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Janis S. Reed Scholarship helps BAM student keep her focus

Greg Johnson — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:44:42 +0000

Janis S. Reed Scholarship helps BAM student keep her focus Greg Johnson Fri, 04/18/2025 - 15:44

Receiving the Janis S. Reed Scholarship sharpened the focus even more for the goal-oriented Anh Tran. Wrapping up her final semester as an undergraduate student in accounting at �� and completing the bachelor’s to accelerated master’s (BAM) program, she already had her eyes on the larger picture.

Anh Tran

Following a similar path as her aunt and nearly 30 other students each year, she attended two years at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) in the ADVANCE Program before transferring into the accounting program at George Mason. Her path is now leading her to completing the CPA exam after finishing her master’s degree courses.

Tran was drawn to the Costello College of Business because of its reputation for excellence and diversity. After transferring from NOVA, she worked with an academic advisor to see how she could earn the credits required to sit for the CPA exam. That’s when she first learned about the BAM program. At first, she was concerned that taking undergraduate and graduate courses at the same time would be too much. However, as she eased into the course material, she found that it was nothing she could not handle. Tran is now one of more than 60 BAM students pursuing this accelerated path to the MS in accounting degree.

Still, her course load was increasingly heavy, so Tran was relieved that the Janis S. Reed Scholarship helped pay off her financial costs. “It’s my first time taking both the undergraduate and also the grad classes, so I really want to focus on school,” she says.

Not only did the scholarship help with finances, but it also gave her other opportunities, like connecting her with Reed herself. “I had a chance to talk to her and other recipients at the scholarship luncheon,” she says. “She gave us good advice for our academic journey and then also tips for the career journey that we asked her for. It was really a great opportunity for us to meet her, and she was very sweet and friendly.”

The scholarship luncheon, which brought together Costello donors and recipients to the Fairfax Campus, was an experience that Tran was grateful to take advantage of.

Looking back on her experiences at the Costello College of Business, Tran is glad that she took advantage of many of the opportunities, some of which were recommended or assigned by professors. She recalls attending the career fair for the first time with one of her classmates.

“At that event, I had my first opportunity to talk with real recruiters, and it was really special for me,” she says.

It was at that career fair where she had the chance to interview for her first internship. The internship was exactly what she was looking for—a great learning experience in the professional tax services area at a public accounting firm.

Through focus, hard work, and informed planning, Tran is on schedule to sit for the CPA exam after graduation. She plans to begin her career immediately and balance her CPA studies with her work schedule. “I want to work for a public accounting firm, perhaps in the tax area as well,” she says. “I believe I am familiar with taxes after my past internships, and I’d like to gain more knowledge and experience about this field.”

Tran is excited to begin her state and local taxes internship at a public accounting firm in the summer of 2025. Another summer plan that she’s looking forward to is the global residency trip to Rome, Italy, as part of her global accounting environment class, where she will be able to engage with local companies and explore the culture.

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A collaborative solution to culinary career challenges

Sarah Holland — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:29:31 +0000

A collaborative solution to culinary career challenges Sarah Holland Tue, 03/25/2025 - 10:29

One of the best parts of any town is its local food. But in the aftermath of COVID-19 lockdowns, keeping local restaurants alive and thriving requires a new approach.

Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

In partnership with the City of Fairfax, Town of Vienna, and the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging, and Travel Association Foundation (VRLTAF), George Mason is working on a solution: the Culinary Careers Collaborative (CCC) is a workforce development project to get restaurant workers the foundational skills they need to succeed.

Jai Girard, director of education and workforce development for the VRLTAF, explained that the restaurant industry has often struggled with recruitment and retention. “The challenge has intensified in recent years,” she said. Hospitality employees who were laid off during the lockdowns found jobs in other industries. Business travelers, who were a significant market for Northern Virginia restaurants, have not returned to the pre-2020 numbers. And with growing competition from the gig economy, restaurants are struggling to recruit and retain their staff.

As restaurants face growing challenges, the City of Fairfax and Town of Vienna wanted to find a solution.

