Busy Beaver: Increasing Transaction Size Through Data Analytics

Capstone Team: Christian Meyer, Haider Aly Reza, Nico Roussel, Paul Lim

How can a traditional retailer motivate customers to increase their basket size? The answer to this question may be hiding in Busy Beaver’s database of historical customer transactions. Included in this vast dataset is information about how customers responded to prior promotional campaigns, which primarily take the form of biweekly advertisements that promote various discounted products. The key question is how effective these promotions are at driving incremental business. Moreover, are there opportunities for improvement by adjusting product selection and/or discount levels? Finally, how should seasonality influence the design of the promotions?

The approach chosen to address these questions was to apply modern machine learning techniques to understand the relationship between the various characteristics of a promotion and their corresponding impact on customer purchase behaviors. This approach enabled the identification of key insights that will likely improve management’s ability to design their biweekly advertisements. Ultimately, these insights formed the basis for a proof-of-concept application that illustrates how advanced data analytics can be used to help improve the effectiveness of key business decisions and for future work to continue to understand the donor base behavior, especially as more data becomes available.

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Capstone Presentation

CMU Giving: Unlocking Generosity With Analytics

Capstone Team: Roopa Bharadwaj, Yang Liu, Mark Denton

Growing a sustainable giving program is a key strategy for CMU. But finding and converting these donors to be regular or upgrade their donations isn’t easy.

CMU has been growing the donation base of alumni that participate in annual giving, volunteering, or other events. Appeals are a cornerstone for fundraising programs. But running them inefficiently by targeting the wrong alumni with wrong ask amounts is often a pain point.

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Capstone Presentation

Emerson: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program

Capstone Team: Will Chastka, Yuhan Chen, Hema Kadali, Alexis Robbins, Zelealem Yima

As part of Emerson’s Environmental Sustainability journey, Emerson is looking for accurate and innovative approaches to calculate CO2emissions and identify opportunities to achieve their Net Zero objectives. MSBA students analyzed their data, conducted market research and developed newer methods and Machine Learning models for emission predictions. We also built data stories and what-if scenarios to demonstrate the ‘art of possible’.

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Capstone Presentation

Glance: Improving Click-through Rate on Mobile Lock Screen Advertisements

Capstone Team: Hugo Camou, Johnathan Khodr, Jamie Khoo, Andrew Lee

Glance delivers its users interactive content (cards) to their phone’s lock screens. “Clicks” on sponsored cards is a measure of success for a campaign. Dividing clicks by the number of impressions gives click-through rate (CTR), a key metric when comparing success across campaigns.

Glance already utilizes a sophisticated recommendation system to distribute cards to its users. (Oli et al., 2020) However, to maximize revenue, it is important to understand what motivates a user to interact with a sponsored card. Thus, our goal was to create a modeling methodology that improves upon the existing recommendation system, makes consistent predictions across multiple card types, and offers interpretable results.

By predicting clicks on a target glance at a user level, we were able to develop a modeling methodology that achieves each of these goals. We feature engineered user data and past click history to make our predictions and found that past click history was most predictive of future clicks.

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Capstone Presentation

Honda: 99PLabs Research - Dynamic Vehicle Services

Capstone Team: Chatchawan Lakkhananukun, Prakhyat Pola, Rebecca Stevens, Jocelyn Wang

In this project, we explored two business models: a car maintenance service and a peer-to-peer car lending platform; we used an analytics-focused approach on the Telematics dataset collected on cars provided by 99PLabs. Dwell time and location predictive models were developed previously by another team, and we provided recommendations on the model improvement.

The two business models integrate the predictive models to create potential business values. Because of the limitation of the dataset, two surveys were conducted to understand and validate our business models. Both surveys showed that there are markets for the two proposed business models. We also developed a framework to understand the failure modes of both business models and methods for mitigating the risk. We analyzed the cost-benefit of applying the predictive models to both business models to understand potential values for both 99PLabs and its customers. Finally, we explored the potential of using autonomous vehicles in the peer-to-peer lending service.

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Blog: Leveraging Dwell Time Models to Create Dynamic Vehicle Services (Peer-to-Peer Car Lending Service)

Capstone Presentation

Industrial Scientific: Customer Insights

Capstone Team: Ralph Del Negro, Milica Kosic, Rohi Nallamolu, Alexandra Quan, Amy Ran

The sponsor company has noticed an opportunity to improves upsell and cross-sell activity by using historical data to identify which sites are using less product than they need. The Tepper MSBA team met with members of the marketing, sales, field services, and IT teams to understand the business and data context. These interviews identified the key problem of understanding how account characteristics and behavior impact downsells and upsells.

Using product data, Salesforce account information, and contract amendment data, the Tepper team prototyped multiple machine learning models to predict product utilization rates, contract changes, and equipment volume. Ultimately the team refined a customer segmentation model, which used k-means clustering on the principal components of an 80 feature dataset.

