Owen-related groups are growing rapidly on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

In fall 2008 the economic crisis seemed to fuel a need for connection. At Owen we noticed a large spike in the number of people asking to join the school’s group on LinkedIn, a networking Web site for professionals. This got us thinking about Owen’s presence on other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, and how we might help alumni stay in touch with each other and the school.

With help from the Marketing & Communications office at Owen, school-related groups are now growing rapidly and organically online. Alumni are reconnecting with classmates, discovering job opportunities and developing valuable business connections. They are also receiving the latest news from the school through Twitter feeds, a Facebook fan page, YouTube videos and iTunes lectures.

If you haven’t done so already, we encourage you to explore the various social media sites out there. Signing up is easy and free. Here are a few ways to get started:

Facebook

Facebook is a wildly popular and fun way to keep in touch or reconnect with classmates on a social basis. There are now more than 300 million people around the world who use the site. Facebook allows its users to customize their personal profiles by posting status updates, uploading photos, joining groups and becoming “fans” of just about anything under the sun, including the Owen School. Users receive updates regarding their friends, groups and fan pages through what is known as the News Feed, which appears on every user’s home page.

The Owen Facebook alumni group has nearly tripled in size since October 2008. Here’s how to join:

• Sign up for a Facebook account. Be sure to add Vanderbilt and the year you graduated when creating your profile. This will help you and other classmates find each other.
• Visit the Newsroom page on Owen’s Web site and select “Social Media.”
• Click “Owen on Facebook” and then “Become a Fan.” From time to time, you will receive valuable updates about Owen on your Facebook home page.
• Click “Owen Alumni Group on Facebook” and then “Join Group.” By becoming a member, you can connect with other alumni.
• Search for other Owen groups. Try typing “Vanderbilt Owen” in the search box. You will find several “Class of” groups, some of which are more active than others.
• Search for your classmates. Try typing a name within quotes (“First Last”). If you get too many results, or don’t recognize your friend from the thumbnail photographs, select “My Networks” from the drop-down box. That may narrow the results enough to reveal a classmate.

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn networking site is to business what Facebook is to friendship. The site now boasts a membership of more than 43 million business professionals from more than 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn users create profiles summarizing their professional accomplishments and then invite “trusted contacts” to connect with them and their networks. These networks give users the opportunity to search for job openings, collaborate on projects, and gain business insights through discussions.

The Owen LinkedIn group has more than doubled in size since October 2008: from 800 members to 1,900 members (as of early fall). Here’s how to join:

• Visit LinkedIn and sign up for an account.
• Visit the Social Media page on Owen’s site and click on “Owen on LinkedIn.”
• Click the “Join this Group” button.
• Start networking! LinkedIn can be invaluable for a job search. Try finding other Owen community members who work within your target industry or geographic location.
• Do you have a business question? Post your problem to the discussion board and let other Owen members help you solve it.

Twitter

Twitter is a way to stay in touch with the world through short messages limited to 140 characters. Users send messages (“tweets”) to others who have signed up to follow their updates. Owen uses Twitter to send out real-time information about alumni events, such as happy hours hosted by the school in various cities around the country. Alumni news, like promotions, career changes and new business ventures, are also posted to Twitter.

Here’s how to follow Owen on Twitter:

• Visit Twitter and sign up for an account.
• Visit the Social Media page on Owen’s site and click on “Owen on Twitter.”
• Click the “Follow” button.
• Check your Twitter page regularly for updates from Owen. You can keep up with Twitter online or by using your mobile phone.
• To find other people or organizations to follow on Twitter, click through Owen’s “Following” list.

Other social media sites

Owen also has a presence on YouTube and iTunes, with school-related videos and podcasts of lectures and campus speakers. To check out these sites, just visit Owen’s Social Media page.

Dive in!

These various social media sites may seem overwhelming, but don’t be afraid to give them a try. Keeping in touch with the Owen community has never been easier.

Robinson is expanding his horizons as a member of the MBA Enterprise Corps in Kenya.

Nat Robinson, MBA’07, is a world away from where he thought he’d be after graduating from Owen. While many of his former classmates are spending their days in the corporate jungle, Robinson is getting used to an entirely different way of life. While his classmates avoid traffic on their way to work, he may very well be avoiding a herd of elephants. Or while they’re climbing the StairMaster at the gym, he may be climbing the 16,355-foot peak of Mt. Kenya. 

What truly sets him apart, though, is his job. Like many of his classmates, he is working in finance—only his responsibility is to help a Third World country succeed in the 21st century.

