More than 48 years ago in late 1975, I arrived in Bloomington from Great Britain to teach for six months at the IU School of Business, as the Kelley School was known in those days. While I wasn’t sure what a Hoosier was, and I didn’t understand why everyone in Indiana was obsessed with basketball, I could tell immediately that the business school and its community was very special.
Those six months turned out to be a life-changing experience for me. One thing led to another, and I ended up staying at IU, enrolling in the doctoral program and earning an MBA and a DBA (Kelley’s PhD degree in those days), and joining the faculty in 1981. And the IU Basketball Team that year went on to win the 1976 NCAA Championship with an unbeaten 32-0 record, and I became hooked on IU Basketball, just like every other Hoosier.
Ash Soni
As we begin the new academic year nearly half a century later, I look at where we are today and where we’re going, and I see how everything that has gone before has helped build the Kelley School of Business into a top business school with world-class faculty, exceptional students, alumni who are known for their hard work and innovative leadership, and a dedicated staff committed to ensuring Kelley is the best that it can be.
When I started here, the business school in Indianapolis had only been around for two years; now we’re celebrating its 50th anniversary. In the past year, we’ve celebrated the 25th anniversaries of two groundbreaking programs: our Graduate Accounting Programs and our Kelley Direct Online MBA – the first online MBA from a top 20 business school.
Last fall, we celebrated 10 years of our Kelley Indianapolis Physician MBA, the country’s first and only MBA for physicians from a top-ranked business school. This year, we’re celebrating 10 years of incredible impact created by the Hodge Hall Undergraduate Center at Kelley Bloomington.
In the years to come, we’ll celebrate the anniversaries of the programs we’re launching now: our Business Plus Program at Kelley Indy, a new residential MS in Management degree at Kelley Bloomington, and our reimagined online MS degrees in Business Analytics and Finance, with other specialist online master’s degrees on the way.
We are always reviewing our curricula, monitoring trends, and listening to our students, alumni, corporate partners, and advisory boards to keep our courses and experiences on the forefront of business education. For example, we’ve just made some innovative changes to K201, the Computer in Business course you all know, and the course that I taught in my first semester at IU in 1975! K201 now includes broader relational database concepts and is introducing students to Power Query and Power Pivot in Excel, and Power BI Desktop.
We’re also creating some innovative courses and joint degrees with other schools, creating new ways students with non-business majors can connect with Kelley and creating stronger foundations for success. And we’re strengthening our focus on ways Kelley can make substantive societal impact worldwide.
My first impression of the business school 48 years ago was correct: our community IS very special. Beyond our faculty and staff, the support we get from our alumni and corporate partners – from meeting us at events to serving on advisory boards or helping to fund our many special initiatives – helps elevate everything we do.
Our community propels us forward, inspires us to think bigger, to work more creatively, and to find solutions to new challenges so that we can continue to fulfill our mission: transform the lives of students, organizations, and society by providing excellent business education, driving innovative research, and supporting impactful service enabling economic empowerment and prosperity in Indiana and beyond.
I am very proud of the impact the Kelley School has made since it was launched in 1920, and I’m very excited about where we are going. As we begin a new academic year, let’s do so with a renewed commitment to make an impact for our students, our community, and the communities we serve around the globe.
Onward!
Ash Soni
Dean, Kelley School of Business
The Sungkyunkwan Professor