RBC Bank Sponsors RBC Business Week at Meredith College

For the second year, RBC Bank is sponsoring RBC Business Week at Meredith College. This year the theme is "Leading the Green Revolution". MBA students will join RBC executives and other local professionals and participate in a dinner and panel discussion on sustainability. Experts on the panel include Vice President for Efficiency and Innovative Technologies at Progress Energy, Mr. Rob Caldwell. Mr. Mike Nicklas, owner of Innovative Designs, a world renowned architect and designer of energy-efficient, sustainable buildings will also be speaking, and Ms. Heather Denney, COO and VP of McDonald-York and Mr. Fred Dean, VP of Drucker & Falk, will talk about the challenges of constructing and renovating green buildings. Other events during RBC week will include another panel specific to Building a Culture of Sustainability and a speaker event with Joyce LaValle, Senior Vice President of Customer and Associate Engagement with InterfaceFLOR.

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MBA Students Travel to China for Business Elective

MBA students experienced the culture, history, and economic power of China during a special international travel course called “Business in China”. During the trip, students and faculty visited companies engaged in global business in Shanghai and Beijing, capital and site of the 2008 summer Olympic Games, and toured Dalian, China’s northern economic development zone and host city to the World Economic Forum in 2007. Students also joined fellow MBAs at the Dongbei University of Finance & Economics for a discussion on doing business in China. Through relationships developed by Dean Denise Rotondo, students toured headquarters of Lenovo, a global organization with headquarters in Beijing, the RTP, and Shanghai, and with executives at GE, China Citic Bank, and Danaher Corporation.

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MBA Trip to China Inspires Columnist Vicki Lee Parker

Vicki Lee Parker, MBA student and columnist for the News and Observer, participated in a recent MBA travel elective “Business in China” that included a two-week trip to Shanghai, Dalian, and Beijing. Parker wrote about her views in a recent News and Observer article titled “In China, Customer is Always Right”. The new, global elective provided MBA students to visit firms, such as GE, Lenovo, and China Citic Bank, and to talk with executives to learn how business is done in China. Parker’s syndicated column “Savvy Consumer” runs each Sunday in the Work & Money section of the News and Observer.

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MBA Program Sponsors TBJ's Women in Business Awards

The Meredith MBA program sponsored the 2008 Women in Business Awards hosted by the Triangle Business Journal. The event honors the Triangle's most successful professional women. Hearing the stories behind the success of these dynamic women is a big draw for the luncheon. Dr. Maureen Hartford, President of Meredith College, a previous WIB award winner, was again recognized at this year's event as the recipient of the Humanitarian Award.

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Workshop in Crisis Communication

Imagine you are the manager or owner of a firm that suddenly ends up in a negative news story. What would you say if the media were waiting at the door for your comments? In an all-day workshop in Crisis Communication, MBA students will have the opportunity to learn how to react to the media both in good times and in bad. The workshop, presented by Triangle Media Coaching, will address critical issues that can shape an organization’s public image, such as handling a press conference, turning negative coverage into a positive image, and creating a company message. The co-curricular workshop is one of many program enhancements for Meredith MBA students.

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IBM Grant Provides BusinessWeek for MBA Students

Thanks to a grant from IBM, our busy MBA students now have a way to keep up with current business news. The IBM grant provides each business student a home subscription to BusinessWeek while they are enrolled. Students have access to up-to-date business articles that faculty can link to business topics in the classroom.

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MBA Students and Alumni Race for the Cure

In June, MBA students and alumni participated in the Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure hosted by Meredith College. The MBA team members were among the more than 25,000 participants in this Race for the Cure event, which organizers hope raised over $2 million to fund breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment projects. Our MBA team of students, alumni, family and friends raised over $2,000 for the cause.

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Meredith MBA’s Outperform 90% of MBA Students Nationwide

Meredith MBAs recently scored better than 90% of other MBA students from colleges and universities across the nation who took the ETS Field Test of Business, MBA. The nationally-normed test is used to assess mastery of business concepts, critical thinking, and reasoning ability for MBA students. Meredith gives the test to its graduating MBA students, and the results from 2007 were outstanding. As a whole, Meredith MBAs scored at the 90th percentile, meaning they performed better than 90% of all other test-takers from other institutions.

In addition to the exceptional overall score, Meredith students demonstrated superior performance in specific assessment areas, including outcomes in the 90th percentile in the fields of Marketing, Management, Managerial Accounting, and Strategic Integration with scores in the 85th percentile in Finance.

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Meredith MBA Delivers Skills Valued by Employers

Meredith’s emphasis on building skills such as leadership, communication, and critical thinking falls right in line with what employers find most valuable in managers. 

According to a recent study, many MBA programs fall short when it comes to “soft skills”, the emphasis on human capital and decision-making, and put more focus on managing administration and control, say Robert S. Rubin and Erich C. Dierdorff of DePauls’s Charles H. Kellstad Graduate School of Business. Jane Porter of BusinessWeek weighed in on the study. “So, while decision-making, for instance, was at the top of the manager’s list, it ranked five out of six in terms of how well represented it was in the core curricula” of many business schools, according to Porter. 

Meredith’s MBA curriculum and classroom experience enhance the leadership skills and decision-making ability required of managers. Teamwork, case studies, group presentations, and simulations are all part of a rigorous academic program delivered in a framework of ethics and integrity. Co-curricular opportunities—such as a comprehensive orientation, workshops, distinguished speakers, and coaching by local business leaders—provide additional support to build these valued skills.

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Meredith MBA Develops Leadership Skills

A review of results from EBI (Educational Benchmarking Institute) MBA alumni surveys compared our alumni responses to other national MBA programs. The aspects of our program where the greatest positive difference appeared were: extent to which informal faculty contact increased success as a manager, leadership skills, decision making skills, ability to define business problems, oral presentation skills, interpersonal skills, listening skills, knowledge needed to succeed, and skills necessary to succeed. 

These positive differences appeared against both a peer group of 6 institutions and against all schools in our comparable class, which means Meredith MBA alumni rated their program higher in those areas than did the alumni of the other institutions. “These data indicate that we're developing leadership skills while improving the individual's ability to analyze and solve business problems,” stated Dean Denise Rotondo. “The “positive difference" list represents what our alumni report we do really well, as compared to alumni from other MBA programs.”

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