“This is a challenge that transcends jurisdictional borders,” said Ashley Curtis, marketing and business engagement specialist for the Town of Vienna. "Hungry diners aren’t thinking about where the city starts and the town begins: They’re just enjoying the food. We have a shared goal to support the places our residents and visitors love to eat.”

“We knew we needed partners who could bring expertise in hospitality and restaurant management, so we looked to George Mason and VRLTAF,” said Tara Borwey, assistant director of programs for Fairfax City Economic Development. George Mason has one of the only hospitality degree programs in the area.

“We’re all in such close proximity to one another, and therefore we all have a vested interest in maintaining a strong relationship and improving our shared community,” she said.

Using feedback from restaurant owners around Fairfax City and Town of Vienna, the team developed three tracks: beginning culinary skills, beverage skills, and advanced management. Each track totals 24 credit hours taken over four days. Fairfax City and the Town of Vienna fully funded the programs so they are completely free for participants.

Students practice during the beverage skills track. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

“Partnerships between universities and local communities are essential for creating meaningful workforce development,” said Min Park, associate professor in the Tourism and Events Management program in the College of Education and Human Development. “These partnerships ensure that training programs are academically sound and aligned with workforce demands.”

The beginning culinary skills track and beverage skills track are designed to build foundational skills for industry newcomers. Culinary students learn fundamental cooking techniques and knife skills; beverage students learned how to mix cocktails and pair wines; both tracks include instruction in hygiene and sanitation protocols, service management skills, regulation compliance, and operational strategies.

Students learn skills that will put them in a stronger starting position and get the chance to see if this industry is the right fit without risk for either the student or the restaurant losing a job or an employee.

“Retention is just as important as recruitment,” said Girard. “These tracks remove some of that steep learning curve barrier of these entry-level positions that could scare some people away. They can see if the industry is a good fit for them, while gaining skills that will make them more confident in what can be a stressful environment for someone new and untrained.”

George Mason alumna Sophia Tran, BS Tourism and Events Management ’22, a current graduate student pursuing a master's in management with a certificate in human resources in the Costello College of Business, took the beverage track and earned the ServSafe certificate and the Beverage Arts certificate. The ServSafe certificate, administered by the National Restaurant Administration, demonstrates an individual’s knowledge of food safety protocols and procedures. “I would highly recommend the track. I learned a lot about the wine and cocktail industries,” she said.

Advanced management track participants and instructors. Photo provided.

The third track—advanced management—is the only track specifically for current industry employees, designed to upskill current or potential leaders with instruction on managerial theories and practices. The inaugural module ran in July 2024 with 13 participants, taught through a collaboration between a professor of the Tourism and Events Management program and leading industry practitioners.

“Many of our restaurants are locally owned small businesses, and they don’t usually have resources like this. It’s a DIY mentality, training people on the job,” said Curtis. “But small business is the heartbeat of our region, so being able to support them makes this really special.”

The locations of the tracks vary based on the needs of the curriculum. Dolce Vita Italian Kitchen & Wine Bar in Fairfax City hosted the beverage class, which concluded its first session in January. The beginning culinary track, which will run its inaugural session in June 2025, will use the College of Public Health Nutrition Kitchen in Peterson Hall.

Said Curtis, “Collaborations like this make this region a great place to work, play, learn, and live.”

To register for upcoming tracks, visit the CCC website.

Explore the School of Sport, Recreation, and Tourism Management

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Nonprofits are in trouble. Could more sensitive chatbots be the answer?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:48:25 +0000

Nonprofits are in trouble. Could more sensitive chatbots be the answer? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/18/2025 - 10:48

In today’s attention economy, impact-driven organizations are arguably at a disadvantage. Since they have no tangible product to sell, the core of their appeal is emotional rather than practical—the “warm glow” of contributing to a cause you care about. But emotional appeals call for more delicacy and precision than standardized marketing tools, such as mass email campaigns, can sustain. Emotional states vary from person to person—even from moment to moment within the same person.

Photo by Getty Images

Siddharth Bhattacharya and Pallab Sanyal, professors of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at ��, believe that artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve this problem. A well-designed chatbot could be programmed to calibrate persuasive appeals in real time, delivering messaging more likely to motivate someone to take a desired next step, whether that’s donating money, volunteering time or simply pledging support. Automated solutions, such as chatbots, can be especially rewarding for nonprofits, which tend to be cash-conscious and resource-constrained.