The customer segmentation model output 3 clusters: low risk of downsells, moderate risk of downsells, and high growth opportunities. Key insights of these models include strong correlation between customer activity and upsells, the importance of product choice in predicting contract amendments, and the observable predictive value of the company’s own customer health metric.

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Capstone Presentation

Reducing Tier 2 Creator Churn on Roposo Through Targeted Intervention, Sponsored by InMobi

Team Members: Sagar Dubey, Emma MacKay, Dipali Mistri and Sruthi Suresh

Roposo, a short video-sharing platform owned by InMobi, is challenged by the severe lack of “active” creators, causing less diverse content creation. The dormant or “Tier 2” creators far outnumber the most active “Tier 1” creators. Roposo is looking to identify levers to encourage less active creators to create more content leading to higher creator and content diversity. This would also reduce the concentration of views toward popular creators in the Roposo ecosystem.

Our purpose was to identify Tier 2 creators and find levers that could incentivize them into posting more often, or in other words, reduce their churn. We ran k-means clustering on the set of creators and found that there are five distinct clusters, among which two lie on each extreme – most active (Tier 1) and totally inactive. Our focus then was on the three remaining Tier 2 clusters. During EDA, we found that views and posting frequency were correlated, and so hypothesized giving additional views as a potential lever. We ran survival analysis on the three clusters separately to define a churn cut-off for each, accounting for when 90% of creators in each cluster had posted. We used a combination of survival analysis, decision tree, and poisson regression models to propose that InMobi offer free views to those creators from the three Tier 2 clusters, who have less than 750 average views in the past 14 days. Doing so would potentially cause these creators to post more often, and not churn as a result.

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Introduction

Roposo, owned by InMobi, is an Indian “short” video (shorter than 3 minutes) creation and sharing app, available in various local languages. Users on Roposo create short videos on its various channels dedicated to comedy, religion, dance, food, health, movies among others. A small subset of creators on the platform thrive (Tier 1) with the remainder lagging behind and having high churn rates (Tier 2). The remainder of users on the platform are viewers (Figure 1).

In this project, our ultimate goal is to decrease the churn rate of Tier 2 creators by addressing the following questions: Who is likely to churn and why? If possible, can we determine the optimal intervention strategies to reduce the likelihood of churning?

Methods and Materials

Our analysis is focused on a subset of creators from the months of September 2020 to January 2021. Our dataset includes various characteristics about the creators, including demographic, behavioral, and engagement features.

We transform our data into time-series features. Specifically, we look at 1, 7, 14, 30, and 60-day rolling windows and compute metrics such as the number of views, the count of videos, and the average inter-posting time. We furthermore record demographic features such as gender, age, and tenure. At this stage, we also compute our target variable, which is the time to the next video posting and the count of videos posted.

Results

We distinguish Tier 1 and Tier 2 creator characteristics through K-means clustering. As shown in Figure 2, the Elite Performers do not need further incentives and generally have low churn, whereas the Bored Creators may not respond to any kind of intervention given their low activity on the platform. Therefore, our recommended intervention strategy focuses on Older Loyals, Male Newbies, and Active Females. Survival analysis further highlights the difference in posting characteristics (Figure 3). We also use this to define churn as the number of days where 90% of creators are expected to post since their last video.

We find that views are highly concentrated on the platform, and that within our target Tier 2 personas, those with lower views post less frequently. Based on these findings, we initially propose a strategy to boost views for Tier 2 creators who have less than 750 views in the preceding two weeks. We further refine this target group based on a creator’s behavioral characteristics (count of videos posted and time since last video) and find that those within our refined target group are at much greater risk of churn (Figure 4).

Discussion

Based on earlier analysis, we observe that the ideal group to target for increased views are Tier 2 creators who had less than or equal to 750 average views in the past 14 days. We attempt to further refine this target group using a tree-based classification model. The results from this model suggest refining our treatment group based on the number of videos a creator has posted in the past 14 days and days since last video posting.

We re-run our survival models to observe the posting characteristics of our proposed treatment group and compare the results to our previous proposed treatment group that was defined based on views. We find that the refined target group has significantly longer inter-posting times than the remaining members of their persona as well as those targeted solely based on views. This suggests that InMobi can better ration “free” boosted views to those most at risk. We furthermore confirm that Older Loyals and Male Newbies appear to be more sensitive to the number of views, meaning that increased views are predicted to have greater impact for Older Loyals and Male Newbies than for Active Females. As mentioned above, this provides a further way for InMobi to prioritize free views.

Conclusions

To conclude, we note a few key highlights that we uncovered during this project. Views and posting frequency are correlated, and a few top creators, namely the Tier 1 creators, capture a high percentage of total views on the platform. The remaining creators, that is, Tier 2 creators, differ by their posting characteristics, and by extension, views, and clustering allows us to better understand the various personas that exist among Tier 2 creators.

Tier 2 creators suffer from churn, but given that creator churn is non-contractual or deterministic, we loosely define churn based on posting characteristics within each persona. There are several ways that InMobi can help less successful creators on the platform, including artificially boosting views, which is expected to reduce inter-posting time. While less successful creators can be broadly targeted, targeting specific creators based on behavioral and demographic rules will allow for a greater impact.

