Looking Back At the Last Six Years, and Looking Forward to the Next.
Rodolfo P. Ang
June 1, 2006
Business education at the Ateneo goes as far back as the 1950s, but Ateneo's School of Arts and Sciences was reorganized into four separate Schools only in June 2000. Thus, the conclusion of School Year 2005-2006 also marked the end of what was only our first six years of existence as a separate School of Management.
Time has passed so quickly that we can hardly believe that it has already been six years since we first came into being. And yet the last six years have not been without their achievements:
Faculty Profile. In School Year 2000-2001, less than a sixth of our faculty held doctoral degrees. We have drastically improved our faculty profile since then: in SY 2005-06, nearly a fourth of our faculty already held doctoral degrees, with another fourth at various stages of completion of their doctoral studies. As always, a premium has been placed on earning advanced degrees from outside the Philippines, and we count among our faculty doctoral and masteral degree holders from such elite learning institutions as Wharton, Yale, Northwestern, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, among others.
Student Profile. Student enrollment at JGSOM has grown significantly in both quantity and quality. Not only are more students applying to and enrolling at JGSOM, but the quality of our applicant base and our student population has simply gotten better and better: We enrolled 558 freshmen in SY 2001-2002, of whom 11.9% had graduated in the top 5 of their High School class. By SY 2005-2006, our freshman intake had grown to 709 students, of whom a staggering 23.1% had graduated in the top five of their class. Our total JGSOM student population was 1,923 in June 2001. By March 2006, this number had grown to 2,415 students, distributed over our six undergraduate degree programs.
Academic Programs. In July 2003, we sent out our first batch of only 24 Junior Term Abroad participants to 6 international destinations, distributed over 5 countries in 3 continents. Each one of them came back and described their JTA as a life-changing experience. In July 2006, we will be sending a record-breaking number of 114 JGSOM juniors to spend a semester abroad at 25 institutions spread out over 11 countries in 4 continents, including Santa Clara, the University of San Francisco, Lille Catholic University, Kyushu University, University of Technology at Sydney, and the National University of Singapore. That's almost exactly 20% of our junior student population.
In Summer 2006, we conducted our second China Business Study Tour, which brought 16 of our students to Hongkong, Macau, Shenzhen and Beijing over a four-week period. We expect to make the China Tour an annual offering, and hope that we can add a second offering, a European Business Study Tour, by Summer 2007.
Our JGSOM Business Accelerator, an incubator program for student entrepreneurs to create business start-ups while still in school, was launched in SY 2003-2004, with 21 students organized into 5 business ventures. A total of 52 students from 8 different degree programs have enrolled in the program as of April 2006, grouped into 11 small business units. Their products range from a line of men's toiletries to ice cream with a soy-milk base to charcoal briquettes created from waste materials. Expect to see their products for sale soon!
We are currently working on a new science-based undergraduate business program, and expect to launch it in SY 2007-2008, bringing our portfolio of undergraduate degree programs to a total of seven. We already have six minor programs that allow our students to earn certificates of specialization on top of their main degree. Look forward to the launch of two exciting new minor programs in October 2006.
Benchmarking Against Our Peers. We try to measure the quality of our academic training by benchmarking against students of top universities across the region in various national and international student competitions. We continued our sterling performance in student competitions by winning the Gold Award at the 3rd HSBC Young Entrepreneurs' Competition in March 2006 for the third straight year.
We won first, second and third place in the 6th L'Oreal E-Strat Challenge, an on-line business strategy game, totally dominating this competition also for the third straight year. (Our top team's score was third highest in the region, and fifth highest worldwide.)
Also in SY 2005-2006, we scored a back-to-back victory at the Manila Jaycees' Best Business Plan competition by winning First Prize for the second straight year. (Actually, our two teams landed first and second place!) We won First and Third Place in the Chinese-Filipino Business Club's First Business Plan competition, Second Place in the Philippine Marketing Association's Strategic Marketing competition, and Third Place in the Operations Research Society of the Philippines' OR Competition.
Student Life. Our students work hard, but also have time to play. Our third annual JGSOM week, called "aweSOM!", was once again a main highlight of the year. Held in September 2005, it featured a week-long series of academic and non-academic competitions among our various student business organizations, beginning with a fun run and ending with the Mr. and Ms. SOM pageant. The Management Engineering Association showed that they were truly aweSOM and emerged overall champions.
Due to our students' clamor to have more JGSOM-wide activities, we held our first (and we hope annual) JGSOM Sportsfest in February 2006, featuring an inter-program competition over 10 different sports events. It culminated with an exciting tug-of-war where the Legal Management students and faculty out-pulled the Management team to win the sports championship.
Outreach. The JGSOM Business Resource Center and Family Business Center both took shape this year, organizing and running a variety of programs that included the Business Leadership Forum, the Entrepreneurial Academy and the Family Business Breakfast Roundtable. An additional innovation this year is that many of our fora included international guest speakers. This year, we were honored to welcome to the Ateneo Dr. Saras Sarasvathy of the Darden School at the University of Virginia, Mr. Hui Kwok Leong, Head of Business Incubation Venture Support for the National University of Singapore, Dr. Michael Trueblood of the California State University , and Dr. Dennis Jaffe of the San Francisco State University.
In June 2005, JGSOM also organized and hosted the First National Conference on Entrepreneurship Education, bringing together 117 delegates from all over the country, including 69 business school Deans.
The JGSOM Student Enterprise Center. Construction on JSEC is expected to begin in June 2006, in time for occupancy by the second semester of SY 2006-2007. Sometimes simply referred to as the Management Mall, JSEC is an experiential learning laboratory that will encourage student entrepreneurship by allowing students to set up their own retail establishments in commercial spaces available for lease (at subsidized rates!) right on campus.
Much has been accomplished over the first six years of our life as the John Gokongwei School of Management. We look forward to the coming year, and indeed to all the coming years as a period of promise and of exciting new possibilities.
We hope that all of our stakeholders, including our students, alumni, administrators, faculty and staff, and partners from the education, business, government, and diplomatic sectors will continue to be our active partners in working to realize all the enticing possibilities that lie ahead, helping us to turn exciting dreams into vibrant realities!