By Dean Tom Gilligan

Bragging on the students at McCombs isn’t difficult, and no group enjoys hearing about student accomplishments more than the McCombs Advisory Council, in session last Friday.

Our theme for the day was experiential learning, and students were there to talk about three key initiatives at the school:

• The Energy Management & Innovation Center, with its concentrations in energy finance, clean tech finance and clean tech marketing, resulting in an MBA team victory at the National Energy Finance Challenge.
• Texas Venture Labs, which is reporting on its first year of operations this Friday at the Venture Labs EXPO, with ten new ventures under development, supported by the efforts of 30 graduate students from business, law and engineering.
• The Supply Chain Management Center’s highly successful hands-on learning experience this past summer, which took students upstream through the Target supply chain, from Austin to Hong Kong; the eighth summer program developed by the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER).

Advisory council members, such as this year’s incoming chair, Gary Kelly, BBA '77 and chairman, president and CEO of Southwest Airlines, love to hear about experiences like these because they understand we’re getting students out of the classroom, closer to the complex reality council members see in their own corporations.

During a break on Friday, Todd Davidson, an engineering Ph.D. student in the Texas Venture Labs program, talked about working with business students. “One of the most important insights for me was learning to identify the pain point first. I’ve had an engineering professor tell me, just come up with a great idea and then find the problem. The business approach was a change of perspective for me.”

On the flip side, MBA student Rex Morrow said he discovered a unique approach among the engineering and law students in the program. “Engineers are trained to think critically about processes, systems and the hard science behind the technology,” he said. “And the law students helped us understand the ramifications of how to shape the patent, or the type of corporate structure we would need.”

Morrow was very excited about next year’s program, which will include five students from the College of Natural Sciences. “We have some software engineers, a molecular biologist and a graduate student in textile and apparel technology, which is very interesting.”

In the corporate world, such collaboration is normal everyday behavior—I’m pleased we’ve created that experiential dynamic at McCombs and across the campus.