Corey Phelps knows that in college communities with major universities, there can sometimes be a divide between town and gown.
But Phelps wants to shatter any perception of a divide as it relates to Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.
“I think business schools have an obligation to be really good citizens in our community,” says Phelps, who took charge as Smeal’s dean in mid-July. “We have expertise that we can make available; we have students that we can develop and make available. And I think there are huge benefits that the community can provide to us … internships, jobs, projects. Explore experiential learning opportunities. I think it’s a win-win.”
Phelps is a speaker and author (Cracked It! How to Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants) whose career in higher education and business has included stops at McGill University in Quebec, HEC Paris, and the University of Washington. He comes to Penn State after serving as dean at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F. Price College of Business.
Why the move to Penn State?
“For me, someone that really wants to collaborate and partner with other colleges, Penn State’s a fantastic place to do that,” he says. “I think we can have an outsized influence as a university to the extent that we’re working all together.”
At Smeal, Phelps leads a college with more than 8,000 undergraduate, professional graduate, executive, and doctoral students, along with 800-plus faculty and staff. Smeal boasts more than 94,000 alumni.
As January arrives, Smeal will be launching a collaborative planning effort to establish a vision for where the college wants to go over the next five years.
“The purpose of that exercise is to answer two fundamental questions: Where do we want to go? In other words, what’s the vision for the college? And then second, how are we going to get there?” says Phelps.
One thing is clear: Connecting more with the community is part of Phelps’ vision. For example, he has been meeting with local business leaders to discuss how Smeal could “partner with them to really move the needle on startup creation.”
Phelps cites electronic sensor-based technology as one area where there is local expertise with room for development.
“What I’d like to let the community know is that we’re here to help.”
Here’s more from our conversation, which took place in early November:
[You’ve] had a chance to meet with local business leaders?
Phelps: Oh yeah. [Two] of the first things I did when I got here:
Make sure that I was integrated into the university. I reached out to every single dean on the University Park campus, our vice presidents, and senior vice presidents, to just have conversations with them, get to better know them, understand their colleges, and then start to figure out how we could work together.
I also started to do that with the community. I reached out to the [Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County], for example. I reached out to the Happy Valley LaunchBox, which is over in the Eric Barron building. On the innovation side of things, I’ve reached out to some local business leaders, largely because I want to understand what is the appetite of the business community here in central Pennsylvania for Smeal to engage with them.
I believe that business schools have an obligation, yes, to educate people. We have an obligation to conduct research that’s going to be relevant to organizations and to managers. But we also have to be there for our local community. We can do that in a number of ways.
One of the things I’m really passionate about is entrepreneurship, startup creation. We have a strength in Smeal in terms of entrepreneurship. I think we should be working more in the community. I’ve been talking with the folks at Happy Valley LaunchBox, for example, and how could Smeal partner with them to really move the needle on startup creation with the chamber. I’ve been talking to them about how Smeal can play a role, whether it’s as a talent development engine, making sure that there’s a ready supply of graduates coming out of Smeal to work in those organizations, or Smeal helping them with initiatives.
For example, [the chamber has] a brand-new strategic plan and I’ve been in conversations with helping them think about, how could they leverage Smeal in terms of our expertise to help execute on that strategic plan? I believe good business schools should be really good partners locally, and I’ve started to work on developing those relationships.
What have you heard from them about what they see as the biggest challenges that you might be able to help with?
Phelps: Well, a couple things. Number one, I think that we have a lot of expertise here that historically we have not leveraged and allowed to be useful. … We run an accounting clinic here, a free accounting clinic for tax preparation, that I think we could do a much better job of making that available, at least [increasing] awareness to the local community. I think we have expertise in other areas, where it’s finance or supply chain, that we could use in order to transfer that knowledge or help organizations with that. We did an event last year that we’re going to replicate this year that’s focused on exporting, so international business. We have a very strong international business group here. We’ve got companies in central Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania more broadly, that export. We have expertise on helping them. …
The second thing is the talent development engine. We have a lot of students that want to stay in Pennsylvania, but I think it’s largely Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. A lot of people want to go to New York City or D.C. But I think we have to make sure that we are tightly connected with the local community and local organizations so they can recruit our students just as effectively as the larger cities can recruit our students. We need to make sure that we’re there for them in terms of providing the talent that they need.
As someone coming in from the outside with business expertise, have you had a chance to look at where you think the general business climate here could improve to retain more young professionals?
Phelps: I don’t. I mean, one of the things is size, critical mass. And what I don’t mean by that necessarily is just having a sufficient number of organizations to recruit our students. I think it’s also, are there going to be career opportunities for them to move up in those organizations? I haven’t really gotten a good grasp of that yet.
The other thing I would say is, what is the appetite for us to really move the needle in terms of startup creation? One of the things I’ve learned is there is an expertise here, at the university but also in State College, in sensors, electronic sensor-based technology. I would love to learn more on how Smeal could help partner with those organizations, whether it’s on the talent side, whether it’s having our faculty members work with them as experts and advisers, to really start to lift that up.
Looking across the university, we’re always trying to figure out, how can Smeal help the university commercialize technology into the local economy? I think that’s one of the challenges for college towns is that, when startups get to a certain level of maturity, they make an assumption: “I cannot grow my startup if I stay here. I won’t have access to financial capital; I won’t have access to the talent that I need. I’m too far away from customers.” I’m still trying to figure out: Is that a realistic challenge that we’re facing here in State College, and if it is, what role can Smeal play in addressing that? I’m still in the very early days, but I’m starting to get a little bit better understanding and I hope to get more in the future.
On the flip side, are there ways that local businesses can help Smeal?
Phelps: First and foremost, they can want to provide internships for our students. They can want to provide jobs for our students. They can want to provide experiential learning opportunities for our students. What I mean by experiential learning is we try to close the gap between classroom learning—what they’re learning in terms of concepts, theories—and the ability to apply it in real time.
I’ll give you a couple examples. We have the Nittany Lion Fund. That is a student-managed investment fund that has about $19 million under management. It’s largely run by students; there’s a fantastic faculty adviser. Then we have Leveraged Lion Capital … [and] we have the Nittany Lion Consulting Group, which provides consulting services. So, we have these groups of students. What we need for them is, for example, with Nittany Lion Consulting Group, we need projects for them to apply their consulting skills. So, the more that we have community organizations engaged with us, the more we can source these projects—whether it’s for our consulting group, finance, accounting, different student organizations with different experiential learning opportunities—so they can definitely engage with us more there.
We’d love to see people from the local community in our classrooms guest speaking. It doesn’t matter if they’re alumni or not. Our students need to hear what it’s like to work in organizations—small, medium, large organizations, for-profit, nonprofit, governmental organizations. I think there’s a variety of ways that I would love to see the community engage more with us, because it’s going to be beneficial to our students and to our faculty. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
