The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/456562
news from HIGGINS HOUSE On his arrival at WPI, he recalls that one of the initial hurdles was to set the university's business program apart from the crowd. "We needed to come up with an identity," Gerstenfeld says. "The president at the time and the dean and I all wanted it to be a differ- ent sort of business school. This was WPI. We weren't going to try to be a BU, or a Northeast- ern, but be a business school that relied on technology a lot. There's not a business that's not technology-driven in some way." Another early challenge was some initial hesitancy at WPI to form its now internation- ally regarded MBA program, which the profes- sor said drew opposition "because some folks were concerned that it was moving away from technology too much, but I felt we could have an MBA program that also focused on technol- ogy. That's turned out to be a very big and suc- cessful program." As the program has grown, Gerstenfeld has noticed an increasing number of mid-career students looking to come back to school to refresh or acquire technological savvy, or folks with undergrad technology degrees looking to learn how to manage effectively. "Although, we don't care—they could be Eng- lish majors," he says. "They'll get a pretty heavy dose of computer expertise while they're here." What students also get from Gerstenfeld is instruction in what experts might call "work- life balance," and which clearly stems from his love of life itself. With Gerstenfeld as head of WPI's Wall Street Project Center for the past 15 years, his stu- dents have undertaken intense study with some of the world's foremost fnancial institu- tions (Bank of America, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, among others) to complete their MQP while studying and working in New York, London, and Glasgow. Alumni, students, facul- ty, and friends celebrated Gerstenfeld and his work with the Wall Street Project Center at a special reception in New York on Dec. 10. While the students' access to fnancial profes- sionals at some of the most desirable compa- nies in the fnancial sector is wonderful, equal- ly important is the opportunity to get out and see the world, which is why Gerstenfeld insists on a cultural component to the experience. "I tell them they have to do at least three cul- tural things each weekend," he says (with a smile, conceding how much he enjoys assign- ing this task). "They can work fve days a week, but on the weekends they need to get out and experience the culture. And every week they need to send me a report outlining what they saw." With evident pleasure, he shares a recent re- port from a student working for JP Morgan in Glasgow, who wrote about taking the train down to London during a rainy weekend in early November to visit friends. While the weekend was not momentous, it did include details that illustrated how the student was doing more than crunching numbers in a Scottish offce building. "See here," Gerstenfeld notes, "he writes about having an assigned seat on the train, which is different from Amtrak, and how clean everything was. "The report also includes the student's im- pressions of a football [soccer] match at Emir- ates Stadium, where Arsenal and Manchester United play, and then a perhaps unexpected observation about how Americans are viewed, at least in this little corner of London, during this weekend in November 2014: He was talk- ing to a woman who said that she liked how straightforward Americans are. She said 'Amer- icans are nice.'" Not exactly an epiphany, but life is in the de- tails—something Gerstenfeld later demon- strates while examining one of the many ex- amples of beautiful, handmade African art that adorn his offce, collected over the years during his many trips to Namibia, where WPI has strong ties and where he worked on that coun- try's air traffc control system. Retirement looms in a fuzzy background that comes ever clearer into focus as the school year progresses, but as with all creative, intelli- gent people driven by the best stuff in life, that retirement will not be spent idly. For sure, there will be more time to spend with his wife, Susan Vernon Gerstenfeld, her- self a professor at WPI, or doting on grandkids, or continuing to advise students at WPI. But there's always the next project, the next hurdle to leap over. Gerstenfeld plans to mix his love of music— he's a clarinetist and saxophonist—with a desire to help English language learners. In recent years he devised a program to use music in ESL (English as a Second Language) in- struction. Taught currently to adults looking to hone weak or burgeoning English skills, the program has proven popular, and he plans to expand it further. It's another project in a life that has been a project in itself, to show how a good life can be lived. "I'm a lifelong learner," Gerstenfeld says, smiling. "Things are going to change, change, change. We need to be learning. Always." — Ted Flanagan Winter 2015 57