Dean Carolyn Woo of the Mendoza College of Business recently announced her decision to leave Notre Dame and take up the position of CEO and President of Catholic Relief Services (CRS). During Dean Woo’s time at Mendoza, she has led the college to back to back number one rankings in BUSINESSWEEK’S list of the best undergraduate business schools. Dean Woo graciously agreed to sit down with the Rover to talk about her background, her work at Notre Dame, and her future role at CRS.
How did you get to where you are today?
I was born in Hong Kong and was the fifth of 6 children. There were 4 daughters and two sons. Both the sons went to professional school and one is now a lawyer and the other is a doctor, and my three other sisters did not go to college. It was unusual that I got a lot of education.
My first formative experience was at a school run by the Marionite Sisters, American missionaries who worked in China but were asked to leave during the Communist revolution. They provided me with an incredible education and played a large role in teaching me to speak English. I made friends in the first grade at the Marionite school that I am still friends with today.
The sisters taught me a great deal about faith. They were can-do people who were brave enough to leave America to go to places like China, Africa, and Latin America. Through my 12 years at the Marionite school, I came to learn that God is real because it is so real to the sisters.
My nanny was another major influence on my life. She was sold as a servant in China when she was young because her father had tuberculosis and needed the money to pay for treating the disease. She taught herself to read by sitting outside of a schoolroom. Eventually she came to my family and helped raise me. She was a person of incredible integrity and hard work. She was compassionate, she would give the little money that she had to the less fortunate, and she had high expectations for me. I think that my nanny cultivated many of my work habits.
Then I went to Purdue University and only had funding for one year. It was against my father’s wishes, but I raised the money from my nanny and my siblings. In the end I received scholarships from Purdue that funded 6 of the 7 years that I spent studying there.
After receiving my master’s degree and PhD from Purdue, I began a career there and was offered incredible opportunities. Most importantly, I discovered the Newman Center at Purdue, also known as the St. Thomas Aquinas Center. The center took me in and provided a home away from home. I met my husband there, I was married there, and my children were married there. I received many gifts from Purdue, but my greatest gift was my husband who has been a partner in everything. I stayed at Purdue until 1997, when I came to Notre Dame.
What is your favorite aspect of working at Notre Dame?
My favorite aspect of working at Notre Dame is that we can combine our work with faith and particularly that we can combine our Catholic mission with business education. It isn’t just combining faith and theology but instead that we are able to combine education in the “secular” field of business with the Catholic mission of Notre Dame. In fact my favorite accomplishment is not that we are ranked number one.
When asked about my goals, I told Bishop Darcy that we are going to “play with the big boys,” that we would win some of the time, and that we were going to do it the Catholic way. I am most proud of the fact that we did it the Catholic way and that we are number one.
What do you think is the most important aspect of a business education?
I believe there are three essential aspects of a business education. The ability to solve problems and create effective processes is number one for a business education. Number two is the development of personal integrity. Finally, third is instilling a sense of the common good.
What, in your opinion, sets Mendoza apart as a business school?
We provide an extraordinary education, but we also emphasize integrity and the common good. I believe that our faculty is extremely dedicated to helping our students succeed. You can really tell that the teachers are devoted to the students and are available to them. The combination of our focus on academic excellence, ethics and the common good set us apart. We also have an extraordinary alumni network that is willing to help students. Finally, we encourage students to develop their faith.
How would you deal with the major influx of students enrolling in Mendoza in the future?
We are working as a university team to tackle this issue. The team consists of all the undergraduate college deans, the admissions office, and the First Year of Studies program. There are immediate steps we have taken to handle the problem, and there are also intermediate steps we are considering.
First, we put all of our discretionary resources into accommodating the very large sophomore class. This year we are asking for additional capacity for both faculty and staff support. We are also working with the other colleges to see what may help them retain and attract more students. There is also the possibility of a new career discernment course to help students understand that you don’t need to major in business to get a job and launch a professional career.
If these things do not work to stop the growth in enrollment in Mendoza, we are considering whether or not we need a gate. Almost all business schools have a gate, but at Notre Dame we do not because we believe that it is our model to let students choose their course of study. Instituting a gate for acceptance into Mendoza presents a new set of challenges so we are therefore taking different, more immediate measures before considering a more rigid admissions gate.
What do you feel are the most relevant concerns of students at Notre Dame?
I believe that for any college student there are about three major issues or questions that they are dealing with. The first question asks, “What is my journey?” and “What am I good at?” This question is about them as adults and how they will fit in the adult world.
The second issue deals with values, namely what are the student’s values, what can the student count on, and whether the world is a place of goodness where the student can count on other people, and whether God is real.
Finally, I believe that there is a third set of issues for this particular generation that deals with economic security. Students realize the tremendous sacrifices that their parents had to make for them to attend Notre Dame. They also have witnessed economic disruptions in their own families, adding to the student’s anxiety about what it takes to be economically stable.
Do you believe that the current structural economic problems in the United States and the world spell a more difficult future for college students entering the workforce?
I actually think that the answer is “no” for Notre Dame students. I do not believe that it is more difficult for Notre Dame students. Indeed I would actually venture to say that the future offers more opportunities for Notre Dame students with the proviso that our students practice some degree of outward-looking with how they think about their careers.