LISI: Implementing a Newsletter Recommendation System: How Leimberg Services Inc. Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

Capstone Team: Cyndia Chen, Olivia Dion, Jackie Sun, Haowei Song, Yifei Wang

This paper explores the implementation of a newsletter recommendation system for Leimberg Services Inc. (LISI) to enhance customer satisfaction. The research leverages machine learning algorithms and data analysis to segment subscribers and predict their newsletter interests. By collecting demographic information and consumption records, along with newsletter content, the study identifies clusters of subscribers and matches them with relevant newsletters based on keyword similarity. The findings provide valuable insights for LISI to personalize email marketing campaigns, improve customer segmentation, and conduct A/B testing for optimization. The proposed strategies encompass recommendation systems, customer segmentation, and A/B testing, which can contribute to increased subscriber engagement, retention, and revenue. Additionally, suggestions are given for future improvements, including adjusting the registration system, providing clearer categorization options, and establishing a comprehensive database with interactive data collection. These recommendations aim to enhance personalization, improve user experience, and enable data-driven decision-making to optimize LISI's service and content over time.

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Capstone Presentation

LISI: Strategic Vision and Business Plan For Leimberg Information Services' Growth

Capstone Team: Alicia Carter, Erin Murphy, Deanna Swinerton, Tiffany Wang, Daniel Weiss

Leimberg Information Services, or LISI, is a niche content provider for Estate and Tax attorneys, CPAs, and financial professionals and companies. LISI offers newsletters, webinars, podcasts, courses, and other content to its customers. Historically, LISI has been run like a hobby. It is now under new ownership, and they want to expand profitably and sustainably. Due to poor data collection, and no real organizational structure, they didn't know where to start.

Overview of Solutions:

Tepper MSBA students proposed three methods to drive LISI's growth:

1. Develop an extensive podcast platform.
2. Expand the reach of their newly created product The Institute.
3. Build a networking platform based on the expertise of LISI's subscribers.

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Capstone Presentation

PGT Trucking Order Selection Project

Capstone Team: Jiarui Wang, Jiadi Zhang, Peter Pan, Sanjit Sokhi, Zhiyu Pan

PGT Trucking faces a high surplus of demand. It receives far more order requests for hauling services than it could satisfy. Therefore, PGT requires an automated algorithm that helps it selectively accept the optimal combination of order requests that not only produce high revenue but do not conflict with each other geographically or time-wise.

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Capstone Presentation

Synechron: Improving Employee Retirement Experience with Actionable Financial Wellness Programs

Capstone Team: Aishwarya Shah, Ryannon Starkey, Gnanitha Manne, Mindaugas Katilius, Evan Wong

There are three major concerns in the retirement industry:

• Very few people are focused on saving for retirement.
• People may need to take money out early for emergencies which reduces retirement corpus.
• More money is being spent on services and products impacted by inflation.

One-third of Americans feel unprepared or unsure of whether they are on track for retirement, one of the main reasons being the lack of engagement between employers/plan providers and employees. The purpose of this study is to examine these challenges and provide insights into the ways that employers and plan providers could help improve the contribution rate.

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Capstone Presentation

Parcel Consolidation in Last-Mile Delivery, Sponsored by Tata Consultancy Services

Team Members: Kristina Schiffhauer, Sivanagahari Devarapalli, Stefanie Montgomery, and Timothy Marshall

Parcel delivery companies (i.e., United Parcel Service, FedEx, Amazon) are challenged with an intricately complex logistical problem - moving parcels from origin to destination as efficiently as possible. The final leg of delivery logistics is last-mile delivery. For customers with relatively frequent orders, multiple parcels are likely to pass through the same last mile over a short time frame.

We explore an approach to achieve cost savings through the implementation of a parcel consolidation program. We introduce a framework to target the most valuable customers and compare customer-facing incentives to motivate program participation.

Our experiments have shown that parcel consolidation schemes are an effective way to reduce last-mile costs. Specifically, given enough capacity to store held parcels overnight at the last-mile hub, the marginal stop costs saved outweigh the parcel storage costs. Dynamic parcel consolidation has the highest savings, but is not feasible to implement in real-life.

Two days per week assigned delivery days has higher savings compared to single day of week assigned delivery, due to the fact that more destinations can be included in the program under the two days per week delivery scheme.

Last-Mile Delivery Is Critical

The last-mile delivery cost function is complicated and depends on many parameters such as transportation hub's fixed and variable costs of truck, fuel, distance traveled, time duration, parcel weight, and volume. Due to confidentiality and a competitive market, major parcel carriers’ actual last-mile delivery cost function is not available publicly. Gevaers, et al. (2014) modeled total last-mile costs by modeling specific last-mile characteristics as independent variables.

In our simplified version, we have referenced two sources to derive cost per delivery stop from quarterly earnings reports of parcel carriers (UPS and FedEx) and the annual ATRI (American Transportation Research Institute) report provides transportation cost per hour and transportation cost per mile. These studies suggest an average last-mile delivery cost per stop of about $4.50, which is the number we use in our optimization model.

