Roles And Responsibilities At SMU

Well, some priorities were my own; some priorities were given to me. So for example, one priority was to get the AACSB accreditation. Another priority was to launch the executive MBA program which wasn't there at that time, and also the Post Graduate programs. My personal priority was that you cannot do any of these things till you hire the right faculty. And admittedly that was also the priority from the board to see if SMU could ramp up the rate and you can't just ramp up the rate, you need to ramp up the quality as well. And so you know, hiring of faculty, you also have to make sure that the environment is there when you hire young faculty to make sure that there are adequate processes and resources for faculty development because it costs a lot of money to train the faculty and you don't want to lose them when they are almost ready but not quite ready for tenure. So we have to make sure that we not only hire the right people but we are able to bring them to the level where, you know, we can keep them. And so acquisition and retention of faculty was the key priority. Then it was also important to begin to start linking with other universities. My personal background is in marketing and within marketing, brand management. And so one way, in which we build the brand is to build awareness about SMU, but also to build up quality, but that quality is signaled by the quality of academic institutions you are partnered with. And so it was important to also partner with and learn from but also contribute towards because if you are going to partner with somebody, they want something in return. So it was really thinking through the strategy of how we are going to ramp up our Post Graduate Program, ramp up our reputation, while, at the same time, not losing sight of the Undergraduate Program, which was then about 98% of the enrolment, and it is still, 89-90% of the, I mean, the Undergraduate Program is still our core business but it was building sort of a superstructure on the foundation that was already laid by the very strong Undergraduate Program.