“We completed a project in Minneapolis and are working with other organizations, in Boston, New Jersey and elsewhere, but the focus is always the same,” Sanyal says. “How can we leverage AI to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve service quality in nonprofit organizations?”

Siddarth Bhattacharya. Photo provided

Sanyal and Bhattacharya’s working paper (coauthored by Scott Schanke of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) describes their recent randomized field experiment with a Minneapolis-based women’s health organization. The researchers designed a custom chatbot to interact with prospective patrons through the organization’s Facebook Messenger app. The bot was programmed to adjust, at random, its responses to be more or less emotional, as well as more or less anthropomorphic (human-like).

“For the anthropomorphic condition, we introduced visual cues such as typing bubbles and slightly delayed response to mimic the experience of messaging with another human,” Sanyal says.

The chatbot’s “emotional” mode featured more subjective, generalizing statements with liberal use of provocative words such as “unfair,” “discrimination” and “unjust.” The “informational” modes leaned more heavily on facts and statistics.

Over the course of hundreds of real Facebook interactions, the moderately emotional chatbot achieved deepest user engagement, as defined by a completed conversation. (Completion rate was critical because after the last interaction, users were redirected to a contact/donation form.) But when the emotional level went from moderate to extreme, more users bailed out on the interaction.

The takeaway may be that “there is a sweet spot where some emotion is important, but beyond that emotions can be bad,” as Bhattacharya explains.

Pallab Sanyal. Photo provided

When human-like features were layered on top of emotionalism, that sweet spot got even smaller. Anthropomorphism lowered completion rates and reduced the organization’s ability to use emotional engagement as a motivational tool.

“In the retail space, studies have shown anthropomorphism to be useful,” Bhattacharya says. “But in a nonprofit context, it’s totally empathy-driven and less transactional. If that is the case, maybe these human cues coming from a bot make people feel creepy, and they back off.”

Sanyal and Bhattacharya say that more customized-chatbot experiments with other nonprofits are in the works. They are taking into careful consideration the success metrics and unique needs of each partner organization.

“Most of the time, we researchers sit in our offices and work on these problems,” Sanyal says. “But one aspect of these projects that I really like is that we are learning so much from talking to these people.”

In collaboration with the organizations concerned, they are designing chatbots that can cater their persuasive appeals more closely to each context and individual interlocutor. If successful, this method would prove that chatbots could become more than a second-best substitute for a salaried human being. They could serve as interactive workshops for crafting and refining an organization’s messaging to a much more granular level than previously possible.

And this would improve the effectiveness of organizational outreach across the board—a consummate example of AI enhancing, rather than displacing, human labor. “This AI is augmenting human functions,” says Sanyal. “It’s not replacing. Sometimes it’s complementing, sometimes it’s supplementing. But at the end of the day, it is just augmenting.”

In This Story

Siddharth Bhattacharya

Pallab Sanyal

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Research

Artificial Intelligence

Costello College of Business health care research puts “patients at the center”

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:55:18 +0000

Costello College of Business health care research puts “patients at the center” Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/11/2025 - 11:55

In This Story

Nirup Menon

Like virtually every other industry, health care is increasingly prioritizing digital transformation. The sector is unique, however, in that its results are measured not only in business terms but also tangible outcomes for people—often, literal life and death. So are newly acquired technologies actually paying off for patients?

Nirup Menon, a professor of information systems at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at ��, says that the answer is “not always.”

Nirup Menon

His recently published paper in Decision Support Systems tackles the so-called “HIT paradox,” or the widespread perception that health information technologies (HIT) have not yet moved the needle on important outcomes such as productivity, quality of care, and patient safety.

Menon co-authored the paper with Costello colleagues Amitava Dutta and Sidhartha Das.

Based on comprehensive survey data from approximately 6,000 U.S. hospitals, the research team looked into whether those that adopted Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) saw lower mortality rates for cardiac patients.

