Wow that was fast! I can’t believe that I celebrated my second “first day of school” on the Bluff with our students last week. As I look back on the year, I want to take a minute to celebrate some of our successes at Pamplin and share plans of what is to come.
Year At-A-Glance
First, let me start by acknowledging that it was a year still largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While we returned to in-person instruction for most classes, several were still conducted only online. Despite formidable challenges, we managed to work our way through both the Delta and Omicron variants, though we did hold the first two weeks of classes after Christmas vacation online for all students. That said, while the COVID-19 “hangover” did impinge upon our plans, nevertheless, we had several noteworthy achievements.
The 3 “E’s”
Internally, we began the year by setting three key priorities—the 3 “E’s”: embrace our students, enable success for our stakeholders and engage our communities. With embracing our students, we focus on making sure our students have access to the resources that they need to be successful at UP. Enabling success for our stakeholders looks different, depending on the stakeholder in question.
For example, for our student stakeholders, this means ensuring that they are prepared for their future business life and the world that they are likely to encounter. For our business partner stakeholders, this means being a trusted resource for both their human capital (talent) and intellectual capital (problem solving) needs.
Finally, engaging our communities means immersing ourselves in and aligning ourselves with the various communities in which we are embedded—the UP campus, the North Portland neighborhood, the City of Portland and the state of Oregon—to help tackle the important business and civic challenges these communities are facing.
External Outreach
Turning to our external efforts, we partnered with UP’s Dundon-Berchtold Institute and Office of Marketing & Communications, to launch a successful three-month, multi-faceted marketing and advertising campaign with the Portland Business Journal around business ethics. Here, the goal was to establish the Pamplin School of Business as the thought leader in business ethics in the state, a position that we can justifiably claim as Oregon’s only Catholic business school.
Separately, we also launched Pamplin’s first ever digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Working with one of our corporate partners, Logical Position, we stood up a program to generate qualified leads for our roster of graduate business programs. As a result of this effort, a significant percentage of our leads can now be traced back to this campaign.
Student Engagement
There are also exciting things happening with our students. At Pamplin, we want our students engaged with our business partners in relevant, real-world, experiential projects. Such projects not only tie back to our UP Holy Cross mission (educating “the head, the heart and the hands”), but also provide an opportunity for our students to do meaningful, impactful work. I want to highlight one of these projects.
In Dr. Sam Holloway’s Strategy & Competition in the Experiential Economy class, our graduate business students combined principles from design thinking, marketing and strategic management to understand and empathize with current and future customers of Tricycle. Students created customer journey maps, noting Tricycle’s successful and unsuccessful efforts in attracting the type of consumers that they were targeting. So, how did our students do? Tricycle’s executive director put it best.
“I’ve been listening to feedback about my companies for 30 years and at Tricycle, we’ve hired and paid consultants thousands of dollars… they didn’t give us close to the value that the UP MBA students gave us tonight.”
Back to Events
Finally, now that the fog of COVID-19 appears to be lifting, we hope to ramp up the number of Pamplin events that we can host in person. We want to get out and meet you whether it is on campus, at your place of employment or at your favorite watering hole. For instance, I would like to launch “Pilot Pint Nights” where we bring our Pamplin faculty and staff out to greet our alumni at different breweries in the greater Portland area. Stay tuned for more details.
We are gearing up for a great new school year. I am excited for year two.
Go Pilots!
Dr. Michael DeVaughn
Dean, Pamplin School of Business