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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Learning Strategist

In his first month as dean of the Nazarian College of Business and Economics at California State University – Northridge, Chandra Subramaniam has engaged in what he calls a whirlwind of meetings with department chairs, directors and faculty. Subramaniam sees the position he assumed March 1 as the continuation of his career trajectory. His goal for the business college is to find niches that it can excel in so that students will want to attend aside from reasons of geography and cost. “You cannot be the best in everything, so you have to pick and choose what you are going to be good in,” Subramaniam said. A native of Malaysia, Subramaniam, 64, came to the United States in 1982 to get an MBA at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He later got a Ph.D. in accounting from that university’s Carlson School of Management. He taught for 10 years at Texas Christian University before moving on to the University of Texas at Arlington, where he served as chair of the accounting department and interim dean of the college of business before coming to CSUN. Subramaniam met with the Business Journal in his office to talk about his plans for the business college, what motivates him, his interest in accounting and what is on his travel bucket list. Question: Where does the Nazarian School fit in the constellation of business schools in the Los Angeles area? Answer: I think if you look at it, the Nazarian School is one of the largest business schools in the country. That makes it one of the largest business schools in Southern California. The question then becomes how do we take the size we have and take the diversity of students we have and place them appropriately in businesses where we want them to be? In terms of constellation, the question becomes not just size but where is the impact we want to make? What are your plans to achieve that? At some point we have to pick and choose one or two or three items that we are going to say, “Here is where we are going to put our mark.” Where students can say they are not coming here just because of geography and cost. They are coming here because this is a place of excellence in a particular field. Does accounting fit that description? I think so. It is one the most successful programs in Southern California. As far as I know pretty much all of the Big Four (accounting firms) come here. We have got name recognition for the entire accounting department. All the 20 top accounting firms hire from CSUN. How about fundraising? We want to get our alumni to come back to the college. I think that many of our alumni have now decided that this in one place that allowed them to be successful and they now want to give back and help the next generation of students be successful. What else? We have good evidence of pockets of excellence in entrepreneurship. We have an incubator we are starting up because we want to move students forward after they have done the pitch competition, the Bull Ring (venture capital competition) and the (National Science Foundation) I-Corps (for new entrepreneurs) into something so they are not left with nothing to do. I think that is how we can see how to close the loop. We also have the Wells Fargo Center for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. We have all these pockets. How do we then get it under one umbrella and push it forward? Why did you take this job? I was an interim dean for two years and on a weekly basis we would get these open positions for deans. The only place I applied was CSUN. Part of the reason is the fact I noticed there are a lot of wonderful things the Nazarian College has been doing. The types of activities they have been doing in terms of entrepreneurship, a really good accounting program and a very successful small business institute program. Title: Dean of the Nazarian College of Business and Economics at California State University – Northridge Born: 1954, Butterworth, Penang, Malaysia Education: Bachelor’s degree in applied physics, University of Malaya; bachelor’s in accounting and MBA, University of Minnesota, Duluth; Ph.D., in accounting, University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management Personal: Married, three children Most Admired People: Teachers; Greg Frazier, professor and associate dean, University of Texas at Arlington; Rachel Croson, dean, College of Social Sciences, Michigan State University Hobbies: Travel How did the University of Texas job prepare you for this? One of the things we have here is the type of student body that I was interested to work with. It is similar to what we had at the University of Texas at Arlington. It is a very diverse student body. A majority of the students work. They are coming in as transfer students or are first-generation college-bound. The diverse student body is exciting to work with. What is your background? I was born in Malaysia. I am an immigrant. I came here after graduating from the University of Malaya as a physicist, went into engineering and worked for National Semiconductors. I moved up the ladder quickly and into management. I had no clue what businesses do. As an engineer, I am playing with my toys. I decided then that I needed an MBA. I was given a scholarship to go to the University of Minnesota in Duluth. How did that lead to accounting? As part of the MBA requirement you had to take an undergraduate class in accounting. I have this 6-foot 4-inch (instructor) with a big beard, tall, graduated from the University of Chicago master’s program in accounting. He wouldn’t sit down anywhere. He would stand, put his leg up on the table and expound on the theory of accounting. I fell in love with accounting. I think of myself as the accidental accountant. By the time I was done with MBA, a two-year program, I had taken all the classes in accounting. Did you ever work as an accountant? I did business consulting. While I was going through the program, I was working as a student assistant for the Small Business Development Center. That gave me great experience working with small businesses in the seven-county area of northeast Minnesota. When I graduated with an MBA, the dean called me up and said they needed a new director for the SBDC and the Small Business Institute and we would like you to