Isenberg Celebration of Scholarship Recipients and Their Benefactors

Last evening I had the pleasure of attending the 2014 Isenberg Scholarship Celebration, which took place off-campus at the Log Cabin.

The venue was beautifully decorated with flowers and balloons, in maroon and white, of course, the UMass Amherst colors.

We had been attending this special spring recognition ceremony, which for many years had taken place at the UMass Campus Center.

Yesterday's event was extra special because my family and I had been giving over quite a few years towards an endowment established to create a scholarship for a student and, yesterday, we had the joy of seeing the first Nagurney Scholarship awarded to an undergraduate Operations & Information Management student, who is both a scholar and a true gentleman.

The hor d'oeuvres were elegant and the desserts sumptious but the best part was seeing the student scholarship recipients and their many benefactors, who include alums, members of the community, as well as faculty.

Education, as was emphasized yesterday, especially by our Dean, Mark Fuller, is the greatest gift that one can get and receive. Our Associate Dean Dr. Linda Shea further emphasized that scholarships enable our students to realize their dreams.

All the presentations were wonderful, including the student and alum ones, and I enjoyed hearing our Development Officer, Andrew Clendinneng, who is Canadian (I was born up north there, too), speak of the friendships he has made with our great alums.

It was also terrific to have one of my doctoral students, Sara Saberi, present. She was there because she is one of the ten recipients of the 2014 Isenberg Scholar Award. Her concentration is in Management Science and she is working on our NSF-funded multiuniversity project on Network Innovation Through Choice.

 

Gene Isenberg, after whom our School of Management is named, would have been so proud to see the students, family members, faculty, benefactors, and staff present yesterday evening. Sadly, he passed away on March 16, 2014 but left a tremendous legacy.

The Isenberg School is truly on the rise and, best of all, we have tremendous students that we have the privilege to teach and to conduct research with.

Congratulations to all of the scholarship recipients - you make the donors and faculty proud!

Thanks also to our wonderful Isenberg Editor, Lou Wigdor and former Dean Dr. Tom O'Brien for all that they have done to get us to this point.