2001, Sloan web site

Faces of MIT Sloan

Ongoing feature on the Sloan web site in 2001. A color photo accompanied each profile.

Rosanna Pages
Halt a thriving career, pack your bags, and follow your spouse to another country. Such a selfless path awaits Rosanna Pages and others (men among them) when their spouses accept admission to MIT Sloan.

Pages was GM of her family's electroplating company in Mexico, when her husband, Alejandro Canales, matriculated in the MBA program last year. Once at MIT Sloan, she quickly found so-called Significant Others of Sloan (SOS) don't spend two years biding their time.

"I know more people than he does," says Pages, who was elected president of the SOS club in December.

SOS are active members of the MIT Sloan community. Some find work with MIT Sloan departments; Pages works in the MBA program office. Some pursue their own education; Pages is working toward a certificate in e-commerce at Harvard Extension School. Most take advantage of MIT and MIT Sloan activities; Pages took up crew.

Bound by the SOS club, SOS also contribute to the community. The club helps coordinate family social events, works closely with the student-run Graduate Management Society, and does community service. Its activism helps make MIT Sloan a family-friendly environment—a place for students, spouses, and children.

Perhaps most importantly, SOS make up a support network. They've put together a survival guide for incoming SOS, and they conduct an SOS orientation when families arrive in August. Pages says they've also begun contacting SOS of admitted students before they come to campus—a jumpstart on strengthening a network that makes it easy for families to feel at home at MIT Sloan.

Matthew Rhoden
Acceptance e-mails went out to MIT Sloan MBA applicants at 6 p.m. one Saturday last spring. Within 22 minutes, an applicant had logged onto sloan2003.com, accepted admission, uploaded a digital photo, and charged the acceptance fee to his credit card. Without Matthew Rhoden, it wouldn't have happened.

The seemingly innocuous digital transaction culminated a year in which Rhoden, an MBA student from Columbia, Miss., advanced the MBA program's technical capabilities and proved the potential of on-line communities.

As an admitted student the previous spring, Rhoden was disappointed that he and his peers were relegated to communicating through a Yahoo! chat room. He and future classmate Paul Ko built sloan2002.com, an interactive web site for admitted students.

A community was born. The so-called admits of MIT Sloan began chatting on-line, uploading pictures and bios, and advising each other on what type of laptop or PDA to buy. The incoming class quickly divided itself into geographic zones, and admits began forming alliances and friendships.

Impressed, administrators of the MBA program enlisted Rhoden to build on the model and develop sloan2003.com. A database-driven site, it serves both as a platform for building a community among admits and as an official medium for transactions and communication between the MBA program and admitted students.

A self-described techie enrolled in the New Product and Venture Development Track, Rhoden has taken on a dynamic role at MIT Sloan. He's chairman of the Sloan Senate IT Committee and student liaison to the board of the Sloan Club of Boston, an alumni club. Next year, he'll be executive producer of the eBusiness Awards.

Citing his own experience, he relishes the role of students as powerful agents of change at MIT Sloan.

Says Rhoden: "We all were solving problems in the real world. There's no reason to stop that when you get here."

Melody Rollins
"MIT Sloan is really a place for doers and change-agents," says Melody Rollins, a Northern California native who graduated from the MBA program in June.

Consider her accomplishments in the past two years, and it's clear she came to the right place. She was a tireless advocate for change, and her mark on MIT Sloan is sure to be lasting.

Just this past year, Rollins was treasurer of the Graduate Management Society, president of the Investment Management Club, and secretary of the Minority Business Club. She also coordinated a student-run team skills weekend, for which she wrote the curriculum.

Awarded an MIT Sloan merit scholarship in May, Rollins' greatest accomplishment might have been promoting both financial engineering and MIT Sloan to minority candidates.

Last spring, she was part of a team of students, faculty, and professional advisors piloting changes to the financial engineering track. The goal: Make the track curriculum more relevant to the world of finance and attract more women and minorities.

To promote the track, she also brought in finance professionals to highlight the discipline's relevance to an array of fields.

As a member of the Minority Business Club, Rollins started and served on a team of students that met routinely with Dean Richard Schmalensee to discuss ways to attract minority MBA students.

Last year, she coordinated a day of activities for prospective minority students and one for admitted minority students.

She and fellow students also hit the road to promote MIT Sloan at the National Black MBA Conference, the National Hispanic MBA Conference, and Destination MBAs, which includes a day for minority MBA candidates.

It's no coincidence Rollins is an ardent advocate of both finance and stronger minority representation at top b-schools.

She was at MIT Sloan as a fellow through the Robert Toigo Foundation, which provides financial assistance, mentoring, summer internships, and job placement services to minority students. The foundation aims to strengthen the network of minority finance professionals.

With fellows like Rollins—who this summer will join Pacific Investment Management as a portfolio manager—it is succeeding.

Antoinette Schoar
MIT Sloan not only attracts the best and brightest MBA candidates. It's also where the sharpest young faculty come for engaging research opportunities.

Antoinette Schoar is one of three prized female doctoral students who joined MIT Sloan last fall. After earning her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in June 2000, she fielded job offers from 12 business schools.

Joining MIT Sloan was a "no-brainer," says Schoar. It boasted leading finance researchers, the New Economy Value Research Lab, and the Entrepreneurship Center.

Now, a year removed from her Ph.D., Schoar is a dynamic member of the MIT Sloan community—researching the efficiency of venture capital investments and seeking to develop a model for how a company's governance, management style, and the distribution of income among its stakeholders are changing in the New Economy.