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During his years overseeing information technology organizations for several large corporations, Bruce Fadem was always surprised that many new employees, even those with newly awarded degrees, were not well prepared for real-world challenges.

“Their knowledge was three to five years behind the times,” Fadem said. Temple’s Department of Management Information Systems is an exception, in part thanks to Fadem and his fellow members of the Fox IT Advisory Board. One of the board’s primary goals since coming together in 2006: helping MIS keep its curriculum contemporary.

“We’ve found a way to change the curriculum on a fairly frequent basis, which is not the norm for large universities, said Fadem, the IT Advisory Board Chairman. “Tech changes quickly and it’s become a critical component of everything we do. … It’s important that students are exposed to and understand it and know how to deal with the new technology and how it can be applied to business processes and products to help companies achieve their goals.”

Fadem, who retired as Wyeth CIO after a 20-year career, reluctantly agreed to found the advisory board, which is today composed of senior IT executives from well-known firms such as AmerisourceBergen, QVC, Pfizer, and NBCUniversal. Fadem explained he’d served on similar councils at other universities—where they used the boards to rubber stamp projects they’d already launched.

Fox’s IT Advisory Board worked differently from the start. Besides keeping curriculum current, board members and their firms engage in symposiums, student competitions, career fairs; provide insights on projects; conduct guest lectures and mentor students, as well fund scholarships and other activities.

“When I talk to students, I try to get them to understand that your career isn’t a series of well-defined steps. It’s shaped by circumstances and opportunities and you have to take advantage of them and adapt,” Fadem said. “I feel so fortunate in my professional career. I got dropped into MIS at Temple when it was still a relatively unknown unit, fast forward to today, I ended up being surrounded by very, very good people – board members, MIS faculty and staff, and students – who carried the organization and me on their shoulders to becoming one of the top MIS programs in the nation.”

 The 6th Annual NBCUniversal Temple University Analytics Challenge attracted more than 135 entries across six colleges, with the first-place finishers coming from Fox School of Business, Klein College of Media and Communications and the Tyler School of Art.

MIS students Jake Green and Rohit Bobby partnered with Klein’s Sergio Aguilar to win the analysis category. Tyler School of Art student Xi (Cynthia) Cheng was the graphics category winner. The first-place finishers took home $2,500. There were also cash prizes for the second and third place winners and two honorable mentions in each category.

“All of the teams put a lot of work into their challenges,” said MIS Assistant Professor Laurel Miller, who organized the event and serves as Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Miller was also a mentor to the three-member analysis team winners and said she was impressed “by how meticulously they looked at each and every angle.”

Teams could choose from three data sets to answer the following questions: The first, from competition sponsor NBCUniversal, asked how media companies align with esports; the second, from global biopharmaceutical company Alexion, sought to learn who the winners and losers were in healthcare funding and payments; the third, from pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, questioned why pharmacies buy drugs from non-primary vendors.

This was the first year a sports-related challenge was offered and many teams were drawn to that. Both first place winners took on the NBCUniversal challenge. Graphics winner Cheng used images from Pac-Man and simple synthesizer sounds to look at the overlap between esports viewers and traditional sports fans in her four-minute video. The analysis trio reworked the question, team member Green said, to ask, “What can media companies and specifically, networks such as those powered by NBC sports group do to adapt to the esports audience and remain a leading delivery and engagement platform for sport entertainment?”

“This project taught me so many lessons that will be of value in my future professional endeavors,” Green said. “It taught us to give more with less. It taught us to condense mountains of data and weeks’ worth of information gathering into a four-minute pitch. We had the privilege of coming together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, despite our differences in educational background.”

Aidan Doyle, Alexion’s Director of Data and Analytic Platforms and a first-time competition judge, said he was impressed by the students and the challenges they tackled.

“When I went to college, you signed up for a class, walked into an amphitheater, the professor wrote on a board, you wrote it down and at the end you’d take a test,” said Doyle. “What I see in the system in the US 30 years later, especially at Temple, is a collaborative effort that brings the best ideas together between all faculty while engaging students and industry… To me, it summed up why Temple and other institutions are the place to be.”

Christian Hettinger ’18 and Danielle Buerger ’17 work very different jobs on opposite coasts – but both came to Temple planning on studying other majors before finding Management Information Systems. Now they bring the skills they learned in the program to their work every day.

Hettinger, an IT Business Analyst and Data Visualization Specialist at Valley Forge-based AmerisourceBergen, named some crucial courses: He picked up requirements gathering and project planning skills in Digital Solutions Studio; Data Science allowed him to “mess around with visualization tools without the pressures of a job;” Data Analytics introduced database models.

