Business
schools straddle the realms of theory and practice. Any sound
business education provides students with an understanding of
the basic principles – of everything from accounting to
macroeconomics – and an appreciation of how issues play
out in the world. An excellent business education affords students
the opportunity to deal with both theory and practice at the
highest level.
In our fields, we frequently construct models that
describe how things are supposed to work, or how we think they
should work.
But we constantly test them by examining data, by working with
and talking to practitioners, and by incorporating observations
and experience into our thinking.
At NYU Stern, the boundaries between
the campus and the business world are porous. And we have the
great geographic fortune to be
located in New York, which is home to an unrivaled concentration
of businesses. As a result, our faculty and students have the opportunities
to validate their theories and models with industry counterparts
who are at the tops of their respective fields.
For example, NYU Stern’s proximity to Wall Street – and
the prospect for collaboration it affords – was one of the
factors that attracted Robert Engle to Stern in 2000. Professor
Engle, was named a Nobel Prize winner in economics last fall for
his work in developing and applying models to analyze and forecast
volatility. Every day, on trading floors a few miles to the south
of our campus, investors and analysts put his models to work.
New
York is home to a stunning array of non-profit organizations – symphonies
and opera companies, giant foundations and hospitals, and small
neighborhood economic development groups. All these organizations
can benefit from the adaptation of management best practices,
and our students can benefit from learning more about how these
organizations
work – and about the work they do. That’s why we
developed the Stern Consulting Corps (SCC) program.
Under this
innovative consulting internship program, which involves
about 50 students each semester, NYU Stern MBA students put into
practice the skills and knowledge they gain in the classroom
to help revitalize small and minority-owned businesses in New
York
City. SCC serves as the umbrella for a unique partnership among
NYU Stern, non-profit organizations such as the Harlem Small
Business Initiative, the Robin Hood Foundation and SEEDCO; and
management
consulting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton and A.T. Kearney.
Working in partnership, the non-profit organizations provide
Stern MBA students with their assignments, and volunteers from
the consulting
firms serve as mentors on the projects. In turn, businesses and
non-profits benefit from the Stern MBA students’ expertise
in everything from strategic and financial analysis to marketing
and operations.
We take seriously our responsibility to be active
and productive members of a larger community. And we believe
that these initiatives – and
our ongoing efforts to attract the highest quality faculty and
students – are among the many factors that make NYU Stern
a model for other business schools. This issue of STERNbusiness
features a great deal of innovative thinking on the part of NYU
Stern faculty members, and on the
part of the many business and government leaders who participated
in
events at Stern last fall. I invite you to explore it.
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Thomas F. Cooley
Dean
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