The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
Issue link: http://ubschoolofmanagement.uberflip.com/i/942540
16 Buffalo Business Spring 2018 connection to excellence Stepping Up CELEBrATING THOSE wHo Make a diffeRence A West Coast restaurant manager who yearned to work in technology and analytics. A former history teacher who caught the business bug as a raceway office manager. A startup founder with 10 years' experience who once considered opening her own record label. Thanks to a unique academic corporate philanthropy partner- ship, these three exceptional individuals are now UB MBA students. Developed to recruit the best MBA students in a hypercom- petitive market, Connection to Excellence (C2E) awards full-tuition scholarships and specialized career development benefits to full- time MBA candidates with outstanding professional credentials. Mark Rizzo, BS '96, MBA '03, a key member of the Dean's Advisory Council, championed the C2E from its initial concept to help the school attract top MBA candidates to UB. Rizzo, a vice president and group manager within M&T's Commercial Banking Division, worked with Erin O'Brien, assistant dean and director of graduate programs, to devise the innovative program, which has resulted in the enrollment of seven accom- plished — and grateful — MBA students, with the promise of more to come. Inaugural C2E partners M&T and Rich Products are investing in C2E and UB as a collaborative and creative means to build a sus- tainable pipeline of highly employable candidates equipped with such critical skills as leadership and business analytics. The first co- hort of four C2E MBAs began classes in fall 2016 and will graduate this spring; the second cohort of three C2E MBAs began classes last fall and will graduate next spring. One of the first C2E recipients, Ryan Sullivan, MBA '18, man- aged corporate restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle before choosing UB to complete an MBA with a data analy- tics concentration. "In Seattle, I started feeling pretty le behind in technology skills," he says. "Most of my non-restaurant friends worked at tech companies like Amazon and Microso on technologies that com- pletely change our everyday lives. They were doing cool stuff." A Western New York native, Sullivan also wanted to return to the area he believes "is in a second renaissance." "Buffalo is a much different place than it was when I was a kid," he says. "It's cool to come back to a city on the upswing." B Y M A R Y C O C H R A N E Photos: Douglas Levere Ryan Sullivan, MBA '18