Key Questions/Hypothesis

1. Parcel consolidation beyond promised delivery date reduces last-mile delivery costs.
2. There are incentives that motivate customers to opt-in for delayed parcel delivery.

Framework Architecture

We set forth a dual-workstream framework to evaluate our hypotheses. Workstream 1 aims to identify customers (destinations) to target for participation in consolidation programs.  Workstream 2 aims to identify effective incentives for convincing customers to opt-in for participation in consolidation programs.

In the diagram, we highlight the framework components that make up each workstream. Together, Workstream 1 and Workstream 2 form a framework that may be repeatedly employed by a parcel carrier to model and evaluate different real-world scenarios. By identifying the customers to target, and identifying what incentives are most effective, a parcel carrier may develop a strong consolidation program that will result in optimal operations savings.

Parcel Consolidation Does Improve Cost Savings

A key component of our analysis is the mixed integer linear programming model built and solved using the DOCPLEX solver. The optimization model simulates the impact of our various consolidation strategies, with the primary benefit of identifying the destinations to target for consolidation which save the most costs, subject to our various constraints.

Our experiments have shown that parcel consolidation schemes are an effective way to reduce last-mile costs. Specifically, given enough capacity to store held parcels overnight at the last-mile hub, the marginal stop costs saved outweigh the parcel storage costs. Dynamic parcel consolidation has the highest savings, but is not feasible to implement in real-life. Two days per week assigned delivery days has higher savings compared to single day of week assigned delivery, due to the fact that more destinations can be included in the program under the two days per week delivery scheme.

Survey Respondents Preferred Gift Card

Incentive surveys reveal that parcel consolidation programs are viewed favorably by consumers. Roughly two-thirds of respondents indicated that they would participate in the two days per week fixed delivery model for no monetary incentive at all, though different monetary incentives increase the reported participation rate. Consumers prefer the two fixed days per week scheme over the dynamic scheme.

Given the willingness to participate in a consolidation program and the potential for cost savings, we recommend that parcel carriers implement a consolidation pilot program at key last-mile hubs without offering incentives for participation. In preparation for a pilot program, the framework described in this report can be applied to a real-last mile hub to reveal the optimal consolidation scheme, expected cost savings, and willingness to enroll in the program.

Vitalant: Blood Donation Donor Analysis

Capstone Team: Matt Greenfield, Sam Hartman, Josh Kennedy

Vitalant, the nation’s largest independent and nonprofit blood services provider, has been facing declining blood donations over the past decade. The United States as a whole is facing blood supply shortage.

Pittsburgh area donor information for a 12-year period was the basis of examination, analyzing, and modeling for the team. Data was taken through many iterations of analyzing trends and developing churn prediction models.

The team confirmed a handful of the theories posited by the Vitalant team sponsors and brought new information to light. The disparity among older and younger donors was confirmed, yet the team was able to identify that this is mainly due to lack of returning donors in younger generations. Donors that returned acted similarly across all generations.

The team was able to isolate which factors are indicative of higher churn (or lower retention), which are mainly the amount of prior visits and whether the previous visit was successful. While the team was able to confirm many suspicious and bring new trends to light, many of these analyses can be continued for future work to continue to understand the donor base behavior, especially as more data becomes available.

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Capstone Presentation

Accounting for Seasonal and COVID in CLV Model Predictions for a Retail Chain

Capstone Team: Andrea Levy, Michael Zakin, Vivek Jayaprakasan

Customer Lifetime Value (“CLV”) modeling focuses on measuring and understanding the value of a customer based on past customer transaction data. Reliable models that accurately predict CLV is a critical tool that helps a company understand customer purchasing behavior, enabling managers to make focused marketing decisions.

Two common “buy-’til-you-die” probability models are used to predict CLV in non-contractual customer retail environments: the Pareto-NBD model (Reference 1), and the BG-NBD (Reference 2) model. One of the primary benefits of these types of models is that they work with aggregate data and are easy to implement.

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Capstone Presentation

The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University is a proud Yellow Ribbon Program participant. Veterans must have 100 percent Post 9/11 GI Bill eligibility; active duty service members, and their spouses using transferred entitlement, may participate in the Yellow Ribbon program. Once an individual student’s eligibility is determined by the VA certifying official at Carnegie Mellon, the Tepper School of Business Financial Aid Office determines the amount of Yellow Ribbon eligibility.

The Tepper School’s level of participation in the Yellow Ribbon Program may vary annually. For payment rate information, visit the United States Department of Veteran Affairs website.

Additional information about Veterans’ benefits can be found on The HUB and the CMU Veterans & Military Community site.

The Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship-for-Service Program, funded by the Department of Defense (DoD), is a combined educational and workforce development opportunity for STEM students.

With a full scholarship, students pursuing STEM degrees will be able to focus on complex research to further the DoD's mission and create a lasting impact. SMART offers full tuition to undergraduate and graduate students, annual stipends, summer internships, mentorship, and guaranteed employment with the DoD upon graduation.

