IBIT News

New Mentoring Pilot Takes off

The Spring 2019 IBIT pilot matched students with top executives. One of the great advantages Temple students have long enjoyed is the opportunity to work directly with top industry executives under the IBIT mentorship program. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the mentorship model shifted a bit from project-based pairings to one-on-one assignments designed to give students even more access to guidance, perspective and feedback from seasoned senior executives.

“Our mission with IBIT is to integrate professional perspectives with academic expertise to create best practice forums and facilitate excellence in IT,” says Sondra Barbour, IT Advisory Board member. “This newly designed mentoring program directly supports that mission. By pairing students with industry experts, we’re providing the opportunity to increase knowledge and connections between students, industry and faculty.”

Mentors have traditionally been members of either the IT Advisory Board or executives of IBIT member firms, and this year was no different: The roster of leaders included George Llado, CIO of Alexion; Chris Cera, the CEO of Arcweb; and Dinesh Desai, the Chairman and CEO of Emtec, Inc.

The pilot program’s three mentees, nominated by faculty and chosen by the Institute, were all MIS majors. Rising senior Michelle Purnama and rising juniors Sophia Spadotto and David Shin were assigned to their mentor based on background and mentor expertise.

“It was a special and unique opportunity,” Purnama says. She was paired with Alexion’s Llado, which she says was ideal given her upcoming internship with the company. Not only did her conversations with Llado and tour of the Alexion office help her prepare for the internship, she says, she found the CIO accessible and easy to talk to. “That made it comfortable for me to ask him questions and ask for advice.”

The mentors, too, enjoyed the experience. “The mentorship program has been a great way to build relationships with young professionals while simultaneously helping them create new building blocks for their careers,” Arcweb’s Cera says. “I plan to continue being a part of the mentorship program moving forward.”

In fact, not only will the new model of IBIT mentorship continue on through upcoming semesters, but the next goal for the program is expanding to include a dozen mentors with anywhere from one to three students each.

Nineteenth Annual IT Awards

The Nineteenth Annual IT Awards were held on Thursday, April 4, 2019 and featured the IT leader Award for Angela Heise, President of the Civil Group, Leidos, Inc, the IT Innovator Award for John Collier, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Wawa, Inc, and the IT Award for Distinguished Alumni for Himesh Bhise, Chief Executive Officer of Synacor.

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The event also featured awards for students, faculty, and staff:

STUDENT LEADERSHIP AWARD Cara Evans	IBIT ALEXION SCHOLARSHIP Andrew Smuszkiewicz
RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR AWARD Paul Pavlou	IBIT AMERISOURCEBERGEN SCHOLARSHIP David Saddic
FACULTY LEADERSHIP AWARD Jeremy Shafer	IBIT EMTEC SCHOLARSHIP Craig Bach
TEACHER OF THE YEAR AWARD JaeHwuen Jung	IBIT NBCUNIVERSAL SCHOLARSHIP Tyler Pobirsky
ADJUNCT OF THE YEAR AWARD Patrick J. Wasson	IBIT PFIZER SCHOLARSHIP Vittoria Fani Ciotti
ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP AWARD Amanda Barber	IBIT QVC SCHOLARSHIP Rana Ismaeil
JAMES AND ANDREA STEWART SCHOLARSHIP Carly Krzywicki	IBIT SCHOLASTIC SCHOLARSHIP Colleen McFall
RON AND RONDA RIDDELL SCHOLARSHIP Shannon Horgan	IT ADVISORY BOARD SCHOLARSHIP Luke Swiatek
YUSUF G. MANDVIWALLA SCHOLARSHIP Patrick Jurgelewicz	ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS Outstanding Officer: Justin Kish Outstanding Member: Sean Boyer
IT LEADERS SCHOLARSHIP Ashlin Cheriyan Mitchell Chudnovsky Tigue Devine Jacob Granieri Ji Sung (Ashley) Han Aiden Hartey	IT LEADERS SCHOLARSHIP Nikithar Kumari Michael Manieri Jason Mays Emily Mellon Quynh Nguyen Natalie Rojas

MIS Professional and Academic Achievement Awards:

SENIOR
Andrea Behler, Cara Evans

JUNIOR
Michelle Purnama, Pham Xuan Bach Hoang

SOPHOMORE
Sophia Alvarez, Madison Collins

FRESHMAN
Kevin Dang, Sean Boyer

Click here for high-resolution downloadable pictures

Students, Executives Connect Through Company Visits

Top-performing Temple University MIS Students got to see the inner workings of two global companies in November. Pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and educational publisher Scholastic Inc. in New York City, were the inaugural hosts of the Institute for Business and Information Technology’s (IBIT) Company Visits initiative.

