August 2025 Message from the Dean

Dear Colleagues,

I hope everyone enjoyed the summer and is excited by the buzz of the new academic year. Over the past few weeks, we have hosted many orientation sessions for our new students — from Online MBAs to Full-Time MBAs and BBAs. Our program teams and faculty did an excellent job of building positive momentum and setting expectations for the new academic year. Thanks to all of you who participated in these activities and events to welcome our students to the Michigan Ross community.

In addition to our students, we welcomed six new tenure-track faculty members — Daphne Armstrong, Oguzhan Celebi, Rebecca Desimone, Angela Kohlenberg, Kevin Lee, and Julian Tertegge — and six new LEOs — William de Herder, Savannah Hall, Justin Huang, Soojin Kwon, Curtis LaButte, Dave Ostreicher, Kevin Self, and Kevin Wenzel. We recognized these individuals last night at our annual Faculty Celebration, which honors the whole arc of a faculty career by welcoming our newest faculty, celebrating milestone promotions, and especially recognizing the many career accomplishments of our retiring faculty. It was great to see many of you there, including some of our emeriti faculty like former dean (and former U-M interim president) Joe White.

Continuing on the theme of recognition and celebration, I am excited to share that the Financial Times named Ross the No. 1 executive education provider in the United States in their 2025 ranking of EE programs worldwide. Not only did Ross secure the No. 1 ranking for our open enrollment and custom Executive Education Programs, but we also claimed the No. 1 ranking for key open program categories, including faculty expertise, course design, and quality of peers. This is fantastic news and a testament to the great work of our EE faculty and staff in ensuring Michigan Ross is a premier source of talent, knowledge, inspiration, and connection to executives around the globe.

On the FTMBA enrollment front, I am very pleased to say that we weathered the federal-level uncertainty related to international student visas very well. Our class size is coming in very close to what we had originally planned for this time last year. We have many colleagues to thank for their hard work and dedication to ensure we brought in this highly talented cohort, including:  

• Admissions (Andrea McHale and team) for effectively reducing melt and deferrals
• Sean O’Neil and Annie Atkinson for their adaptability with our scholarship strategy
• Operations (Doug Thomas, Chris Wunderlich) for timely I-20s, visa tracking, and policy interpretation with the International Center (Brittany Widin)
• The MBA Program office (Marissa Bhuva) for working through a hybrid policy, faculty prep, and section design
• Lacy Calzavara for helping with clubs & MTrek inclusivity for hybrid students
• The Career Development Office (Heather Byrne, Leslie Lynn) for reassurance on recruiting timelines
• Our registrar (Kathy Hastings) and financial aid (Mershawn Gayden) for hybrid scheduling and aid support
• Lizette Korn for exploring options related to allowing some of these students to take OMBA courses
• Faculty (Justin Frake, Greg Miller, Nirupama Rao) for their hybrid accommodations
• Backup studio support (Greg Barker)
• And MBA program leadership (S. Sriram, Matt Ganderson) for all the creative problem-solving and coordination

A team behind each of these folks was instrumental to these processes. Overall, this was a complex challenge, and it was amazing to see the highly productive collaboration under very short time lines to effectively set us up for a successful academic year from the perspective of our students, faculty, and staff alike.

We will discuss these and other activities in our upcoming State of the School meeting on Sept. 25 at 3 p.m. in Robertson Auditorium. Please join us if you can. We will discuss the recent happenings and look forward to the upcoming year, including highlights of our plans related to the artificial intelligence insights we discussed in our strategy sessions over the summer. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in those sessions — your perspectives are very valuable in informing us of our next steps in this arena.

As we move into the new semester, I also want to thank all of you who attended our summer gatherings. I really enjoyed our conversations and am grateful that we had opportunities throughout the summer to connect before the start of class.

As always, I want to remind everyone of my upcoming office hours, which can be found on the dean’s office webpage. In late September, in-person office hours for faculty and staff will shift to Wednesday afternoons in the Davidson Winter Garden. 

• Tuesday, Sept. 2 from 4:15-5 p.m.
• Wednesday, Sept. 24 from 3:30-4:15 p.m.

I look forward to seeing you soon on campus as we kick off the new academic year. I hope you all have a fun and relaxing Labor Day weekend. I’m particularly excited to cheer on our Michigan Wolverines football team this Saturday at their opening game against the New Mexico Lobos at Michigan Stadium. Go Blue!

Kind regards,

Sharon