Professors Amy Lavin and Laurel Miller have been promoted to Associate Professor of Practice.

Professor Lavin has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the MIS Full-Time Teacher of the Year, Full-Time MBA Faculty Member of the Year, Fox Business Honors Faculty Member of the Year, and MS DIM Faculty Member of the Program. She was also a Dean’s Teaching Fellow and an Honors Teaching Fellow. Her program leadership includes serving as Academic Director of the MS in Digital Innovation in Marketing and as Assistant Academic Director for the Online MBA and BBA programs. Lavin has authored several Ivey case studies and her research in online learning has appeared in pedagogical journals and numerous conference proceedings.

Professor Miller teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs, including the MS in Digital Marketing, the Fox MBA, and the Fox Executive MBA programs. She won the MIS Full-Time Teacher of the Year award. In addition, Miller has made numerous contributions to MIS students’ professional development and industry engagement as co-manager of the Professional Achievement Program (PRO) and Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Through IBIT, she is responsible for many events that connect students with alumni and the larger IT community, including the IT Career Fair and the annual IT Awards.

As an undergraduate in MIS, Thomas Steigerwald (BBA ’10) took an expansive view of his future. Unlike some people who have a detailed vision of their dream job, Steigerwald knew only that he wanted to solve business problems with technology. Looking back on his years at MIS, he says his time as president of the student organization AMIS (now Temple AIS), through which he was able to connect with industry leaders, helped prepare him for what was to come. “Munir Mandviwalla is a big mentor,” he says.

After graduation Steigerwald landed a job at Aramark, which he describes as his “first taste of e-commerce.” During the year he was working there as a technical analyst another Temple alumni introduced him to Chris DiMarco, who was in the early stages of starting Lamps.com. At the time, he urgently needed his website launched.

“I knew I wanted to be solving business problems, and at that moment, I met someone who had a fun challenge,” says Steigerwald. The education Steigerwald got at Temple gave him a robust skillset that allowed him to build out the infrastructure and architecture of Lamps.com as well as leading the digital marketing strategy.

He was the first full-time hire for the start-up. “As the company has grown, I’ve grown and taken on many roles,” he says. “Everything the MIS and Fox school curriculum covered, I’ve used or applied here.” Even though he’s done it all at this point, Steigerwald has never held a formal job title at Lamps.com.

“I like not having a title,” he says. “It allows me to be flexible and add value in a variety of ways.” He can respond nimbly to the changing technology and business environment. “Ten years ago, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest weren’t around,” he points out. “You didn’t even consider building a responsive website, but as times have changed I’ve been able to quickly adapt.”

No matter which hat he is currently wearing, his work remains grounded in technology. “I can describe myself as a software engineer–I write code–but some people describe me as a solutions person because I’m finding and solving our businesses needs with technology,” notes Steigerwald.

It was a major leap of faith when he left his corporate position at Aramark to join a startup. “I saw the potential, and I was able to take the risk. And it’s been worth it,” he says.

Each year, the Management Information Systems Department recognizes the accomplishments of students, faculty, and administrators. A committee of faculty, staff, current students, and alumni use a rigorous process to select the recipients.

Congratulations to this year’s winners!

 

Student Leadership 

Sean Boyer (BBA ’22)

Researcher of the Year

Jason Thatcher, Professor

Faculty Leadership 

Munir Mandviwalla, Associate Professor

Administrative Leadership 

Taylor Tropea, Digital Marketing Specialist

Full-Time Teacher of the Year 

Amy Lavin, Assistant Professor

Part-Time Teacher of the Year 

Liang Yao, IT Lead Examiner, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

AIS Outstanding Officer

Kevin Publicover (BBA ’21)

AIS Outstanding Member

Katherine Lobdell (BBA ’22)

Professional and Academic Achievement 

Kyra Lloyd (BBA ’21)
Carly Krzywicki (BBA ’21)
Logan Piatetsky (BBA ’22)
Safaniya Paul (BBA ’22)
Abigail Helterbran (BBA ’23)
Ajay Oomman (BBA ’24)

 

Last year, the MIS department began previewing several redesigned courses, and this fall the new curriculum has been officially rolled out in full. The introductory course, Digital Systems, teaches basic programming skills to all business students, regardless of major. It’s a new approach that will give Fox students a competitive edge after graduation.

