June 2003, MIT Sloan web site

MIT Sloan graduation 2003

Students enter MIT Sloan as the best and the brightest. When this year's graduates received their degrees at Killian Court early this month, one thing was clear: they departed better, brighter and equipped and energized to make their mark on the global business stage.

Five hundred and seventy-nine MIT Sloan students graduated, alongside another 1,600 graduating MIT students and in front of family and friends in the picturesque court at the MIT Dome.

Life-changing experience
For most, the day was the culmination of a life-changing experience and a major step toward a long-held professional calling.

"I came to MIT Sloan with a vision of starting a venture on my own and I feel that I am fully equipped to achieve that," said MBA graduate Siva Ravikumar, who will now be a founding partner of a venture capital firm in Richardson, Texas.

Ravikumar said MIT Sloan's coursework — rooted in faculty members' research and experience in management practice — fueled his entrepreneurial ambitions.

With MBA students from more than 60 countries and from a curious mix of professional and personal backgrounds, he added, the collaborative nature of the program "nurtured the learning process."

The unique MIT Sloan culture proved a good fit for MBA graduate Christina Cragholm, who will join Samsung's Global Strategy Group in Seoul, Korea, in September.

"At MIT Sloan, I found a home for all of my interests — from high-tech careers to wine appreciation, and from recruiting to leadership," she said. "MIT Sloan rewards taking initiative and approaching problems from a different perspective. The culture of innovation gives me added confidence and friendships as I embark upon the rest of my career."

Finding the unexpected
For Sloan Fellows graduate Alan Dowdell, coming to MIT Sloan was initially less about changing his life than about bolstering his skills.

As a mid-career executive at Corning, he saw the Sloan Fellows Program as a means to "remove the fog of accounting, finance and economics, while crystallizing leadership skills in technology and innovation management."

"The MIT Sloan Fellows Program seemed like the right balance of top-tier, highest-quality school with the lowest opportunity cost," he said. "On that, the Program fully delivered."

"What I didn't expect," said Dowdell, "was the life experience of becoming part of a closely-knit community with solid ties to the broader MIT technology and alumni networks — something on which I will rely for the rest of my career."