“CDSS is not only for cardiologists,” Menon explains. “It is hospital-based—a system that helps with clinical decision-making. But we know that many cardiac patients may not necessarily have cardiac as their only problem. There are probably decisions being made about them using all kinds of ailments and medications, and so on.”

The basic idea behind CDSS is to use technology to mine actionable insights from a wealth of patient data, giving clinicians key tools to make informed decisions at the point of care. Theoretically, a hospital with CDSS solutions should be much better equipped to handle complex cases—such as a heart-attack sufferer with diabetes or another comorbidity—in real time than one without.

However, Menon and his co-authors discovered that when it came to preventing deaths from cardiac emergencies, the impact of CDSS was context-specific. Their paper finds a number of complementary effects suggesting that health care technologies need help from their environment in order to be most effective. For example, the presence of cardiac medical services (CMS), e.g. diagnostic catheterization and electrophysiology, was unsurprisingly associated with lower mortality rates—but CMS combined with CDSS was more impactful than either on its own.

“The labor force—by which I mean the physician and the entire team of nurses and technicians—should be trained to use this technology appropriately,” Menon summarizes. “You also need real-time integration between CDSS and other IT systems, because if it’s not well-integrated, the provider will not have all the data at their fingertips. If you don’t provide the right inputs into a CDSS, it’s not going to give you the right outputs.”

Menon points out that the “HIT paradox” isn’t limited to CDSS or any single technology. President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package, after all, included tens of billions in financial incentives for health care providers to digitize their patient records. By 2017, 95 percent of U.S. hospitals had adopted electronic patient records. Yet, as Menon tells it, “hospitals are just chugging along. The quality remains the same and the costs are just increasing. Or you might see improvements in one small department. So we are trying to find the variables that create complementarities within large samples.”

Menon knows, however, that the applications of health care tech can be closely targeted to relatively tiny patient populations, too. Another recent paper of his, published in JMIR Medical Informatics, uses causal survival forests, a machine-learning algorithmic technique, to determine which of two chemotherapy drugs promoted the most longevity for terminal prostate cancer patients. Taking into account age, race and comorbidity symptoms, their analysis produced an easy-to-use prescription policy tree that, by itself, could extend patients’ lives by almost two months—if the test sample, comprised of 2,886 veterans treated at VA health centers, was representative of the wider patient population.

“If you go down every branch of the policy tree, the numbers become very small,” Menon says. “It almost becomes like personalized medicine, because you can factor in age, race, gender—although gender didn’t matter in our study—PSA numbers, bilirubin numbers, etc.”

Menon has ongoing research projects aimed at improving health care through technology, at both the patient level (a la the prostate cancer study) and the ecosystem level (a la the CDSS study). One paper in progress focuses on Covid-19 and how the data-sets research scientists selected for their studies influenced their findings. Another looks at telemedicine’s effects on quality of care.

“My foray into health care began with my PhD dissertation, which was on IT in hospitals,” Menon says. “At that time, I was working primarily from a hospital administration point of view. As a business school researcher, it seemed logical to stay there. But as you come across more problems, and you read more, you realize that the patient is the center of everything, not the hospital.”

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Research

Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:03:48 +0000

Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/04/2025 - 13:03

In This Story

Si Xie

Historically, entertainment and advertising have worked as a tag team, taking turns soliciting attention from audiences. But our social-media age is blending the two into new, hybrid forms.

Witness livestream shopping, a seamless amalgam of e-commerce and entertainment. In place of one-way messaging delivered by polished pitchpeople, this model employs relatable influencers presenting products for online sale—and chatting with consumers—in real-time sessions that often last several hours.

Famously popular in China, livestream shopping is picking up steam in the United States. In June 2024, as an example, U.S. TikTok netted its first million-dollar livestream, courtesy of Texas-based brand Canvas Beauty. By 2026, live shopping may be responsible for as much as five percent of all e-commerce sales in the U.S., according to industry projections.

For global brands, this means a possible revenue explosion. But for information-systems scholars like Si Xie, assistant professor at Costello College of Business, the global rise of livestream shopping represents an unprecedented research opportunity.

