Alumni and industry leaders gather for the 2024 Pamplin Engagement Summit

Alumni, friends, faculty, and staff of the Pamplin College of Business recently convened for the Pamplin Engagement Summit, where more than 300 attendees celebrated the college’s achievements while strategizing for its future.

Attendees of the summit, held April 18-19, participated in board and committee meetings, partook in breakout sessions, witnessed the 2024 Pamplin Awards ceremony, toured the new Data and Decision Sciences Building, and enjoyed a keynote luncheon featuring Omar Asali ’92, chairman and CEO of Ranpak and founder of One Madison Group, and Lynne Doughtie ’85, former chairman and CEO of KPMG.

Sponsored by the Pamplin Community for Leadership and Engagement (PCLE) and steered by Jim Hatch ’72, Pamplin Advisory Council Cabinet member and chair of the PCLE, the summit presented an opportunity to convene senior volunteer leaders and explore the evolution of education to meet the demands of the next-gen Pamplin College of Business student. This year’s event was the first since the inaugural Pamplin Engagement Summit in 2019.

A panel discussion featuring Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and Pamplin College of Business Dean Saonee Sarker was among the highlights of the Pamplin Engagement Summit. Moderated by Dawn Jefferies, senior producer for strategic initiatives, Sands and Sarker, touched on topics such as the global status of the college and university, the impact of artificial intellingence on education, and the next-generation Pamplin, among others.

Below is an abridged transcript of the discussion.

Jefferies: President Sands, you have spoken a lot about Virginia Tech's growth. I'm curious how the university will support the continued growth that you have described.

Sands: You can't just hope that you will grow. You must be definitive about it, and you must have a plan. I believe there are several categories where we have opportunity. Virginia Tech has grown tremendously over the last decade or so … but our potential is much, much greater. One of the categories that I think is most exciting because it aligns with Global Distinction is the growth in sponsored research. It's an indicator of your external value. If a partner sees value, they're going to invest and they're going to fund our research. I think that's something that, especially for Pamplin, is a huge growth opportunity. 

Sarker: I think sponsored research is very important and critical for us. We’ve already launched some efforts and steps toward that process. If you look at the journals where we publish our research, they are looking for projects and papers that are very grand, challenge-solving approaches, with large-scale data sets and transdisciplinary efforts. Those can only come from sponsored research efforts due to the size of the topic. It can come in two different forms in terms of our sponsored research efforts. One is that we are the initiators of sponsored research. The other is that we are partners in other sponsored research efforts.

Sands: The problems that we're trying to solve today are so much more complex than they were two or three decades ago. You cannot solve problems with that level of complexity without people with the expertise of Pamplin in the room. The Innovation Campus is probably the best example of that from an aspirational point of view. There are an unlimited number of verticals that we can engage in through the platform that the Innovation Campus gives us. I'm excited to see what you can do in Blacksburg, and then how the connections we can make through Northern Virginia amplify, in a non-linear kind of way, the kind of impact Pamplin can have.

Jefferies: You both have touched on enhancing the status of Virginia Tech and Pamplin globally. How does the university do that when, frankly, the university’s global status is currently well esteemed?

Sands: It is, and I don't want to diminish that. When I look back on the history of Virginia Tech, we are a little different than our peer aspirational universities in the sense that we were a small military land-grant institution with a small enrollment 67 years ago. A lot of the institutions that we are competing with for attention on the global stage have been in this business for well over 100 years. We only became a comprehensive university in 1970. So we're late bloomers in a way. I don't want to diminish the fact that we have achieved a lot in the last 50 years. But when I look at the opportunities that are out there, they are tremendous. These investments that we make now will come to fruition 10, 20, 30 years from now. I can see that we have planted seeds all over the world and they just need to grow and become innovation hubs.

Jefferies: Artificial intelligence is something that we are hearing a lot about, particularly in higher education. Can you talk a little more about how it's going to impact our lives? How will it impact your focus moving forward for the next-gen Pamplin?

Sarker: We cannot turn our backs on the topic or just say, ‘We'll just take it as it arrives.’ We need to be at the forefront of it. Our next generation of leaders, our students who are graduating now, are going to be in a collaborative space where they're not only collaborating with a human, but collaborating with artificial intelligence [AI]. My focus is to prepare our students so that when our industry partners hire them, they are prepared from the start, which means they need to be prepared for an AI-infused world. They will need to have AI skills, they will need to be able to work with AI, they will need to be able to innovate with AI, and they will need to start contributing to our industry partners from the day they graduate. That is the mindset with which we are approaching the world of AI and how it infuses our curriculum as well as our education.