Visit smartscholarship.org for more information on eligibility and how to apply. The SMART application is open annually from Aug. 1 to Dec. 1.

All full-time and part-time MBA students are considered for a Tepper School Scholarship at the time of admission based on the overall strength of the admissions application. A separate scholarship application is not required. Students who receive a Tepper School MBA Scholarship are advised when they are accepted for admission.

As part of a select group of schools and corporations, the Tepper School partners with Forté, a non-profit working to advance women in business. Through the admissions process, exceptional MBA candidates are selected to receive Tepper School-funded Forté Fellowship. Along with the prestige of receiving this designation, Forté Fellows gain access to exclusive Forté benefits, such as skill-building workshops, leadership conferences, networking opportunities, job postings, and more. The Forte Fellowship is open to all qualifying students regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender or other identity.

The Tepper School of Business is a member school of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management (CGSM), an alliance of 25 leading business schools and more than 80 corporate partners that are dedicated to enhancing diversity in business education and leadership by helping to reduce the under-representation of African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans in both the member schools’ enrollment and the ranks of management. Candidates who apply and obtain membership through The Consortium, are eligible to be considered for all merit based scholarships ranging from $10,000 to Full-Tuition. Consortium Fellows at the Tepper School of Business are those selected to receive the merit-based full-tuition scholarship. Consortium Fellowships are open to all candidates who receive membership into The Consortium through their membership process. To apply or learn more about The Consortium, please visit www.cgsm.org or contact tepper-mba@cmu.edu.

Reaching Out MBA (ROMBA) is an organization dedicated to educating, inspiring and connecting business students to impact change in the classroom and workplace. The ROMBA Fellowship has been created as a joint effort between top business school programs and Reaching Out to demonstrate that business schools are outstanding opportunities for out LGBTQ+ young professionals and their active allies to build their careers. Fellows receive access to various Reaching Out programming (including the annual conference!), mentoring and LGBTQ+ leadership opportunities, some of which are to be developed specifically for these fellows. As part of accepting the Fellowship, ROMBA fellows agree to take a national leadership role in planning content for at least one Reaching Out initiative during business school.

To be eligible for the ROMBA Fellowship, candidates must receive a minimum merit scholarship of $10,000 per year from the Tepper School of Business. (This fellowship designation does not increase your current merit scholarship.) The ROMBA Fellowship is open to anyone regardless of sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or other protected class.

The McGowan Fellowship is administered as part of the McGowan Fellows Program which was established in 2010. The fellows program is funded by the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund, named for the former chairman of MCI who broke AT&T’s monopoly on telecommunications and ushered in a new era of free enterprise.

The purpose of the fellows program is to nurture aspiring leaders by providing tuition support, principled leadership development, and a growing, generational community of talented, like-minded leaders who count social impact as well as shareholder value in their decision making.

Eligibility

One fellow is chosen annually from each of 10 schools ranking in the top 20 MBA programs nationwide. Carnegie Mellon University is a partner school.

Each fellow must be a full-time MBA student who has demonstrated leadership skill and an interest in ethical leadership. Fellowship recipients receive full tuition for their second year of MBA study, which is intended to provide them with increased freedom to pursue careers of their choice.

Eligible students are required to complete an application form which is due in the spring of their first year of study. The winning fellow is notified by August 1st. Please contact Trisha Grace for more information.

McGowan Fellowship Activities and Requirements

McGowan Fellows must participate in the program’s Annual Symposium and Retreat weekend which takes place in the fall. Keyed to an engaging topic as seen through the lens of ethical leadership, the symposium introduces new fellows to alumni and offers opportunities for spirited discussion, networking with classmates and business leaders, and a refreshed view of the workplace.

New fellows also collaborate on a social impact project during their fellowship year. The project is outlined during the symposium and fleshed out via conference calls and a group spring retreat, provided by the fellows program. Representatives from the class present a project update to the board in July, after graduation, and a final report the following November, during the symposium.

Another key component of the McGowan Fellows experience is the Emerging Leaders Program and Coaching. This involves leadership training from CCL, a world-renowned leader in the space, and working one-on-one with CCL-trained McGowan alumni coaches.

To learn more about the current class of McGowan Fellows, visit the McGowan Fellows Program website.

About William G. McGowan

William G. McGowan (1927-1992), an American entrepreneur with a pioneering spirit, was the motivating force behind the success and innovation at MCI. McGowan joined MCI in 1968, and through his vision and grit, the company went nationwide with microwave telecommunications services at low prices, breaking the stranglehold of the AT&T monopoly. MCI became one of the largest providers of telecommunications services in the world.

McGowan’s interests stretched well beyond the confines of business. He believed that every child had the potential to achieve if provided opportunities. Recognizing the importance of education in reaching one’s potential, he supported efforts to find ways in which to advance low-income children and youth.

Following his death in 1992 from heart problems, McGowan’s legacy was preserved through the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund. The fellows program grew out of his interest in education and dedication to a career in business.