Si Xie

“One of the most important elements of livestream shopping is the interaction,” Xie says. “Livestreams bring all potential buyers into the same virtual room, together with the influencer. People can see which products have been put in the online shopping cart, and which have been purchased.”

Her recently published paper in Production & Operations Management finds that the longer an individual product is showcased in a livestream featuring several different brands, the more revenue it will generate. Yet as product showcase duration goes up, overall revenue from the livestream goes down.

To reach their conclusions, the research team—including co-authors Siddhartha Sharma of Indiana University and Amit Mehra of University of Texas at Dallas—analyzed data from nearly 75,000 livestreams conducted in China during 2021.

For Xie, the findings point to a fundamental conflict between the incentives of livestreamers and the brands they promote. It is in the best interest of third-party influencers to move fairly rapidly between different types of products, but brands will want more airtime devoted to each one.

“People like variety,” Xie explains. “If I watch a livestream and all I see are shirts in different fabrics, I might feel there are not too many choices I can make. However, if you show me a shirt and then a pair of pants, I can make an outfit. There’s a higher probability of my making more purchases, and that’s in line with the third-party livestreamers’ incentives.”

One way to correct these misaligned incentives would be for brands to use the power of the purse to influence the influencers. In China, even the suggestion of such corrupting relationships has caused public scandal. In 2023, for example, top livestreamer Li Jiaqi (nicknamed “The Lipstick King” for his ability to sell beauty products) lost one million followers on social media after lashing out at an online commenter who complained about the high price of an eyebrow pencil made by Chinese cosmetics company Florasis. Li, Florasis’s most prominent brand ambassador, was excoriated for ostensibly putting his relationship with the brand above empathy for financially struggling consumers.

“People were saying, ‘you are trying to be defensive of the product because you get so much interest from selling that pencil’”, Xie says. “Therefore, Li’s credibility was really impaired.”

If Xie’s paper describes how human imperfections can jeopardize livestream shopping, could AI be the answer? Indeed, AI-powered animated chatbots — both paired with human influencers, and serving customers solo during off-peak sales hours — have become commonplace on China’s livestreams. For her PhD dissertation, Xie probed data from more than 70,000 livestreams in China and found that introducing an AI assistant boosted livestream sales by about 18%. But the effect steadily declined over time — and not because the novelty wore off. The rapidly improving algorithmic responses had the unintended consequence of shorter watch durations, which may have reduced impulse buying. Xie’s suggested remedy? “The owner of the gen-AI tools could modify the interaction between the virtual livestreamer and the audience to encourage more engagement, perhaps by adjusting the learning speed to ensure that the audience remains engaged for a longer period."

Xie also suggests that brands and channels replace humanoid avatars with cute, cuddly “mascots” that users just can’t bring themselves to click away from.

Xie says she’s working on future papers that tease insights out of livestream data. “One good thing about this new technology is that it promotes the user to buy using methods we can observe. Livestreamers sell general items like grocery items and clothing, as well as expensive stuff like cars and houses, and you can really see how people behave.”

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Research

George Mason alumnus launches AI software startup for law enforcement training

Greg Johnson — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:05:48 +0000

George Mason alumnus launches AI software startup for law enforcement training Greg Johnson Wed, 02/26/2025 - 11:05

Delivering immersive, voice-driven simulations for law enforcement through building skills, gaining real-time feedback, and preparing for real-world scenarios, Kaiden AI is a software startup co-founded by its CEO Ali Aldubaisi, BS Neuroscience ’21.

Ali Aldubaisi

Aldubaisi had begun studying neuroscience at George Mason with the intention of going to medical school. However, the distance learning forced upon by COVID led him to think outside of the box and start his first company vRealm, an online tutoring platform.

After a few years working on the project, he co-founded Kaiden AI with his vRealm partner, Ali "AJ" Aldjaei. “When we first started, we were focused on the higher education market,” he says. “We initially built the AI platform for grading and evaluation. Like most startups, you build where you initially think is the right fit, and that’s going to be the market for you.” Throughout the process of building his startup and attracting investors, he would find each day bringing surprises.