Dale Danilewitz, CIO, AmerisourceBergen, addresses Temple Students during site visit

These visits bring together business leaders and students at the sites of IBIT members. For a few hours, students tour offices, learn about projects a company is working on, and talk with employees about their careers.

It was amazing to sit at the same table with high-level executives and hear them speak about their experience. Overall, the site visit allowed me to expand my knowledge about the [healthcare] industry as well as my network said MIS student Anastasia Postolati.

Learning how Scholastic Inc. uses technology in publishing showed how diverse a MIS grad’s career options truly are, said Madison Collins.

The November hosts worked closely with IBIT to design their visits, which are also recruiting opportunities. Only students with excellent academic and professional development experience are invited to participate in Company Visits.

It was an absolute delight and inspiring to host the students. They filled me with hope and optimism for the future as prospective leaders of our communities, our businesses and our domestic economy,” said Dale Danilewitz, AmerisourceBergen CIO. Danilewitz, who sits on IBIT’s IT Advisory Board, also said that the students were inquisitive and informative and displayed an air of confidence and sincere appreciation for the opportunity to meet our company leaders while engaging in productive and thought-provoking conversation. They are welcome back any time.

Winners Announced For 6th Annual Temple University NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge

The 6th Annual NBCUniversal Temple University Analytics Challenge attracted more than 135 entries across six colleges, with the first-place finishers coming from Fox School of Business, Klein College of Media and Communications and the Tyler School of Art.

MIS students Jake Green and Rohit Bobby partnered with Klein’s Sergio Aguilar to win the analysis category. Tyler School of Art student Xi (Cynthia) Cheng was the graphics category winner. The first-place finishers took home $2,500. There were also cash prizes for the second and third place winners and two honorable mentions in each category.

“All of the teams put a lot of work into their challenges,” said MIS Assistant Professor Laurel Miller, who organized the event and serves as Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Miller was also a mentor to the three-member analysis team winners and said she was impressed “by how meticulously they looked at each and every angle.”

Teams could choose from three data sets to answer the following questions: The first, from competition sponsor NBCUniversal, asked how media companies align with esports; the second, from global biopharmaceutical company Alexion, sought to learn who the winners and losers were in healthcare funding and payments; the third, from pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, questioned why pharmacies buy drugs from non-primary vendors.

This was the first year a sports-related challenge was offered and many teams were drawn to that. Both first place winners took on the NBCUniversal challenge. Graphics winner Cheng used images from Pac-Man and simple synthesizer sounds to look at the overlap between esports viewers and traditional sports fans in her four-minute video. The analysis trio reworked the question, team member Green said, to ask, “What can media companies and specifically, networks such as those powered by NBC sports group do to adapt to the esports audience and remain a leading delivery and engagement platform for sport entertainment?”

“This project taught me so many lessons that will be of value in my future professional endeavors,” Green said. “It taught us to give more with less. It taught us to condense mountains of data and weeks’ worth of information gathering into a four-minute pitch. We had the privilege of coming together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, despite our differences in educational background.”

Aidan Doyle, Alexion’s Director of Data and Analytic Platforms and a first-time competition judge, said he was impressed by the students and the challenges they tackled.

“When I went to college, you signed up for a class, walked into an amphitheater, the professor wrote on a board, you wrote it down and at the end you’d take a test,” said Doyle. “What I see in the system in the US 30 years later, especially at Temple, is a collaborative effort that brings the best ideas together between all faculty while engaging students and industry… To me, it summed up why Temple and other institutions are the place to be.”

Learn more about the Temple University Analytics Challenge.

See all of the winning entries here.

The 6th Annual Temple University NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge

The Institute for Business and Information Technology announces The 6th Annual Temple University NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge. The competition opens on October 1st, 2018 with the judging and awards presentation on November 14, 2018.

The challenge is open to all Temple University students and features problems and data sets from NBCUniversal, AmerisourceBergen, and Alexion. Students can win prizes of $2,500 out of a total pool of $12,000.

Learn more at http://analyticschallenge.temple.edu