We are a community for Black students, alumni, faculty and staff at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business.
Dean Williamson, it’s great to see you! The last time I saw you, we were both in Seoul, South Korea, where you hosted a gathering for those of us doing our MBA Residential there, along with alumni and recently admitted students. Your presentation mentioned that we have over 200 Merage alumni in South Korea, which is impressive. You invited 60 alumni and over 50 showed up, with their families in tow! So that was great to see. What have you learned from the alumni there and across the globe?
We have wonderful alumni who are motivated to spearhead alumni engagement activities across the global and work to maintain the Anteater community.
I believe one of the reasons are alumni want to stay connected is they had such a great experience living in Southern California. One of the advantages we have as a school is that we have so many different communities that have strong cultural connections to their home countries.
In the case of Korea, you have a lot of Koreans that have come to Southern California to make a home and now it's become a destination of choice for the Korean community in America. You have many successful Korean business leaders here and many Korean entertainers who have homes here, so it's become a place for authentic Korean culture and that always leads to economic exchange as well.
Many of the best companies in Korea send their top talent to study at the Merage School. The education they receive here often serves as a launching pad for them to go up in their organization and achieve their professional goals. It's all extraordinarily mutually reinforcing because it gives us really unique insight into the operations of some amazing companies in Korea. You were able to benefit from this because you had a chance to visit these companies during your MBA Residential. Most of those company visits were arranged by Merage alums.
Yes, they were!
They’re just an extraordinarily generous set of alums. It just reinforces the cultural and economic ties between the region and that's great for everybody. We also have Korean faculty, and they will tell you that our location was one reason why they were motivated to join the Merage School. We have also fostered very meaningful relationships with several of the top universities in Korea: Seokyeong University (SKKU), which is over 600 years old, Yonsei University, which is consistently rated as one of the top business schools in the world, and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).
We’re able to work at the highest level in that country with the best organizations and key business leaders. It's just a tremendously reinforcing activity.
It was great to see the alumni while I was there. I think my favorite company visit during the Residential was to Hyundai Capital, where one of our Merage alumni (now a VP there), kindly hosted us and gave us a tour of their credit card factory. We also did visits to the airport, a blockchain company, a coffee roaster distributor, so I think we got to see a very nuanced lens of all the various types of businesses they have there.
It's not a coincidence that those companies also have their North America headquarters here: Kia, Honda, Samsung, Hyundai Capital, etc. Again, you see that that cultural connection almost always facilitates economic ties. Those economic ties create tremendous opportunities for our students. For example, this spring term I'm teaching an EMBA course on a live case in partnership with KIA America.
We’re working with KIA America to help them think about their workforce needs as they expand their EV offerings. The EMBA course is called, “Leading in Transformational Times”, and we will work directly with KIA executives to help them understand how EV technology is impacting their business. At the end of the course, students will pitch their recommendation to KIA’s senior leaders.
That’s so exciting! I’ve found that any sort of real-world business ties that we get during the MBA is hugely beneficial to anything we’ll carry out post-grad. So, in the same vein of being inclusive, celebrating other cultures and alumni, I also recently saw you at BMA's Innovate24 Conference over the weekend, which had a great lineup of speakers. I’d love to hear any takeaways you had from this year’s event.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to see any of the speakers because I was teaching. I will say, my son went and I gathered that OG Arabian Prince was a hit.
Yes! He was definitely a crowd favorite. We were just blown away by his story, like I had no idea he was involved in so many other sectors, but yeah, he was very compelling.
I actually first met him at a technology forum that was being hosted by UCI. He was there as a potential investor. We've stayed in touch and now he's big supporter of the Merage School Black Management Association.
Oh yeah, big supporter. We're really grateful to get him this year. Well, even though you didn't get a chance to actually attend any of the speaker sessions, you’ve seen BMA evolve over the course of a few years now. It's only gotten bigger and better. What are your hopes and goals for the future of BMA?
BMA really is the first initiative we put in place to solidify our activities around inclusive excellence. It wasn't like we weren’t doing anything before, however, we didn't have an organization like BMA. And of course that was just the start. We now have the Asian Pacific Islander Initiative, the LatinX Initiative, and our Global Initiative which was created to support our international students.
I give a lot of credit to Tonya Bradford, Kevin Bradford and the BMA officers who got the boat going. Their initial idea was to create a space that allows individuals to bring whole-of-self to business school, but as we continue to evolve, I want to focus more on the “excellence” part.
How do we ensure that we are enhancing placement outcomes for all students? How are we furthering the career development of alums as they go through different phases of their careers? Can BMA be a means by which individuals continually tap back into the school to reinforce and reconnect, get ideas and retool, if necessary, as they progress in their careers? How do we link the students and the alums through effective mentoring activities? And how can we continue to diversify the talent actually teaching our courses?
