Fort̩ Fellows Attend Conference in NYC

Six students from Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management traveled to the 2008 Forté Foundation MBA Women’s Conference in New York City over the summer as Forté Fellows.

Stacy Poindexter Owen, Babcock’s director of admissions for the full-time MBA and Master of Arts in Management programs, joined Katharina Haynes, Sara Kyle and Traci Lee, members of the class of 2010, as well as Claire McLeod, Diana Morse and Dana Lee, class of 2009.

In addition to industry introductions and networking opportunities, the students attended sessions involving classroom communication strategies and quantitative calisthenics. They also had the chance to interact with Forté Fellows from other business schools across the country including Berkley, Wharton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Columbia, Georgetown and Emory, among others.

“We think this conference is a great way for first-year students to connect with returning second years; it’s wonderful to see how the second-year students have grown and how much their confidence levels have increased,” Owen said. “One of the perks of being a Forté Fellow is that we cover their expenses for this conference and the trip to New York City.”

Owen completed the first year of her two-year term on the Forté Foundation board of directors this summer as well.

“Babcock has been a member of Forté Foundation since 2003,” Owen said. “Since then we have seen the number of women in our full-time program increase to 30 percent or more each year.”

In fact, Owen said she met Haynes at a Forté event in Boston in 2006, when Haynes first began researching business schools.

The Forté Foundation is a coalition of major corporations, top business schools and non-profit organizations that work to increase the number of women business leaders. Through education programs, information forums and financial support of MBA students, Forté motivates young women to prepare for careers in business, increases their access to education and business networks and raises their awareness of the social impact they can make through careers in business.

About Forté Foundation
The impetus for establishing the Forté Foundation came from a groundbreaking study of women in MBA programs conducted by the University of Michigan and Catalyst Inc. and published in 2000. The study, “Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity,” questioned why more women weren’t pursuing MBA degrees and shed light on women’s experiences in the business school environment and their career outcomes. It identified a number of factors that discourage women from pursuing an MBA and associated career paths, including a dearth of female role models, concerns about work/life balance, and lack of encouragement from employers. Deriving its mission from the “Women and the MBA” study, the Forté Foundation was founded in 2001 and is the only organization that provides a national infrastructure to effectively reach, recruit and retain top female talent at every level.