apply for the position. So as soon as I was through with my MBA, I am the new director for the SBDC for northeastern Minnesota. I am driving all over the place, talking with chambers of commerce and individuals dealing with businesses. It was a fun experience. What undergraduate degrees would you recommend for students if they eventually want to get an MBA? The original notion of having excellent credentials in some other area and then you are coming to understand the broad view of business in an MBA program is a best fit for an MBA. You want to first get a strength in a particular discipline, whether it is engineering, sciences or arts, and then you want to understand what a business entity will look like. The other thing they should have is it is always nice to have some work experience. You cannot understand incentives and corporate structures if you have never been out in the workplace. Some work experience always helps in an MBA program. The MBA program here at CSUN is part time. Any thoughts on making it full time? We have an excellent part-time program. My discussions with the MBA directors has been in terms of how we grow the program. That numbers have been declining a little bit and we want to grow the program. Whether we want to change it is a longer discussion. There are other schools that are struggling with full-time programs. Wake Forest gave up their full-time program. Iowa gave up their full-time program. Why? Partly because when the economy is good the willingness of good strong MBA candidates to come and give up two years of work to come back full-time to school is declining. It is a struggle to capture a full-time market when the economy is good. In terms of part time, I think that is a good market to be in because you want them to be in their job and moving up the ladder. How will you conduct outreach to businesses? Absolutely. Local businesses are critical. Last year, I was named to the top 500 business leaders in Dallas-Fort Worth and part of it was the outreach. We have program called the Wells Fargo Center for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. That center and a class within the management department provide support for small businesses for when they are starting up, they want to change their market, or want to grow the business. We also want to make sure we connect with a lot of businesses to provide internship opportunities for our students. How about speaking opportunities? We have students listening to alumni and senior leaders saying what is going on. The most impactful thing alumni can say is “I sat in that seat over there, and 10, 15 years later I am a CFO or CEO and you can too.” From a student perspective, that has a big impact. When someone says you can do it, that sets you on a path. What motivates you? I have been a teacher all my life. I started doing tutorials when I was 14, teaching math and science. I graduated with a physics degree and taught for two years in high school. Consulting is more teaching. I got my Ph.D. and I have been teaching ever since. What motivates me is to see students actually light up when they understand something. From the deer-in-the-headlights look when you are explaining something to suddenly something clicks, and they understand it and they can move forward. What was your career turning point? When I came to the MBA program, the idea was to spend my time on the MBA and get back to industry. As part of my duties when I became the SBDC director, I had to teach classes. For me, that became the goal. The question was how do you do it? A Ph.D. was a requirement. What are the strengths at CSUN? The strengths they have in the college is they have great faculty. They are enthusiastic about helping the students. And the weaknesses? The weaknesses are not a CSUN issue or a college of business issue. The weaknesses we have is generic to education per se at the moment, which is part of why I am trying to change the culture here. Part of it is the business world is moving so fast in terms of technology. The question is how do we change what we are teaching in the curriculum and preparing the students for that, bearing in mind that in four, five years’ time the students we graduate are going into a business world that has changed significantly? If I talk to my accounting and finance faculty they are looking at how do I take blockchains, how do I take technology and data analytics and use it in my industry? How do we get those into a curriculum? We need to get it in there in order for us to make sure the students that we graduate have the skillset they need for the marketplace. Who has been an influential person in your life? My teachers have been the most influential. I still have fond memories of my math teacher in high school. I have a former dean by the name of Rachel Croson, who is now a dean at Michigan State University, who I lean on sometimes to ask questions. Another person I do admire is someone who was an associate dean when I was at UTA named Greg Frazier. He was the most meticulous person I have ever seen. He was the best COO a college could have. What’s the last book you read? I am a John Grisham fan. So, I read every book he publishes. What are your hobbies? My wife and I love to travel. We have a bucket list of places where we want to travel. Where have you gone? We typically don’t do tours; we just go off on our own and discover a place. We love Switzerland. We love London, Paris. I go home to New Zealand pretty much every year because that is where my family is, in Auckland. What places are on your bucket list? There are two places to go in the next few years. I have a friend of mine who is in Norway and she’s been calling us for a long time to come. The other one is Prague. Those are two near-term bucket list (destinations). We will try to do South Africa sometime.

Mark Madler
Mark Madler
Mark R. Madler covers aviation & aerospace, manufacturing, technology, automotive & transportation, media & entertainment and the Antelope Valley. He joined the company in February 2006. Madler previously worked as a reporter for the Burbank Leader. Before that, he was a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and several daily newspapers in the suburban Chicago area. He has a bachelor’s of science degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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