Electives, too, were important.

“Even the classes that didn’t seem to have as direct an impact have mattered,” he said. “I now see the value in the problem-solving skills I learned in classes unrelated to my job.”

Hettinger enjoyed math and science but found computer programming limiting. He chose MIS as a sophomore.

“With MIS, you get to be a part of tech, but it’s not limited to programming,” he said. “I really liked the idea of being involved in strategy and big picture planning and using problem-solving skills like you would in math.”

Hettinger interned at AmerisourceBergen twice as a student and joined the pharmaceutical company full-time after graduation. He’s met other MIS graduates there and hopes to recruit more. 

“Some new employees have to play catch up because this is their first exposure to some real job challenges,” he said. “I use something I learned at Temple every day.”

Buerger is part of NBCUniversal’s Media Technology Program, a two-year program giving associates technical and managerial experience by working three jobs in different locations; in her case New York, New Jersey and California, where she now lives. 

When the program ends in July, Buerger hopes to join the TV Entertainment division to further explore how technology affects the creation and distribution of TV and online content.

“Technology has played a large role in transforming the media landscape in recent years, providing a lot of opportunity for innovation in the future of entertainment,” she said.  

Buerger decided to combine technology and business as a junior.

“Tech has a large impact on the world and has the power to transform business when paired with competitive advantage,” she said. “Everything we do in life depends on a system.”

She interned at NBCUniversal in News Technology while at Temple. Since graduation, she’s held roles in Enterprise Applications, TV Entertainment Technology, and Brand Development, working as a project manager, business analyst, data analyst and application product owner.

“A great part of being in a rotational program is having the ability to work on multiple projects with different roles at the same time, allowing me to expand both my technical and leadership skills concurrently,” she said.

Buerger has met other MIS graduates at NBCUniversal and, like Hettinger, she wants to recruit more. She believes MIS sets them up for success. 

“MIS definitely prepared me. In addition to giving me an in depth understanding of technology concepts, looking at technology through a business lens is really what set me apart,” she said. “I have the ability to create meaningful business cases with financials, as well as use Systems Thinking to always align my work with the company’s strategic vision and larger architecture.”

Shahla Raei, MS ’17 IT Auditing and Cyber-Security, was back on Temple’s campus recently, screening internship candidates for Wells Fargo during the IT Career Fair. Raei, who’d joined the multinational financial services company as a Senior IT Auditor in June, had already impressed her bosses.  

“I was the first student from the program to join Wells Fargo and now senior management wants to hire more students with a (Management Information Systems) background,” Raei says. “They said it’s because they already have the background in auditing and the auditing process.”

A native of Iran, Raei earned her Bachelor of Software Engineering degree from South Tehran Branch University in 2011 and her Master’s in Science in IT Management from Payam Nour University in 2014. She moved to the U.S. in the Fall of 2014 to take a job at Philadelphia’s Fried Brothers Inc. as a Data Analyst helping optimize product sales and digital assets.

Looking to learn more about auditing, Raei decided to earn a second Master’s Degree at Fox School of Business. She quickly gained practical skills, like how to use Audit Command Language (ACL) and the specific steps of the audit process.

“Most of the professors work in the industry and having that experience is really helpful,” she said. “The teaching was practical.”

Raei also appreciated the opportunity to hone her people skills while at Fox. During her first year, she got a free membership to ISACA, the international professional association focused on IT governance.

“Coming from an engineering background, I was not as good at working with people I didn’t know,” Raei said. “English is my second language and was sometimes challenging. Temple provided the opportunities for me to practice my communication skills.”

After doing an IT Audit Internship with CHUBB, Raei met her current boss when he represented Wells Fargo at the IT Career Fair. He encouraged her to apply to the company.

“Getting that first job is really hard. Then you get into the industry and you can start building your network,” she said. “One of my professors, Thu Nguyen, works in the same department. It’s great because I already have a relationship with her.”

Wells Fargo has more than 1,000 auditors and Raei works with the Enterprise Technology Group. Her day to day work includes doing risk assessments and conducting audits from planning to field work to recording. Her background in Cyber-Security has been a huge benefit to her and her employer; she’s been able to do more security audits, which she finds more challenging.

“It’s really great because I’m working with people who have a lot of experience,” she said. “I’m still learning.”

The sixth annual Information Technology Career Fair was the biggest one yet, with 40 companies and more than 250 students taking part in the Sept. 17th event held on Temple’s main campus.

Among the businesses seeking to hire Management Information Systems students for internships and jobs were AmerisourceBergen, Dow Chemical, Lincoln Financial, NBCUniversal, Scholastic and QVC. The fair has grown so much that it was moved to the Howard Gittis Student Center, said Laurel Miller, Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology.