“There’s been a push that MBAs should know how to code, and we’re bringing that thinking to our undergradates,” says David Schuff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Information Systems. “Some other business school programs start with basic computer literacy, but we’re asking, ‘What’s the next generation of tools and skills?’”

Digital Systems provides an overview of how businesses use technology in today’s economy. The first two-thirds of the course help students get a grasp of the big ideas in an active learning environment. Through hands-on, in-class assignments, students practice applying the concepts they’re learning, including programming.

“It represents a shift from a project-management focus to a product-management focus,” says Schuff.

During the final third of the course, students learn to code using JavaScript to build a digital product of their own. Their final project challenges students to make a tool that can rank potential investors in a fictional firm in terms of various functions like income, assets, and debt. “Their job is to write those functions,” says Steven Sclarow, Assistant Professor of MIS and the course coordinator.

“In the past, coding assignments taught concepts without putting the business perspective on it,” says Sclarow. “Our approach uses an overarching narrative throughout the course to help students see how it relates to them and digital product management,” he says.

The prospect can be daunting for some students, especially outside MIS, but completing the project gives them not only important new skills, but also confidence. And for MIS students, this introduction prepares them expertly for what’s to come: more advanced courses on API-based software development, user experience, and cybersecurity.

“The new Digital Systems course is the latest example of how Temple’s MIS department prepares students for the workforce,” says Bruce Fadem, chair of the IT Advisory Board and retired VP and CIO of Wyeth.

“All business students are going to encounter digital systems, no matter what job they have,” says Sclarow. And Schuff emphasizes this point: “If you’re in accounting or finance, you might have a need to do process automation. In marketing, you might need to manipulate data to do analyses. Programming is becoming an essential tool to do these things yourself.”

When Juhi Ghosh (MS ’07) came to Temple with a computer science degree from India’s Pune University, she was committed to furthering her MIS education while mixing in finance and marketing courses to help her succeed in the fintech industry. “I did a lot of research before I picked MIS,” she said. “It’s one of the few MIS programs offered at a business school and it had the right balance of business and technology management.”

While earning her M.S., Ghosh interned at Goldman Sachs as a software developer and after graduation, returned to New York City to work for the firm. She then spent seven years at Elliott Management Corporation and now is a product manager at Arcesium, a post trade technology company providing solutions for alternative asset managers.

Rachael Voluck (BBA ’14) transferred to Temple from Penn State in search of a diverse student body, a campus connected to urban life, and a major that would make her competitive in the job market.

She found just that with MIS. “MIS is an innovative program that prepares you for the workplace and connects you to potential employers,” she said. “Temple instilled a solid work ethic in me that’s proven very helpful.” That work ethic was evident during her time at Temple – in 2013, Voluck received the Cara and Niraj Patel Scholarship for high performing MIS students.

The Montgomery County native started her career at Vanguard before shifting gears to work for startups in the fintech, insurance tech, and advertising tech fields. Today, she works in San Francisco at Square, a leading financial services and mobile payment company. As a technical product manager on the communication platform team, she builds enterprise software including email, SMS, push notifications, and in-product messages.

While at Temple, Voluck was president of Net Impact, a sustainability and corporate social responsibility organization at Fox. She also co-founded the Rad Dish Co-op Cafe with a group of fellow students. “As the only person from business school involved, I wrote the business plan and handled the economics of menu pricing,” she said. “I helped show that business fundamentals are really important no matter what you’re doing.”

She’s energized by hearing that more women have joined the MIS program in recent years, saying “I like the idea of more women learning about tech and getting out there and doing it.”