I think we've established proof of concept on the importance of having spaces in the business school that are inclusive of all cultures. The beauty of course, is that in each of these situations, whether it be API, LXI or BMA, they provide a lens of how each particular community is thinking about business and they also provide entry for people from outside of that community to engage with the community.
In many respects, it's just like the opportunity that you just experienced going to Korea. That's beauty of having an institution that is, at its core, inclusive. If you really want to thrive and be a global leader, you need opportunities to see world-class expertise from a wide variety of cultural lenses, and you can draw upon these experiences to upskill yourself. That's my vision for BMA moving forward.
It's a great vision to have. At BMA Innovate24, a lot of the key themes that they covered were about futurism. Arabian Prince, for example, his whole theme was, “I want to train and breed futurists like we need to be thinking about the next thing” and I've always admired Merage for thinking the same, especially when it comes to digital transformation. And a lot of the key themes that were discussed throughout all the panels were how tech is evolving various industries, from sports, to media to museum experiences. So, with that, Merage recently introduced ZotGPT, a set of new AI tools for students and faculty.
Maybe you could summarize what it is for our alumni readers and just talk about why now? Why did you decide to put this out?
Well, the “Why now?” part is easy. One of the concerns that's been raised about OpenAI’s ChatGPT is security and another issue is intellectual property. The University has created a closed net mechanism that helps us safeguard against some of those concerns, while still taking advantage of what the tool can do. We'll start iterating with different uses for this tool, like creating more sophisticated chatbots to help with HR issues for our employees.
There's another initiative being developed to create individualized student services for academic advising - not to displace our staff or faculty - but to complement their capability. This would give students more real-time support. We also are exploring the use of the tool in our curriculum. I actually have a set of faculty who are teaching an elective right now using a generative AI Grade Bot.
A Grade Bot?
Yes! The Grade Bot essentially aids with evaluation of the assignments. Students are given assignments where they can use generative AI to support their work, then the Grade Bot begins to understand the patterns of how the students are responding.
Again, it’s not displacing the expertise of the academics in terms of evaluation, but it's helping us understand trends of ChatGPT usage amongst students.
At a very bare minimum, ZotGPT can effectively triage activities. The idea is that you can get faster responses for items that are not as complex or require human intervention right away.
Well, I just want to say I'm grateful that the school is looking into this and actually finding ways to leverage it to their own benefit because I agree with you, I don't think it makes sense to simply ignore it. Inevitably, I think it's embracing it in a way that works for you. I admire the professors who actually acknowledge it in their syllabus and say here's the ChatGPT policy: you can use it for research purposes, but not for final deliverables, which I agree with. I think friends of mine at other business schools, they're still a little late to catch up on that, so I think in many ways, Merage is ahead.
I sit on the board of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) as Secretary Treasurer and we had our board meeting a few months ago in Barcelona which brought together 30 deans from business schools around the world. As part of the AACSB Innovation Committee we spent 4 hours talking about the impact of AI. We all went around the room and talked about our activities in this domain.
There are some schools that are really leaning in, trying to experiment and others that perhaps are more conservative or resistant. We’re definitely an example of a school that is leaning in. Globally, we're probably experimenting with this more than most business schools, and I think that's going to serve us well.
Of course, when pursuing initiatives like this, a key part of the conversation is what resources are you willing to dedicate to make this worthwhile? At the Merage School, we certainly have dedicated time, energy and financial resources to make sure that we're at least able to coherently speak on the topic and understand what potentially applications could be.
Well, I know we talked about a few topics today, but I also want to give you the space to talk about any strategic initiatives that are related to Merage that you're particularly excited about right now?
The big thing that's going to be coming up, that will be a great celebration for us is the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition Finals which will be on May 23.
I saw the list of semi-finalists and it included a set of amazing companies. That list will get whittled down to the top 10 finalists. The event is one of the best days here on campus. I always start that session by saying that today we will have the unique opportunity to see how a star was born because it's guaranteed that one of those 10 companies will be generating a product or service that people are using in the future.
We usually have 300 people in the auditorium. It's packed. It's a great vibe. We have a bunch of investors from the community. Deals are done as soon as the students finish walking off the stage. You got people coming up to them talking about, “I want to get you in my incubator. I'd love to talk to you some more about maybe getting behind you as an investor.
It's very, very cool to see.
Do you typically see students who participate in Stella Zang New Venture Competition then transition into The Cove?
Depending on the entrepreneur, they could end up at the Long Beach Accelerator, The Irvine Accelerator by Sunstone Management, The Cove, or if they’re a biotech startup, they could be in University Lab Partners because they need wet lab space. It just depends on the entrepreneur.
With Stella Zhang, we’re at the earliest stage of development and then because we have partnerships and relationships across the investment community, we can help the entrepreneurs navigate into bigger ponds.
Well, Dean Williamson we’re excited to see the upcoming finalists at this year’s Stella Zhang New Venture Competition and I appreciate you taking the time to speak with BMA today!
