|
Photo courtesy Gary Kuwahara |
| Dean Strong opened up his home for the event focused on bringing the faculty and advisory board closer together. |
1
|
|
Faculty/Advisory
Board Connections Come Away From Campus
Early
last month, Dean Jim Strong opened up his Whittier house for the
fall semester kick-off Faculty-Advisory Board Annual Reception. It’s
the third year in a row that Strong has held the event, with the
idea that it’s important these two key CBAPP communities get to meet
each other beyond the walls of campus. Without overstating a party’s
significance, it also helps ideas germinate, folds advisory board
members further into the day-to-day of the college, and allows
faculty members to voice ideas that they might not otherwise. This
year, faculty and advisory board members also had the opportunity to
meet CSUDH’s new president, Mildred Garcia, who attended. For Strong himself, the gathering moves him from his role as dean to that of socialite host – he credits his wife, Jane, for a lot of those qualities and help pulling off the evening as well. But he enjoys opening up his own home rather than staging the event in a campus meeting space for a very simple reason: “Sometimes, you need to take things out of the work environment to help people relax. I think it would be harder to make the connections that I hear and see being made if it was in some room on campus with gray walls.” Like many advisory board members who are prominent businesspeople in the greater Los Angeles area, Hud Warren, the principal of logistics firm ChinaWest, attends countless mixers and social networking events. He says the surprising and key ingredients that separated this one from the others was that relaxed, in-home setting and the overtly different backgrounds, yet similar interests, between the faculty and advisory board members. “You’ve got people with high positions throughout the spheres of business and public policy. And then, you’ve got these people who are obviously extremely bright with Ph.D.s and years spent studying the very businesses and practices the advisory board members face every day,” says Warren. “That makes people very interested in getting to know each other and bridging the typical conversational barriers at social events like this.” Warren, whose company spends a lot of time in China as its name would suggest, got to speak to the numerous CBAPP faculty members who have studied the country and/or are from China. It made the event immediately worthwhile. It didn’t hurt that his wife, who is originally from China, also got to speak her native Mandarin with some of the faculty members. Mark McGann, vice president of investments for A.G. Edwards, had spoken with assistant professor of finance professor Bingsheng Yi on the phone several times about coming in to Yi’s finance classes. Meeting face to face for the first time at the party let them iron out the details so that the in-class presentation goes smoothly for both of them. Oftentimes, it’s when there’s a shared passion between a faculty member and advisory board member where ideas for class presentations or even curriculum additions first take form. And while the most obvious connections are those made between faculty and board member, the event also bridged connections within each group, “For the executives on the board, we meet for two to three hours, four times a year, and when we do, it’s pretty structured and rigorous to get through the amount of material we do. So unless you get there early, there are very few opportunities to really get to know the other people you’re working with. This party gives you that time,” says McGann, who holds degrees from USC and Stanford but prefers to work on the CSUDH board because he feels the campus is on the verge of taking off.“ Strong suggests there’s a similar reason why faculty like to attend: “We have 15 or 16 faculty who have been on campus six years or less, most of whom have come in the past four years. It’s relatively easy to get to know faculty within their own departments, but beyond that, it takes a long time.” The overall outcome is a party where connections are made and bridges crossed. Yet, in the end, it is still just a party, which is not lost on the dean. “It’s great if people make all these connections and get excited about helping the college in new ways, but really, I just want everyone to meet each other and have a good time,” he says. |