The James R. Swartz Leadership Scholarship is an award supported through the generosity of Tepper School of Business alumnus James R. Swartz, MSIA ’66. Awardees are individuals who demonstrate exceptional leadership potential. The scholarship is designed to attract outstanding individuals to the Tepper School of Business to provide a superior foundation for leaders addressing complexity and analytical decision-making within global markets. Our graduates are renowned for making an impact in organizations, and the Swartz Leadership Scholarship provides the financial support to students we believe will be outstanding ambassadors for our standard of leadership alongside strategic analytics.

The Swartz Leadership Scholarship is awarded to a first-year MBA student who exhibits an outstanding record of personal and professional achievement. The scholarship criteria evaluate candidates’ abilities to demonstrate the potential for exceptional leadership skills. We view the range of leadership skills as encompassing ethics, purpose, creativity, openness, team-orientation, optimism, strategic and analytical decision-making, and effective communication abilities. Swartz Scholars will possess a high degree of self-awareness of their strengths and areas of development, enabling their personal leadership and management style to be further developed during the Tepper School’s MBA program.

About James R. Swartz

James R. Swartz, founding partner of Accel Partners, is widely recognized as one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists in the world. Interdisciplinary learning is a hallmark of a Carnegie Mellon University education, and Swartz exemplifies this. He is unique among venture capitalists because he has successfully invested across multiple industries, from energy to health care to telecommunications and software. He has served as a director for more than 50 successful companies and was lead investor with the emergence of numerous industry-pioneering firms, including Avici Systems, BroadBand Technologies, Daisy Systems, FastForward/Inktomi, FVC.com, Illustra/Informix, Medical Care America, Netopia/Motorola, PictureTel, Polycom, Remedy Corporation/BMC Software, Riverbed Technology and Ungermann-Bass/Tandem.

In addition to his illustrious career, Swartz has given back to the community by donating not only his financial resources, but also his time and leadership to numerous civic and professional organizations. He’s a member of the Tepper School’s Business Board of Advisors. In 2015, Swartz donated $31 million to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. The Swartz Center works with its partners to serve the entire CMU community — departments, colleges, centers and campuses — to accelerate bringing research innovations and promising ideas to the global marketplace and helping all entrepreneurial students, faculty, staff and alumni tap into the innovation ecosystem. He also established the distinguished James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellows program, which fast-tracks the careers of Carnegie Mellon graduate students who are passionate about entrepreneurship in the technology arena.

He is also director emeritus of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Foundation and a trustee of the Sundance Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 1999 to 2002, Swartz served on the Management Committee of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Winter Olympics of 2002. He is also former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Swartz earned a bachelor of science in applied physics and engineering from Harvard University and a master of science in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University, where he received an Alumni Achievement Award. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Western Governors University.

Mary Anne Spellman and John E. “Jack” McGrath, MSIA ’61, established this fund in 2004 to attract top students to the Tepper School of Business.

The McGrath Scholarship provides a two-year scholarship biennially to a student pursuing an MBA at the Tepper School of Business. The scholarship is awarded to a first-year student who exhibits an outstanding record of personal and professional achievement, as well as exceptional leadership potential. We view the range of leadership skills as encompassing ethics, purpose, creativity, openness, team-orientation, optimism, strategic and analytical decision-making, and effective communication abilities. Recipients are highly aware of their strengths and areas of development, enabling their personal leadership and management style to be further developed during the Tepper School’s MBA program.

Booz & Company has established an additional scholarship fund at the Tepper School in honor of McGrath and other former partners who are also alumni of the Tepper School and Carnegie Mellon University.

About John E. “Jack” McGrath

Prior to his retirement, McGrath had a distinguished 45-year career at Booz & Company. During his tenure, he became a specialist in developing corporate renewal strategies and helped top management and boards of directors with significant transformation programs at some of the world’s largest consumer products. McGrath also served as a board director for 10 years, as well as in a number of leadership positions. Prior to joining Booz Allen Hamilton, McGrath worked for IBM. Before that, he served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps.

McGrath is deeply committed to many charitable organizations. He’s a loyal alumnus and generous supporter of the Tepper School, where he is a founding member of the Business Board of Advisors. He also serves as a life trustee of Carnegie Mellon University. McGrath has served on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Great Lakes Theater Festival, the Mellon Center of the Cleveland Clinic, the Sisters of Charity Health System and the Northeast Ohio Multiple Sclerosis Society, among others.

McGrath grew up in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He earned a bachelor of science from the University of Notre Dame and a master of science in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Booz & Company Scholars Fund in Business was created in 2005 to honor long-time Booz executive and Tepper School of Business alumnus John E. “Jack” McGrath, MSIA ’61, and other Booz partners who attended the Tepper School and Carnegie Mellon University. McGrath has also established his own scholarship fund at the school, the Mary Anne Spellman and Jack McGrath Scholars Fund in Business.

The Booz & Company Scholars Fund in Business provides partial-tuition scholarships for MBA students in the Tepper School of Business who have been successful academically and professionally and have exceptional leadership skills.

