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.cs-grc.com 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.