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Alumna
Kelli McGonagill Finglass ('89)
When Kelli McGonagill Finglass isn't leading dance rehearsals and business meetings, coordinating appearance calendars and travel, or reviewing rough cuts of a CMT reality TV show, she's sharing wisdom with the 30-plus women who make up the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Each facet of the group, often lauded as "America's sweethearts," passes across Finglass' desk. She took the job of director and business manager — which includes helping to choose each year's members — in 1991 after five years of cheering on the squad. She knows the rigor of the process.
Each May, more than 600 women audition for a coveted spot on the team and Finglass says that having to tell 95 percent of them that this won't be the year their dream comes true is very difficult.
"My role is kind of like being room mom. But it's not always cheer, cheer, cheer," she says. "I'm also the one disappointing people and that is very heavy for me. I know how fragile young people can be."
A self-proclaimed perfectionist, Finglass has always worked hard. After her first year as a Cowboys cheerleader in 1984, she enrolled in UNT's College of Business to study marketing. Each day for four years, she drove to Denton from Valley Ranch for 8 a.m. classes, worked an afternoon job in Lewisville and then headed to the dance studio for a full evening of rehearsals.
"Because I've traveled worldwide on 18 USO tours, this little girl from Lindale saw a much bigger world than East Texas," Finglass says. "A tour to South Korea and chance to learn about manufacturing got me interested in international marketing."
She credits former marketing professor Krishna Erramilli and Gopala Ganesh, current University Distinguished Teaching Professor of marketing, for stimulating her brain and her interest in the field.
"They taught me how a product goes from an idea to the store shelf, and how you reach the consumer," she says.
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Alumnus
James Guillory ('13)
Putting in hard work to transform a "no" into a "yes" is a familiar task for James O. Guillory Jr.
When the athletics-over-academics-minded Houston high schooler was denied admission to UNT in 1992, Guillory had his mother drive him the four hours to Denton to meet face-to-face with an admissions counselor. He professed his commitment to put school first and left that day with conditional acceptance.
Shortly after completing his business studies at UNT, when 21 banks turned down the $5 million loan application needed to fund his first hotel development, Guillory kept asking. Later, bank 22 didn't say "no" — it said it couldn't fund a hotel project for a 25-year-old with no experience in the hotel industry. That week, he secured a job as a hotel sales manager.
"After a month I called the lender and said I'd like to meet with him," Guillory says. "We met and he said that he liked me, but that they couldn't do business with someone who didn't have hotel experience. I pulled out my business card and said, 'I've been at this hotel for a month and I'll stay there as long as it takes. I need that loan.'"
The loan was approved 48 hours later and Guillory continued his job as a sales manager while becoming the first African American to own and develop a Hampton by Hilton-branded hotel. The 65-room hotel, near the Houston Ship Channel in Deer Park, opened in 2003.
"I gambled everything, including everything my parents owned, to get that first hotel completed," says Guillory, president of HarDam Hotels. "I was so focused on getting it done and had the attitude that there was no space to fail, but I recognize it could've gone badly."
Guillory learned to run a lean and mean business from his parents, gas station and convenience store entrepreneurs. By implementing their business acumen and pouring his own sweat equity into his first hotel, he was able to keep costs low and quickly turn a profit. By the end of 2007, he had proven himself a viable business partner for investors and sold the property to pursue more hotel opportunities.
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The College of Business takes home top prizes in Big Data Challenge
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UNT College of Business students represented two of the winning teams at this year’s Big Data Challenge. Sponsored by Sabre and DHISCO (two leading technology companies in the travel industry), the annual competition gave students the opportunity to team up and find solutions to industry-related challenges using real-world data sets.
Putting their analytical skills to the test to develop a case study portfolio, Team Inception and Team Browncoats took home a grand total of $2,000, and the winning titles. Ryan Fellers, Mike Pratt and Rhida Joudah (master's students studying business analytics), won the overall prize in the Sabre category of the challenge, while business logistics doctoral student Amit Malhan and business analytics master’s student Crystal Janes represented Team Inception and first place in the DHISCO category.