After seeing limited traction in higher education, Aldubaisi and his team built a small-scale simulation demo to test a new direction. Among the first to see it was Steve Gladis, a senior scholar at George Mason’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being and a former FBI special agent. He immediately recognized its potential for law enforcement training and encouraged Aldubaisi to explore that path.

“We put the MVP [minimum viable product] in front of police chiefs and academy directors, and their reaction was completely different from our earlier demos,” says Aldubaisi. “That’s when we knew we had to double down.”

Now, Aldubaisi and his team partner with law enforcement agencies and regional academies to implement their simulation platform, with organizations like the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Academy currently piloting the technology. Recently closing a $1 million pre-seed round, Kaiden AI’s investors are venture capitalists largely outside of the law enforcement space.

Ali Aldubaisi (right) at the 2024 Patriot Pitch competition. Photo by John Boal Photography

Even though his current work does not appear directly related to neuroscience, Aldubaisi recognizes the value of his degree. In fact, he still keeps up with neuroscience journals, seeing the relevance between that field and running his company. Developing hypotheses and constantly experimenting has helped Aldubaisi and his team refine and optimize Kaiden AI, from its initial concept in January 2024 to its current phase today.

“A lot of the concepts mirror each other,” he says. “What goes into marketing, how to understand people, how people learn.”

In 2024, Aldubaisi led the keynote discussion at the Patriot Pitch Competition, an event organized by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to support ideas and early-stage business ventures from George Mason students and recent alumni. He is now in talks with Rebecca Howick, the center’s director of operations and engagement, about getting more involved with their efforts.

“Having a center where somebody in whatever discipline that they’re studying can articulate or put together an idea or experiment on ideas is so crucial,” says Aldubaisi. He knows there are many intelligent people with brilliant ideas who may be hesitant to pursue their ventures because they don’t know how they’re going to get the funding or backing.

Having gone through that process, Aldubaisi offers crucial advice to aspiring entrepreneurs that reflects his scientific background. “Having the courage to focus on that one thing that you’re trying to prove out is probably the biggest thing,” he says. “Second thing is always look at what your idea is as an experiment, and the goal is to prove or disprove as soon as possible.”

By following these guidelines, Aldubaisi and his team have surpassed fundraising milestones and are excited to put Kaiden AI into the hands of many more law enforcement students and officers.

In This Story

Rebecca Howick

Learn more about AI research at George Mason

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entrepreneurship

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Artificial Intelligence

Alumni

At George Mason basketball game, students ran the show

Sarah Holland — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:16:20 +0000

At George Mason basketball game, students ran the show Sarah Holland Fri, 02/21/2025 - 11:16

Most students at Division 1 universities like George Mason can say they’ve been to at least one sport event. A sold-out football game, a baseball no-hitter, or a Cinderella run at the NCAA Final Four: these games bring the campus together and make core memories for future alumni.

Students from left: Melissa Quinteros, Cody Salenga, and Manahil Piracha. Photo provided.

But while many can say they’ve cheered in the stands, only a handful can say they’ve run the show.

In fall 2024, Donald G. Costello College of Business students had that unique opportunity, leading the marketing and management of the Ferrum vs. George Mason basketball game on November 23.

Mentored by marketing professor Niki Vlastara, assistant director of fan engagement Lily Plizga, and senior marketing and communications director of Costello College of Business Duane Bailey, five students took responsibility for various aspects of the game: from marketing ticket sales to managing check-in to developing a creative timeout game.

For Plizga, the experience was an opportunity to show students the breadth of career possibilities in sports management and marketing. “I found this career because I was a student wage worker with Athletics; I wouldn’t have known about all the opportunities here otherwise,” she said. “So for me, this experience helps showcase all the different paths available to them.”

For Vlastara, it was an opportunity to give students hands-on experience to practice theories and concepts from their coursework. “In event marketing, once the event is done, it’s done; you can’t resell. So, it’s important for the students to have that experience of having one chance to get it right and fill the seats,” Vlastara explained.

George Mason is nationally ranked for internships/co-ops and its graduates report high job success related to their career goals, which underscores its prioritization of experiential learning opportunities like this one.