Robinson is a member of the MBA Enterprise Corps, an organization dedicated to helping Third World countries develop and grow their economies. The corps was founded in 1990 by a consortium of leading U.S. business schools. Today the corps sends recent business-school graduates on 13–15 month assignments to countries around the world, including Angola, Uzbekistan, Guyana and Azerbaijan. Their projects include microfinance (providing financial services to impoverished clients), small business and private sector development, and microenterprise (starting businesses with little or no capital). 

Graduates accepted into the corps first spend a week in orientation and training in Washington, D.C. From there it is on to their assigned countries where they study the language and culture of their new homes for one to two months. After that they begin their actual jobs. In Robinson’s case, that means working for the K-Rep Group, a commercial bank focused on microfinance, in Nairobi, Kenya. 

“They match you up with your interests,” Robinson says. “At first I was going to Peru, but that fell through. Then I was going to Nigeria, and then Angola and then finally Kenya. You have to be open and flexible.”

After graduating from Owen, Robinson was hired by Accenture. The company granted him a leave of absence to join the corps in fall 2008. On his blog, he describes some of his duties: 

“My immediate role at K-Rep is to assist the organization in building up their financial reports to qualify for some major financing from the Grassroots Business Fund. I sit with a small army of young accountants and try to decipher as much of the relevant financial and accounting statements as possible.”

He’s also had a chance to see a bit of the country and has been warmly received everywhere.

“I was out at one of our village banking branches in western Kenya, where the Obama family is from,” he says. “I had to give a speech talking about our investments. At the end I said something in Swahili about Obama and I got a standing ovation.”

Karen Weist is the Associate Director of the Career Management Center at Owen and coordinates the school’s selection process for the corps.

“Each year we have a few students who apply,” Weist says. “They have to submit a resume and an essay, and they have to appear before an interview panel. We assess the individuals to make sure that they’re doing this for the right reasons.”

Because those who participate have, in effect, deferred their careers, Owen helps them get right back in the job market when they return. 

“The commitment that we have to the students is that when they return, we give them access to our career services beyond what is normally available to alumni,” Weist says.

Weist points out that the program is not for everyone. 

“We have lots of students who are interested in giving back,” Weist says. “But this program is for those who are interested in giving back on a global level. It’s for someone who is really, truly altruistic—that’s one of the fundamental elements. They also need humility and an understanding that they’re a guest in someone else’s country.”

Robinson’s involvement in Project Pyramid, the student-run organization dedicated to ending global poverty, played a big role in his decision to join the corps, as did his previous international work experience, which included an Owen internship in Shanghai. 

“I have a background in nonprofit and government work and really loved the international business aspect. This is a neat combination of all that—corporate and social responsibility,” he says. “My summer in Shanghai prepared me for the shocks and little challenges involved with working in another culture and being far away from home.”

When he started business school, Robinson had no idea he would end up putting his degree toward something so rewarding.

“My thought of business school was that it was just going to be all business,” he says. “I didn’t think anyone would care very much about making a difference or working with nonprofits. I was really surprised that I was able find an organization in the business world that focuses on poverty alleviation. It’s a great way to use some of those finance classes I took at Owen.”

The MASIF club can trace its Wall Street roots back to Broadway.

The musical never opened on Broadway, or anywhere else for that matter, and it probably never will. But in a way, the curtains haven’t yet dropped on The Party Girl. Though forgotten by many, the musical continues to make its impact known at the Owen School—just not in a way that you might suspect. 

The year was 1977, and Max Adler, a prominent New York businessman, was sitting in his apartment on Fifth Avenue listening to another pitch. As one of the producers of the Tony Award-winning hit Annie, he was often being asked to finance other would-be Broadway musicals, like the one being described to him at that moment. This time, however, something held his attention. It wasn’t the script, which was about a U.S. senator and the mistress who runs his New York power base, or the fact that it was set to star veteran actor Robert Alda (Alan’s father) and an up-and-coming Dixie Carter. What interested him most was the person in front of him—the producer who had optioned the script. His name was Charles Doraine, MMgt’72, and it was his personal story that eventually convinced Max Adler to invest his money. Not in The Party Girl, that is, but in Vanderbilt.

“He said, ‘I don’t like the script, but I’m interested in you because you’re an entrepreneur,’” recalls Doraine. “I explained to him that I had graduated from Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Management and that we thought of ourselves as managers of change. I told him we stood out because we looked at the world differently. Other schools were interested in people who would stay in the box, but GSM was looking for people who were outside of it.”