“I was enrolled in several decision science classes at UNT and when I heard about this challenge in which we get an opportunity to work with real data and solve real-world problems, I jumped onto it,” said Malhan. “With the growth of GPU and increasing computational power, big data and machine learning are gaining tremendous popularity.” READ MORE... |
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Fidelity Investments Integrated Case Competition
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Advancing business efficiencies and developing industry solutions can be a challenging task for any student, but when developing said solutions for one of the best online brokers of 2017, challenging becomes an understatement.
Each year, Fidelity Investments charges students with developing real-world solutions to industry dilemmas as part of their College of Business capstone course, Business Policy. This corporate-sponsored competition, titled the Fidelity Case Competition, involves an integrated academic approach, bringing together teams of students from varying majors. Using their diverse backgrounds, and past four years of academic experiences, teams compete against each other to offer their best solutions and a chance at cash prizes.
This year, students from the Empowerment Consulting Group team took home first place on April 29, and with it, $800 cash, each. Team members included Natalie Boyd, Jacob Bryant, Koffi Ettiegne, Kristopher Galbreath, Jonathan Hamp, Brionna Jones, Michela Mollica McCune and Cade Robertson.
“The most rewarding thing was a chance to find my passion,” said Michela Mollica, College of Business senior majoring in Business Computer Information Systems. “I felt passionate about the proposal we came up with. I knew we had a great idea and I wanted Fidelity to hear it.” READ MORE...
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Faculty pursue research efforts to strengthen the classroom experience
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Dr. Paul Hutchison, associate professor of accounting, began working at UNT in 1988 and has been an asset to the classroom ever since.
With his varied research interests and dedication to the field, Hutchison has been published in nearly a dozen journals, and this year, he added two more publications to his extensive list of accomplishments. The Journal of Case Studies, a double-blind reviewed journal, accepted Hutchison’s coauthored works focusing on business valuation in the context of a privately-owned service company, Mantras Ambulance Services, Incorporated.
Working alongside Dr. Janet R. Jones at University of Minnesota Duluth and Dr. Amy F. Holmes at Trinity University, the cases Hutchison helped develop shared a common core of knowledge – one focusing on seller-side decisions, and another on buyer-side decisions.
“From my perspective, this was a very positive experience in that I got to work with two educational research colleagues who are passionate about teaching like myself. We really wanted to develop short cases that we could actually use in our own accounting classes,” said Hutchison.
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Accounting Scholars Program kicks off fall 2017
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Beginning this fall, the Accounting Program at UNT will offer top-tier students the opportunity to get on the fast track to success. Incoming freshman and transfer students interested in a major in accounting will now be eligible for the unique and elite UNT Accounting Scholars Program. With benefits such as an assigned accounting faculty mentor in the student's first year, an assigned professional mentor to students in their junior year, guaranteed admission to the integrated Bachelor of Science and Master of Science program in Accounting or Taxation and priority consideration for graduate level scholarships, the Accounting Scholars Program is the best way to get ahead, early.
Be on the lookout for additional details as we kick off our programming this fall. |
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Alumna Mitchelle Schanbaum weighs in on cyber warfare in IT
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Mitchelle Schanbaum has over 25 years of experience in all phases of information technology security, training and consulting. After studying Business Administration at Texas Tech University and accounting at the University of North Texas, Mitchelle was recruited by Equifax where she flourished and discovered her overwhelming passion for Information Technology.
Shortly thereafter, the move towards owning her own business became unquestionable and with that, Specialized Security Services, Inc. was born. For 18 years, Mitchelle and her dedicated team have successfully assisted organizations with implementation and oversight of their information security, privacy and regulatory compliance programs. Through her strong communications within all levels of organizations she fosters an environment which creates business relationships in which Specialized Security Services, Inc. is often recognized as a “Security Partner.” She and her team provide trusted advice and project management in all areas of information security including, but not limited to, risk management, incident response, policy and procedure development, security architecture, secured payment solutions, ASV, PCI, NIST and HITRUST compliance. READ MORE... |
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