The Daniels College of Business recently received $1.55 million in an endowed fund for an international and graduate scholarship which will fund a Global Scholars program beginning this summer.
The Joseph W. and Sharon P. Saunders Endowed Global Education Fund is set to expand “global impact” – one of the business school’s three missions. Daniels College of Business Dean Christine Riordan said Daniels has received other gifts for international education, but this is the first permanent endowment for a specific purpose.
The gift was made by Joe and Sharon Saunders. Joe Saunders, who recently retired as CEO of VISA, Inc., is a member of the Executive Advisory Board for Daniels and was a Voices of Experience speaker last year. The endowment will be used to fund scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in global consulting projects.
“Our goals at Daniels include providing global consultancy experiences for our students, global career placement, global executive education programs and high powered global network,” said Riordan.
According to Daniels Senior Director of Globalization Thomas Dowd, as an endowment fund, the Saunders Global Scholars Initiative will generate yearly earnings that can support student engagement in Daniels’ international activities like the International MBA program’s optional experiences and required overseas live-consulting programs, as well as programs like the Reiman School of Finance’s “Financial Capitals” derivatives program targeting Brazil, London and Singapore.
The endowment will also further The Daniels Global Initiative, which focuses on cultivating new international business and educational partnerships, enhancing learning and career opportunities for students in “tightly-designed” programs offered overseas and building research and visiting scholar programs. New partnerships will be achieved through domestic and international Daniels Executive Advisory Board.
“The international boards (IEABs) will ensure that our decisions and activities are informed by the international perspectives and experiences of talented, engaged board members,” said Dowd.
IEABs will advise on internship and career opportunities for Daniels students, help diversify international student recruiting at Daniels, provide corporate and organization connections and generate live-consulting projects for graduate students.
“They will generally be a constant ‘face’ of Daniels” in the home-countries,” said Dowd. “There has been lot of international activity going on at [and] from Daniels, but we realized the need for integrating this activity and aligning it with Daniels’ global strategy,” said Dowd. “This would bring even greater returns on the investments of times, energy and money that are already being made.”
According to Dowd, the Saunders endowment will help Daniels make important decisions that will impact the affordability of its international offerings, among other things.
Riordan said the scholarships will be competitive and will depend on student need and the cost of the trip. No set scholarship award amounts have been decided or released.
“Making substantive international travel more widely available will benefit the students, the school and the companies that engage with our students,” said Dowd. “It provides a point of reference that guides us as we make decisions to ensure that the concept of globalization is embedded into everything we do – inside the classroom and out,” said Dowd.
Dowd said the goal of Daniels’ international engagement is to ensure that Daniels has a global impact “on students, faculty, alumni and international business and stakeholders.”
An example is a recent experience in November 2012. According to Dowd, four international MBA student teams worked on consulting projects for a Norwegian software company (that operates all over the world), in Tanzania. After the overseas component, the director of global marketing flew from Oslo to Denver to hear the results of the projects from the students, finding their presentations so meaningful and useful that he is now changing his company’s whole approach to marketing in Africa.
“Imagine how powerful this will be for a student-team member to be able to reference in a job interview,” said Dowd. “This is the sort of experience we want as many of our students as possible to have access to, and this is how the Saunders endowment will have impact here.”
While the Saunders Global Scholars initiative is a stand-alone program within Daniels, and has no connection to the Cherrington Global Scholar program, the Office of International Education does help Daniels with the logistics of the global consultancy projects.
Dowd said the Daniels Office of Globalization works closely on many fronts with the Office of Internationalization, providing a forum to discuss cross-cultural and academic issues that impact both the domestic and international DU community.
The Daniels Office of Globalization was established three years ago as a result of a “very thorough” strategic planning process to integrate, focus and expand Daniels’ international engagement.
Dowd said the Saunders gift is a very exciting development and that discussions, led by Riordan, will assess how the earnings on the endowment can be used to make participation in Daniels international programs even more attractive to Daniels students – graduate and undergraduate.
“This is a work in progress but the outcome will help advance the Daniels Global Initiative,” said Dowd.