“I think this experiential part of education is what students are looking for. Projects like this help them really understand where the concepts I’m teaching in class apply,” said Vlastara. “It’s very holistic.”

From left: Melissa Quinteros, Cody Salenga, Dean of Costello College of Business Ajay Vinzé, and Manahil Piracha. Photo provided.

Melissa Quinteros, a senior in Costello, said that this hands-on opportunity challenged her to improve the skills she was developing in her classes and extracurriculars. “Having interpersonal skills and collaborating on projects have always stood out as necessary skills in my marketing and business classes,” she said. “For this, I needed to take those skills and learn what worked when trying to promote an event to attendees. I had to figure out how to be brief while emphasizing what parts of the event would be most interesting to the person I’m talking to. That was a challenge, but I learned so much.”

The students, Bailey said, “jumped in with both feet and smiled the whole way.” They brought ideas not just from the classroom, but also from their own experiences: winter 2024 graduate Cody Salenga, for example, pitched the idea of the timeout game based on a game he saw at an NBA game. According to Plizga, the game was really successful.

Athletics also saw increases in their social media engagement when the students had taken over; Plizga’s data showed more comments and higher views.

“We want students to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, that extends beyond graduation,” said Bailey, “We want them to invest in George Mason, and experiences like these plant that seed early.”

The team hopes to continue this collaboration next season. “Athletics and the fans were excited by the collaboration. So we hope to keep it going in the fall, maybe make it a big event each year that becomes tradition,” said Plizga. “And I hope that other departments, schools, and colleges see what we did as a baseline for opportunities in the future.”

In This Story

Mariniki (Niki) Vlastara

Learn here, lead anywhere with Costello College of Business

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Costello College of Business

Athletics

Mason men's basketball

experiential learning

Costello College of Business

Strategic Direction

Checking in to a “suite” internship with Marriott International

Sarah Holland — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 14:34:55 +0000

Checking in to a “suite” internship with Marriott International Sarah Holland Wed, 01/15/2025 - 09:34

When business major Kyle Samuel went to ��’s Fall 2023 Career Fair with a list of companies to speak with, he didn’t realize he would land an internship that would kickstart his career.

With a legacy connection to Marriott hotels through his father, who worked for Marriott at the property level, a chat with the Marriott representative led to securing a competitive spot as a finance HQ intern with Marriott International.

Now, in addition to completing a summer internship with Marriott, Samuel is working part-time for the hotel company and making plans to return in summer 2025 for a second internship.

Kyle Samuel (left) with Marriott founder's grandson, David Marriott. Photo provided.

Why did you choose George Mason?

There are a couple of reasons why. First, it’s close to home and within my culture we try to live with our parents even after we’re 18. So that was important to me. Affordability was a major aspect, too, because staying home saves some tuition. George Mason’s Costello College of Business is also great and well-established, especially compared to other schools in the region.

What inspired your interest in finance?

In junior year of high school, one of my uncles recommended the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. And that opened my eyes to how much personal finance matters in your life. I started reading more, like The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William N. Thorndike, Jr., and my interest just took off from there.

How did you find out about the internship at Marriott?

Through the career fair at George Mason. I went into the fair with notes about each company I was interested in, and Marriott was on the list. I spoke with the representative, and we really connected. She told me about the internship—I didn’t know that Marriott offered internships—and she recommended that I apply.

It’s funny, whenever someone asks me about the career fair, I tell them I have a 100% track record, because I went to one fair and got an internship from it!

What did you do during your summer internship with Marriott?

Some of my major projects were conducting reviews of around 50 capital expenditure budgets from Marriott Select brands to ensure compliance and accuracy, checking the integrity and translation of data from Excel sheets to visualizations, and helping a senior manager send out revenue share allocations to select brand owners.

I also participated in a competition with the other interns where we were given a real-life business challenge that Marriott is facing, and we had to design a potential solution. So we brainstormed ideas for improving Marriott Bonvoy sign-ups among the Gen Z demographic.

One of the things I really appreciated about my internship is that I wasn’t just doing internship work that wouldn’t go anywhere once I was done: I was doing projects with impact.

How have your experiences at George Mason prepared you for your internship?