That “outside the box” line of thinking appealed to someone like Adler, whose path to success was anything but conventional. A bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he survived being shot down over the battlefields of Europe and imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II to return to civilian life in the late ’40s. Seeing an opportunity in America’s booming post-war economy, he started a mail-order business selling inexpensive gifts and gadgets. The catalogs were an immediate hit, and soon he expanded into other types of merchandise.

“He always sold these weird kinds of things, but one year he decided he would go into selling animals. He brought little burros across from Mexico, and they sold like fury and actually made the cover of Life magazine. It was amazing,” says Mimi Adler, Max’s widow.

While the burro-as-pet craze thankfully went away, Adler’s mail-order business did anything but. By the early ’60s the demand was so great for his merchandise that he decided to open his first retail store in New Jersey. Called Spencer Gifts, it caught on with customers and quickly drew the interest of Musical Corporation of America (MCA), a large music and television company based in California. Adler sold the business to MCA, which then took the brand nationwide. This windfall enabled Adler to dabble in other things that mattered to him, including Broadway shows like the one Charles Doraine had come to pitch.

But Adler was just as passionate about philanthropy, and when the conversation turned from The Party Girl to Vanderbilt GSM, he was eager to learn more about the school. Doraine agreed to put him in touch with Dean Samuel Richmond, thanked him for his time and went on his way, not realizing the importance of what had just occurred. It was only when Doraine got a phone call several years later that it dawned on him. A representative of the newly renamed Owen School was calling to invite him to a celebration honoring a donation given by Adler.

“Sometimes you can make a difference without even knowing it. I met Max just that one time, and look what happened,” Doraine says.

As it turns out, Max Adler had struck up a friendship with Dean Richmond during those intervening years and had grown so fond of the Owen School that he’d promised a significant sum for the construction of Management Hall. But before he could make good on that promise, Adler died unexpectedly in 1979. The donation that Doraine received the call about was actually given by Mimi in her late husband’s honor. 

Mimi’s commitment to Owen, however, didn’t end there. In 1983 she donated an additional $25,000 to the school. The purpose of her gift was two-fold: First, she wanted the students to be able to learn how to manage money by making real-life investments, and second, she hoped the earnings from those investments would someday fund scholarships to the school. Mimi’s gift was named the Max Adler Student Investment Fund, or MASIF for short.

The student club responsible for managing MASIF is today one of the most popular at Owen. In 2007-2008, there were over 50 members, all of whom played a hand in deciding which stocks the club picked. Modeled after an S&P mid-cap index, the fund is divided into different sectors, such as real estate, health care, energy, and technology. Second years serve as the heads of these sectors, while first years act as analysts. Getting the first years involved in this manner was one of the initiatives of former MASIF President Nicholas Zager, MBA’08. Having worked at OppenheimerFunds prior to enrolling at Owen, Zager wanted to expose the club members to something akin to the real-world experience he’d had. 

“When you set things up in a team-oriented and professional environment, you see certain people shine. Those of them who grab onto the idea of MASIF can really hit the ground running after graduation,” he says.

Zager’s other initiative as MASIF President was to fulfill Mimi Adler’s original vision by paying the first scholarship. In the 25 years since her donation, the fund had grown to well over $400,000 thanks to the students’ stock picks. With Dean Jim Bradford’s support and Mimi’s blessing, the MASIF club decided to sell off approximately half of that amount and create an endowment for the Max Adler Scholarship. The club members also set about determining the criteria that would be used to award the scholarship. It was agreed that the recipient should demonstrate not only leadership abilities and academic excellence but also a commitment to the school and a career in finance. In the end, several candidates were presented to Dean Bradford, and Bill Lambert, MBA’08, was chosen as the first recipient.

“I think MASIF offers a learning opportunity for people of all different backgrounds. It’s great to be able to pitch your thoughts on a specific stock to members, listen to their thought processes, and then measure those against your own. Not only does the fund create this atmosphere, but we then can act on these situations, and hopefully obtain market-beating returns for the fund in the process,” says Lambert.

Today Lambert is realizing his dream of working in corporate finance at Deutsche Bank AG in New York. His story is similar to those of other MASIF club members who have embarked on Wall Street careers. They all gained valuable experience managing the money that Mimi Adler gave to the Owen School in her late husband’s name. And whether they know it or not, they all owe a debt of gratitude to Charles Doraine and the musical that no one saw.