I’m originally from Romania and I lived half of my life there. I came here for college about nineteen years ago, and I stayed here. I've mostly lived in Romania and the United States. I lived in Boston, more precisely in Cambridge. Then I lived in Palo Alto for five years, I went there for grad school at Stanford. Then I came to Atlanta. These were all different areas, the northeast, Bay Area, California and then the South, each of them with their particular charm. I enjoy playing and watching sports, in particular I like tennis. I like to watch movies. I am an avid consumer of news as well.

Here in the Business School, we offer a bachelors program which has concentrations. It’s not just general; you can major in Finance, IT Management, Operations and so on. We have MBA and executive MBA, those are common to business schools. We have a Masters of Analytics, which is a joint venture between three divisions on campus, us, College of Computing and College of Engineering that is to assist us in engineering. We play a big role in contributions to one of the tracks: Business Analytics and that's a one year program. Then we have a PhD program and of course, various non-degree programs for the industry. Going to the undergraduate program, my area is called IT management but we can manage the equivalent of Information Systems at other schools. Besides having a core class that introduces them to a wide range of topics, students get to study Database Management. We have courses in Business Programming, so various iterations, some being taught in Java, some being taught in C#. We are introducing a course on Data Visualization. We have System Analysis and Design, Business Processes, Electronic Commerce, Emerging Technologies, Business Data Communications, so a wide range of courses on various topics. This is, by the way, the second most popular undergraduate concentration. A number of years back it wasn't so popular, but we turned that around. Now we are second only to finance. Students coming out of this concentration go in the industry, a lot of them in positions of consulting, or IT managers, product managers, data analysts, implementation managers as well. Those are some of the common roles. Some of them join large traditional companies but quite a fair number of students started joining smaller companies and start-ups in particular. In the PhD program, the curriculum is structured such that a lot of professors get to interact with the students, we have half-semester courses. Within two years, students would have taken eight courses with ITM faculty. They get exposure to a broad range of questions, they get to see cutting-edge research in many areas and they make an informed decision in terms of what direction they want to pursue.

There used to be a couple of misperceptions. Georgia Tech has a very strong tradition in Engineering. A decade or two ago, when students would come to study Management, they used to be perceived as not good enough for Engineering. That started changing. Now the courses in the Business School are very rigorous. They are quite hands-on in terms of introducing students to the tools, deep thinking and analyzing problems. That misperception vanished. Now, we stand out and a lot of students want to enter one of the Business concentrations. The school grew a lot in the last ten years. When I joined nine years ago, compared to now, we added more than twenty professors. There used to be a misperception that studying Information Systems or IT Management will prepare you for a job as a help desk person and you're going to be the one troubleshooting installations of windows. Sometimes people don't really understand what this is about. It takes a little bit of marketing of our program and reaching out to students. There is a concentration fair where we present our concentration and we try to explain to the students, beside their jobs, these are the pay rates, this is what you're going to do, what is the career path on which you're going to go, whether you're going to be a consultant or a project manager and so on. We try to inform them, and we have seen tremendous success. Now it’s by word of mouth, students convince other students to join the concentration.