Many classes gave me the foundations I needed to succeed at my internship. BUS 210 Business I and BUS 310 Business Analytics II were really helpful because it allowed me to strengthen my Excel skills, and BUS 103 has helped improve my professional development skills.

University Career Services also played a monumental role. They helped me establish my resume, create my LinkedIn profile, and prepare for the interview with Marriott.

Kyle Samuel (right) with Anthony Capuano, current CEO of Marriott. Photo provided

What would you say is the importance of an internship?

School does prepare you for the workplace, but there’s really no substitute for actually experiencing a workplace. Understanding office culture, learning the hierarchies, networking; you can only really learn those soft skills through being in the workplace. And networking is so valuable. I’ve had a meeting with the CEO of Marriott because I was able to network with the former intern, who connected me to the right people.

Where do you hope to be in ten years?

My long-term goal is to become the CFO of Marriott. I’m minoring in real estate, so working for Marriott combines my interest in finance with my interest in real estate. I love the culture; I feel like they really put people first and work together as a team. And there’s a lot of potential for them to grow in the future.

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George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:39:16 +0000

George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 01/14/2025 - 17:39

Ukraine’s health care system has been hit hard amid the ongoing war. Power outages, staffing shortages, and the destruction of hospitals have added up to a drastic reduction in available care for the already-vulnerable population. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health opened the country to telehealth solutions from overseas. But will these prove to be a successful substitute for at least some necessary services, or turn out to be no better than a tech Band-Aid?

Answering that question is where Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at ��, comes in. In her spare time, she works as volunteer director of analytics for TeleHelp Ukraine (THU).

Mariia Petryk

Founded by a cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students shortly after the war’s inception, THU was designed to succeed where other telemedicine initiatives in crisis-affected areas have failed. The founders worked tirelessly to assemble an international volunteer network comprising medical professionals, translators, interpreters and administrative “health navigators.” Aware that medical consultations were only part of the patient journey, THU’s founders sought to address the entire continuum of care.

Petryk stresses that while the project originated at Stanford, the technical team included “people from Chicago, Boston, other California schools…some very active volunteers were in Australia, South Korea, Canada and other countries.”

Petryk, herself of Ukrainian descent, was honored to lend her data science expertise to this worthy project. As analytics director, she manages a dozen or so number-crunching volunteers who measured and documented THU’s impact upon Ukraine’s displaced population during the initiative’s first full year.

As Petryk explains, “The Russian invasion created a humanitarian crisis where a lot of people were internally displaced. And when people relocate to a new place, they don’t know where to go for health care. They also are at higher risk for many issues, including mental health problems. And they don’t know where to turn to treat chronic diseases they may have.”

THU’s primary focus during its first year was delivering much-needed services to this population of war-ravaged internal exiles.

Petryk’s analytical work gave rise to a recent case study of THU published in Journal of Global Health. The paper’s other lead author was Aditya Narayan, a Stanford medical student and THU’s director of implementation and evaluation.

Their findings describe some impressive early successes. THU facilitated more than 1,200 virtual patient appointments from May 2022 to May 2023 alone. Despite often-chaotic conditions, patient attendance rates were above 70 percent for nine of the 13 months studied. As the first year wore on, the THU team found ways to prevent no-shows—for example, employing the popular texting platform Viber to communicate with patients and assigning an individual health navigator to each patient.

Even more impressively, 96 percent of patients reported that their health complaints were at least partially resolved during their visit.

The paper argues that aspects of THU’s model could be adapted for use in other humanitarian contexts. In its initial growth phase, THU had access to advanced technological infrastructure and a wide network of medical providers, by dint of its academic origins. This implies that partnerships with academia could be critical to replicating THU’s success outside Ukraine.

Petryk remains proud of THU’s impact and her role in helping define it. “Based on actual appointments and how much that amount of care would cost at a hospital, THU delivered an estimated $1 million worth of services in its first 13 months,” she says.

Looking ahead to THU’s future, she says, “I can only wish to see this ‘start-up,’ as it were, go for the IPO.”

For more information and to explore volunteering opportunities, visit THU’s website.

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Mariia Petryk

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