“Our students are getting internships and jobs at many different companies and making an impact. This has companies that haven’t been recruiting saying, ‘Hmmm. Maybe we should go to Temple and recruit,’” Miller said. “Companies are coming to us and saying, ‘Your students are much more professionally developed than others we see.’”

Management Information Systems faculty and staff encourage all students to attend the Career Fair, even freshmen. It’s a critical part of their professional development, she said.

“A lot of students come in and say, ‘I don’t know how to talk to people I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I’m too nervous,’” Miller said. “We want our students to start early so they’re pros at approaching people and saying, ‘I’m Laurel Miller. I’m an MIS major. Please tell me about your company.”

This was junior Michelle Purnama’s first Information Technology Career Fair. Purnama, who changed her major to MIS last year, spoke in depth to representatives from 10 companies, including the CIO of Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a company that specializes in medicines for rare diseases. She was surprised someone at his level was at a recruitment event.

“We had a great conversation. I could feel how passionate he was about his job,” Purnama said. “A resume isn’t all that matters. A lot of students have good resumes, but recruiters are also looking for personality and what you stand for.”

Purnama told the CIO she wanted to have a job that would have an impact. She now has a summer internship offer at Alexion’s Connecticut headquarters.

“He saw how my values aligned with the company and he wanted to recruit me,” Purnama said. “When you make a connection like that, right off the bat, it’s very special.”

As the academic year draws to a close, we have much to celebrate. I am proud of our excellent students and their big win at this year’s AIS Student Chapter Leadership Conference. A record five teams won for their entries in analytics, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Also, congratulations to Professor Jeremy Shafer, who won AIS Chapter Adviser of the Year.

Our signature event with the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), the Eighteenth Annual Fox IT Awards, was a great success. The honorees were technology innovators and leaders John Turner of 3M, James Rhee of Ashley Stewart, and Dave Kotch of FMC Corporation.

IBIT also hosted the third annual National Cyber Analyst Challenge, with 10 teams competing for $25,000 in prizes.

I am also proud of our graduates. Read about recent grads Emily Schucker and Frank Tkachenko, who are using what they’ve learned while in the MIS program to start their careers. We also catch up with two experienced alumni – Michael Luckenbill and Joshua Sandoe – as they find themselves well prepared to take on new career challenges.

With regard to research, read about the launch of our MIS Visiting Scholars Series, which brings leading academics to Temple for a week-long residency. Also learn how Professor Jing Gong studies the impact of information technology on consumer behavior and finds the unexpected.

While Michael Luckenbill ‘08 and Joshua Sandoe ’16 are no longer students, they’ve never stopped learning. Luckenbill has handled business intelligence for a food service conglomerate, merged technologies for two music giants and created custom financial asset software. Sandoe has only worked for one company since graduation, but his job changes every six months, meaning he’s already worked in the company’s business technology solutions center, served as a global information security data analyst and tried his hand at project management.

It’s a lot of change, but both alumni say Temple University’s Fox School of Business prepared them for the professional challenges.

It’s been a really good experience and it speaks to the education I received at Temple because we covered so many different areas,” Sandoe said. “I’ve had business roles, more technical roles, a role as a data analyst; and I was prepared for all of it.

Luckenbill, whose graduation in the midst of the global financial crisis prompted some to advise against technology-related jobs, said taking core Management Information System classes and the accompanying lab work meant he was ready to jump into (almost) any role on day one.

I was prepared to be hands-on with the technology instead of being hands-off,” Luckenbill said. “I used everything, my project management and database course, my software architecture course…

For the last seven years, Luckenbill has worked for LiquidHub, a Wayne-based digital customer engagement firm. As a technology manager in the custom application development division, Luckenbill works with multiple clients, most recently a financial asset firm.

“Even though things are different, custom application development doesn’t change much,” he said. “It’s understanding the business model for that particular client and what they’re trying to achieve.”

After graduating in December 2016, Sandoe joined biopharmaceutical giant Pfizer as a business technology rotational associate, meaning he’ll hold four different positions in his first two years on the job.

“It’s a very unique opportunity to see a lot of different worlds and meet a lot of smart people you may not have met if you were in one role from the beginning,” Sandoe said. “A lot of people say you start to get really comfortable with a job at the six month point and that’s when you pack up and enter next role. If someone’s looking for a routine, every-day-doing-the-same-thing routine, this is not a route I’d suggest taking.”

But it’s worked for Sandoe.

“I always get very excited before I transfer to the next role,” he said. “l’ve learned so much in a year and a half. The difference between then and now, my level of competency, it’s night and day.”