Training Future Consulting Professionals

The skills that Tepper School MBAs acquire, which give them the ability to take an ambiguous or unstructured situation and bring structure to it and use quantitative tools to deal with highly complex business problems, attract consulting firms. Instruction in this skillset begins during the four-week “BaseCamp” orientation program.

Approximately 31 percent of recent Tepper School MBAs accepted consulting positions upon graduation. Our graduates are working at many of the world’s elite consulting firms. The Tepper School Consulting Club offers a combination of workshops, seminars and personal mentoring opportunities that are designed to provide members with the tools they need to become successful consultants. In addition, Consulting Boot Camps provide the students with a glimpse into the daily life of a consultant and help to dispel any misconceptions they may have about the field.

About Booz & Company

Booz & Company (now known as Strategy&) is a leading global management consulting firm focused on serving and shaping the senior agenda of the world’s leading institutions. Its founder, Edwin Booz, launched the profession when he established the first management consulting firm in Chicago in 1914. Today, it operates globally with more than 3,000 people in 58 offices around the world.

The firm combines its deep strategic and transformational expertise with a detailed understanding of the issues in the industries in which it consults. Its consultants believe passionately that essential advantage lies within and that a few differentiating capabilities drive any organization’s identity and success. They work with their clients to discover and build those strengths and capture the market opportunities where they can earn the right to win.

Booz & Company is a firm of practical strategists known for their functional expertise, industry foresight and “sleeves-rolled-up” approach to working with clients. To learn more about the firm or access its thought leadership, visit their website. Its award-winning management magazine, strategy+business, is available at strategy-business.com.

Marc and Sally Onetto established the Onetto Graduate Fellowship Fund in 1999 to support the Tepper School’s strongly held value of embracing and valuing the diversity of its student body. Preference for this fellowship is given to students from any of the 27 European Union countries and from francophone countries in Africa.

Application Required

Applicants must submit a one-page essay titled “Why I Should Receive the Marc & Sally Onetto Graduate Fellowship.” Applicants are encouraged to submit their essay as part of their application.

About Marc Onetto

Marc A. Onetto, MSIA ’75, is principal at Leadership From The Mind And The Heart LLC. He engages executive teams on how to lead lean transformations and deliver excellence for customers. Onetto also is a board member of Flextronics International Ltd., a $25 billion leader in electronics supply chains and manufacturing.

Until February 2013, Onetto was senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service at Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. He pioneered the application of lean management in retail distribution, reinforcing the customer-centric culture of Amazon, which has been the foundation for the company’s success and rapid growth. He was leading tens of thousands of employees in supply chain, fulfillment centers, transportation logistics and customer services to ensure that millions of orders are packaged, tracked and delivered on time to consumers around the world.

Prior to joining Amazon in 2006, Onetto was executive vice president of worldwide operations for Solectron, a $10 billion global provider of electronics manufacturing and integrated supply-chain services to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). He joined Solectron after a 15-year career with General Electric (GE), during which he held several senior leadership positions at GE Medical Systems, including head of its global supply chain and operations, global quality and global process engineering.

Onetto was one of GE’s Six Sigma pioneers and spearheaded the quality culture transformation across GE Medical Systems. He was recognized for his contributions to GE by Jack Welch in his book, “Jack Straight From the Guts.” Prior to GE, Onetto spent 12 years with ExxonMobil Corporation. In recognition of his outstanding career achievements, Onetto was named “French-American Executive of the Year” by Chicago’s French-American Chamber of Commerce in 2002.

In addition, Onetto is a generous philanthropist and active volunteer. He is an outstanding advocate for the Tepper School. Not only has he generously established a scholarship fund, but he has also been instrumental in strengthening Amazon’s recruiting relationship with the Tepper School, which has resulted in Amazon hiring more of our MBA students than any other corporation over the past several years. Mr. Onetto serves on the Tepper School’s Business Board of Advisors, and is a knight of the French National Order of Merit granted by the French government to recognize his active contribution to Franco-American friendship and economic collaboration.

Onetto was born in Paris, France, and earned a master of science in engineering from École Centrale de Lyon, and a master of science in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University.

David A. Tepper, MBA ’82, established the David A. Tepper Scholarship Fund in 1998 to provide support to outstanding students who have the potential to become leaders in the field of finance. Preference for this scholarship is given to applicants from Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

Analytical Decision-Making Applied to Finance

Tepper attributes his professional success in part to the unique set of analytical skills he learned at the Tepper School, and through his scholarship, he helps to ensure that others have a similar opportunity. As he puts it, “the outstanding education that I received at Carnegie Mellon gave me the ability to analyze investment options in such a unique way that I am still capitalizing on what I learned to this day.”

Vision Announced for the New Tepper Quadrangle

In November 2013, Carnegie Mellon University received a generous $67 million gift from the David Tepper Foundation. The first initiative of the new project is a new, world-class home for the Tepper School of Business.

