, taught by Chris Ellis (EMBA ’97, BS ’92), instructor, Department of Decision Sciences and Information Systems, those airborne craft represent a lot of effort and teamwork.

Students in the course form teams and create a plane manufacturing facility from the ground up. In four, thirty-minute timed sessions—each representing a business quarter—production groups work on planes. Functional roles include measuring, folding, gluing, coloring, and cutting.

“At the end of each quarter, each fifteen-person group would count its inventory to determine what was work in process, what it needed to order, what the expenses were, and what the return on investment was,” said Nitza Manes, manager, planning and inventory control department at Sony, who is a junior majoring in marketing. “Ellis compared them and declared a winner, looking at who exceeded expenses, who had the biggest gross profit, who was bringing in too much via air freight, who had too much raw material in inventory, and other factors. We knew the first quarter would be expensive because we were setting up and purchasing tools and machinery. After that, our numbers were expected to improve.” Full story.

South Floridians are very familiar with Commercebank. But they probably don’t recognize the name Evan Sicle (BBA ’94), even though her work is central to the banking convenience upon which Commerce’s customers have come to rely.

As assistant vice president for operational risk management, Sicle works as part of a team charged with keeping services online, even in the midst of natural disasters and other emergencies. In hurricane-prone South Florida, she fulfills a critical function at the bank. 

The Cuban-born Sicle recalls that when Hurricane Wilma blew into town, she and her team had the bank in full swing by the next business morning. They pay almost as much attention to the national hurricane warning system as do local meteorologists.

If you happened to visit Burger King’s corporate headquarters in Miami this summer, chances are good you might have crossed paths with a student from the College of Business Administration.

“I’m pleased to report that nine of the twenty-four summer interns at Burger King this year came from Florida International University's graduate and undergraduate programs—and six of those were from the College of Business Administration,” said Barry Shiflett, director of Career Management Services. “I’m even prouder to say our interns joined students from other leading universities such as Harvard, Duke, Wharton, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.”

Jose’ Tomas (BBA ’92), vice president of human resources at Burger King and also chairman of the Master of Science in Human Resource Management (MSHRM) Advisory Board, offers words of praise for the university’s interns.

When Michael Ashenuga (MBA ’06) went to work for his new company in 2002, he never imagined that in four years it would spawn a major breakthrough for patients with advanced heart failure. The business was in financial straits and had lost all but one investor. But what it hadn’t lost was a belief in its product and a vision for how it could bring hope to patients with severe heart disease and few treatment options. 

After regrouping, the company gave itself a new name—Heartware, Inc.—and set about raising capital to test and market its innovative heart pump device. In 2006, Heartware reaped the benefits of its hard work when surgeons at Vienna General Hospital implanted the first heart pump into an Austrian man in his 40s. Ashenuga was on hand for the momentous occasion.

On her first day as human resource specialist with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Michelle Dunn (MSHRM ’06, BS ’99) talks excitedly about her new role and responsibilities.

“I’ll be supporting Celebrity Cruises, which is Royal Caribbean’s top line,” she said. “The job provides an excellent opportunity for me to put my analytical and program implementation skills to work as a strategic partner to the human resources managers on the cruise ships.”

New York City. The National Basketball Association. All-star events. Globally recognized brands. It all added up to an exciting internship for Yvonne Nelson (IMBA ’06, BBA ’03).

She’s felt the adrenaline rush, complete with the pressure and competitiveness of, say, a Miami Heat game.

When you think about MTV, you probably first think about new tunes, cool celebrities, and slick music videos. But MTV also is a large international corporation—one that provided three students in the College of Business Administration’s Master of International Business (MIB) program with an excellent learning experience.

The hardest part of writing a research paper often starts before the writing begins. Do I have a worthwhile topic? Will it keep my interest? Will it captivate the reader, especially if the reader is my teacher? Has it been done before?

These questions and more plague the serious researcher—whether in high school or at the highest level of academia. Yet, no one disputes the value of well-done scholarship: it adds to the field of study, delivers highly-useful information to academics and non-academics alike, and sometimes brings recognition to the hard-working investigators in the form of awards.

“The more you give to others, the more you get back—not materially but spiritually,” said Christian Jarquin (BBA ’06), whose eyes were opened to the value of volunteering at fourteen when he began a four-year volunteer stint at Cedars Medical Center in Miami. “You wake up every morning and feel that you are alive and have contributed something to the world.”

Since that youthful experience, this magna cum laude graduate in International Business Honors, who transferred from Miami Dade College to Florida International University and the Honors College on a Presidential Scholarship, has:

• worked on Habit for Humanity projects
• spoken at conventions about the importance of non-violence
• participated in the College of Business Administration’s first Global Leadership and Service Project (GLSP)–Bangkok
• co-led the GLSP “Nicaragua December of Dreams I”
• begun to lead the second GLSP to Nicaragua, including making media appearances to generate support for fundraising efforts and garnering further support from TACA Airlines
• caught the attention of Tony Lesesne, chair of Lesesne Media Group, a multimedia entertainment company and publisher of In Focus magazine, through their mutual involvement with Inroads, a non-profit that provides leadership training, access, and interns to corporate America
• become a U.S. citizen. Full story.

It started as a class assignment from Robert Hogner, associate professor in the Department of Management and International Business and coordinator of the College of Business Administration’s Civic Engagement Initiative. He told his students in his Business and Society class to design a community service project.

That’s all Gabriel “Gabe” Menocal (BBA ’96) needed to hear.

Along with four of his classmates, Menocal launched what became one of the college’s most successful social justice projects—the Florida International University Foodrunners. The program organized food distribution to Miami’s homeless. Initially run by a handful of students, at its height the Foodrunners engaged hundreds of business students each year. Menocal’s initiative earned him the university’s nomination for Miami Herald’s featured student at his graduation ceremony. Full story.