The Notre Dame education is very rich, well rounded, and delivered with a high level of expectation. This creates an important set of skills for analytical thinking, writing and communicating, team and community skills, and a great deal of leadership skills. I think all of these skills, regardless of major, will serve our students well.
What I see as the missing piece is that a lot of our students think about working in the real world as a “copout.” They see working in the real world or searching for a job as the type of activity that they dread. They think of going to the career fair as sort of a “meat market.” To the extent that our students do not have a positive and therefore proactive approach to their career launching, they often do not move quickly enough and do not get the type of internships that develop skills, they do not network early enough, and end up stuck.
I truly believe that the Notre Dame educational experience prepares our students to succeed in this world, but it is important for our students to not look at the question of their professional engagement and getting a job as a “copout.” I don’t see this so much as the mentality of the students in Mendoza, and I believe that we have developed a culture that encourages students to start early and to prepare for their interviews.
Most of our juniors have an internship that leads to a job offer after their senior year, but this requires students to do their part. Sometimes students may even go to an internship and realize that they don’t want to work in a particular company or industry and that’s fine, but they’ve gone through the process and it really works. Sometimes I don’t feel that this is the primary model that students from the other colleges follow.
What are some ideas you have for tackling our difficult economic situation?
I think that the most important agenda item is to create jobs. Once we can create jobs, it will create incentive and a pull for education to improve. We always say America is undereducated in some ways, but once we have those jobs I see people going to community colleges, online colleges, job training and other places to update their skills.
You can’t create jobs until there is real, meaningful, value-added production. This will help us increase our exports. This all creates consumer confidence that could lead to growth. We need both export-driven growth and consumer-driven growth, but the first agenda item must be to create jobs.
Tell me about your upcoming role at Catholic Relief Services.
I go into Catholic Relief Services as the CEO and President. I have no background in international relief, but I served on the board of CRS from 2004 to 2009 so I only of the issues more as a board member and from some of the field trips I have taken and through my interaction with the staff. This does not at all qualify me as an expert in the field, and in fact it tells me how much I do not know about the actual work of relief and development.
What I think I bring to the role is a set of experiences that deal with strategic planning, connecting plans to operational implementation, development of core competencies, budgeting, talent development and evaluation. I will be making much more of an organizational and administrative contribution to CRS. Some other areas that I will work on are fundraising, and making sure that the touchstone of CRS is our Catholic identity.
How will your experiences at Notre Dame make you a stronger leader at CRS?
I think that several of my experiences at Notre Dame will help my work at CRS. I took some theology courses while I was an undergraduate at Purdue in 1972-1975, but I think that foundation was quite shallow. I believe that my 14 years at Notre Dame gave me a deeper theological foundation about our faith and how we are to live that faith and that will serve me very well.
I also find the work of the Congregation of the Holy Cross to be very inspiring. I think that their ministries to students, their ministry in developing countries, and their sense of excellence and very high standards in the work that they do is like a “shot in the arm for me.” I am inspired by them and feel like I have learned from them.
Also, the network of colleagues I have here reminds me about the power of team. Mendoza went from being a good school to a really premiere school because of how the team came together. My experiences with my team of colleagues at Notre Dame have been extraordinary. I believe that the students feel this too through the dedication of the faculty and staff and through the high standards at Mendoza. I think to be a number one school, it isn’t about one or two people but rather it’s about culture and a sense of common ground and common purpose. Notre Dame has shown me how much a cohesive, dedicated team can achieve.
What role did faith play in your decision to leave Notre Dame for CRS?
I wrote an essay for Notre Dame Magazine and I talked about how it took me 6 months of discernment in this process and there were 4 or 5 major fears in this decision. They were big fears, not little ones. I’m a person who generally sleeps extremely well, but they were questions that woke me up at three in the morning and they were powerful. I learned to deal with those questions and process them, and in the end those questions don’t have answers because they are about things that could happen in the future.
I just asked myself, “Do you believe that this is a journey with God or do you not believe?” If you believe it is a journey with God, whatever happens, it will work out. I would say faith was everything in this decision. It’s all about counting on God.
What are some of the biggest challenges you believe you will face in your new role at CRS?
I would say that the biggest challenge will be managing myself to cultivate a prayer life and to get proper rest and down time. I tend to work until I completely “run out of gas” and I don’t think that serves people very well because in that type of position you need to be calm, you need to maintain perspective, and you need to be composed. My challenge will be to balance a very active mode of working with reflection and thinking time.
What advice do you have for the next dean of the Mendoza College of Business?
I would tell them to stay on the Catholic mission. That is the most important part of the future of the college. If we succeed as the number one business school and lose our sense of mission, we would have been irresponsible to what a business school at Notre Dame should do. The ability to be committed to that mission and to be faithful to that mission is very important. To do that, you have to cultivate it from the inside out, not from the outside in. The sense of faith, of commitment to this mission, of the blessings that we have received and how to use those blessings properly, of privilege, and of responsibility to our students that we can pass the faith on in a “secular” undertaking like business is extremely important. It’s only when we remain faithful to that mission that we can understand why business is a necessary good in terms of serving people.