At the Tepper School of Business, our finance program emphasizes the analytical and quantitative aspects of finance and accounting, offering students an opportunity to explore various methodologies and analyses. We view analytics as a powerful career advantage in which students master frameworks for assessing complex, uncertain and dynamic variables and produce strategic solutions that, ultimately, are better decisions. It’s this mastery of complexity that our finance students and graduates leverage for career advantage. Specific tools include predictive analysis, quantitative modeling — what some today might call ‘big data’ — optimization, modeling and strategic analysis throughout various courses that include finance, marketing and operations.

Our graduates are working at some of the world’s most prestigious financial institutions, money management firms, corporate finance and treasury departments, consulting firms, and brokerage firms. In fact, approximately 25 percent of Tepper School MBAs accepted finance-related positions following graduation. Further, the Graduate Finance Association, which provides comprehensive mentoring, networking and education to Tepper School students, is the largest professional organization at the school.

Our finance faculty includes some of the most prominent members of the financial academic community, with success in the fields of international finance, financial management, corporate finance and economic research. Many serve on the editorial boards of leading finance journals. In addition, QuantNet ranked Carnegie Mellon’s MSCF program #1 in their ranking of the top master's programs in financial engineering, which provides further evidence of our breadth of knowledge in the field.

About David A. Tepper

Recognized as one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers, David A. Tepper is the president and founder of Appaloosa Management L.P. Formed in 1993 by Tepper and Jack Walton, a former portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs, Appaloosa is a $15 billion hedge fund investment firm based in Chatham, New Jersey. Appaloosa specializes in distressed debt found in public equity and fixed income markets around the world. The company invests on behalf of individuals, foundations, universities and other organizations.

Tepper’s interest in investments was peaked at an early age as he watched his father trade stocks in Pittsburgh. Today, Tepper has achieved an international reputation for producing exceptionally high returns among fund managers on Wall Street. He began to earn this reputation when he became the head trader on the high-yield desk at Goldman Sachs within six months of being hired in 1985. Tepper traded at Goldman for eight years prior to founding Appaloosa.

Tepper’s exceptional professional success is coupled with a strong sense of philanthropy. In 2004, he gave $55 million to Carnegie Mellon University to transform the Graduate School of Industrial Administration and rename it the Tepper School of Business. He also supports the school by serving on the Business Board of Advisors and as a life trustee of Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, Tepper serves on numerous other boards and committees for charitable and community organizations located in New York and New Jersey. He was instrumental in changing education tenure reform laws in New Jersey, through Better Education for Kids (B4K), the organization he co-founded.

Tepper was raised in the Stanton Heights neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He earned a bachelor of arts with honors in economics from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

This Tepper School award is offered to an outstanding incoming full-time MBA student. The fellowship has been established to honor Angel G. Jordan for his many contributions to Carnegie Mellon Univeristy as faculty, department head, dean, provost and good friend to the Tepper School of Business where he taught MBA courses during 1992-1999. There are no additional application steps for consideration of the fellowship. Applicants are reviewed during the admissions application process and notified of eligibility via the acceptance notification process.

This Tepper School award is offered to an outstanding incoming full-time MBA student. The fellowship is named in honor of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a former professor and international chairman at Carnegie Mellon University, French freedom fighter, French government official, and founder of the French news weekly, l'Express. There are no additional application steps for consideration for the fellowship. Applicants are reviewed during the admissions application process and notified of eligibility via the acceptance notification process.

The Murat Ozyegin Fellowship offers up to $30,000 to a qualified full-time Turkish student who demonstrates extreme need for the first year of the MBA program. Applicants must submit a one-page essay titled “Why I Should Receive the Murat Ozyegin Fellowship.”

Applicants will also need to submit a release statement giving the school permission to forward information from their admission application to an outside agency for scholarship consideration. Applicants are encouraged to submit their essay and release statement along with their admission application by late spring. Please forward the application materials via email to tepper-aid@andrew.cmu.edu or fax 412-268-2904.

The Tepper School of Business values the experience and leadership development that Teach for America and AmeriCorps provide to its members and awards related scholarships to alumni of these two U.S. federal programs who join the full-time MBA program.

All Corps alumni who apply to the Tepper School’s full-time MBA option receive an application fee waiver of $200. Additionally, Corps alumni who are accepted as full-time Tepper School of Business MBA students are eligible to receive at least a $10,000 Tepper School Teach for America or AmeriCorps Scholarship.

All admitted full-time MBA students who are Teach for America or AmeriCorps alumni are reviewed for the above Tepper School scholarship at the time of admission. A separate application is not required.

Scholarships are awarded to MSPM candidates who exhibit a high degree of potential for success in the program and their careers.

Partial scholarships may be awarded to all MSPM candidates. Candidates are considered for scholarship at the point of admission, are notified at the time of admission, and are not required to provide additional information, unless noted below. This applies to U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, and international candidates.

All MS in Product Management students are considered for a CMU MSPM Scholarship at the time of admission based on the overall strength of the admissions application. A separate scholarship application is not required. Students who receive a CMU MSPM Scholarship are advised when they are accepted for admission.