THE DIFFERENCE IS YOU - Lundquist College of Business ...

A Bright Future
You’ve read the papers and watched the news, and
you’ve probably experienced some repercussions of
the recession in your own household. Yet, in the face
of all this, you chose to invest in the University of
Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.
This Annual Report to Investors 2008–9 overviews the impact that your funds
have had on the college, our students, our faculty, and programs. You’ll see that
in a challenging economy, with dwindling state funding, we’ve carefully evaluated
our position in the market and leveraged our strengths to maximize the return on
your investment.
As you read profiles of students you’ve aided and review our financial data, you’ll
probably notice that state support is estimated to provide only 9 percent of our
budget this year (compare that to 34 percent in the 1975–76 school year), and
that state funding per student at our university is a fraction of what is provided to
other public schools around the country.
We are able to bridge that gap because of you—our dedicated alumni and
supporters. Total giving to the Lundquist College of Business was up this year,
almost rising to prerecession levels. As a result, we hired more new tenure-track
faculty members than most business schools in the nation, and we awarded
scholarships to dozens of deserving students.
But more than this direct impact, your generosity is a vote of confidence in our
students and faculty, empowering them to make a difference, lead, and discover
opportunities for business and economic growth.
On behalf of the entire college, thank you. Your support is more than just a gift:
it’s an investment in our collective future.
Highs and Lows
Within months of
earning her M.B.A. from
the Lundquist College
of Business, Celine
Seeger experienced
the gut-wrenching lows
and euphoric highs of
starting a company. The
Berlin, Germany, native
graduated in December
2008 with a specialization
in entrepreneurship. She
barely had time to hang her
diploma when she joined
start-up Alpzite LLC as vice
president of marketing and
finance.
Seeger came to UO to study
entrepreneurship after a stint in
marketing with Intel’s German
operations. The reputation of the
Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship
lured her, along with Eugene’s laidback
West Coast lifestyle and the
M.B.A. curriculum, which allowed her to
tailor a program to suit her passion for
technology product development. Pivotal,
too, was a scholarship that paid half her
tuition.
To hone her product development
smarts, she supplemented her core
business courses with studies in
psychology and industrial design. She
also took advantage of experiential
opportunities to work on a technologytransfer
project for the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory, to meet investors,
and to learn to raise capital.
Those experiences proved invaluable
when she joined Alpzite. She’d met
Alpzite founder Ken Furnanz, a former
Intel software engineer, in Germany. In
Oregon, the pair had hoped to shepherd
development of its first product, a
pet-tracking device known as the Pet
Compass. But development schedules
dragged, costs mushroomed, and