College Years: Giving Back While In School

Business students are always reminded of the importance of respecting stakeholders, being socially responsible and giving back to the community. Academic institutions represent one of the most important stakeholders in your life.

Regardless of your personal experience, you should consider making a tangible contribution to the school where you earned your degree. You may have wanted that scholarship, letter of recommendation or grade and did not get it at one point or another, but carrying personal beefs is trivial. Whatever you accomplish in the future has something to do with what school gave you.

While it is good to give back in the future, it is more important to give now. The problem with charitable contributions is that they seldom find their way to those that need it most. For this reason it is good to give back so you see the politics involved and how your donation (be it in time or money) trickles down to who needs it most.

Also as you can imagine, most recruiters like to see that you gave back when your own resources were thin. Anyone can give when they have the money and time to spare, but those who give when they need it most are worth keeping an eye out for.

Giving back can take various forms. Sun co-founder Scott McNealy named his firm Sun Microsystems after the Stanford University Network, a tribute to the school that gave him his MBA.

Bill Gates has always maintained that he intends to give away the vast majority of his enormous wealth to charity. Not to be outdone, his rival at Oracle, Larry Ellison is also a big time contributor to life sciences, especially to the fight against cancer. In May 2002, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it had several new stakes in companies, mainly in health related sectors.

Which brings up whether they spoke to Scott A. Jones. You may not know who he is, despite the fact that you have used voice mail or listened to an MP3 file. Scott A. Jones is the holder of many of the patents that will shape our lives in the decades to come. The companies that he has helped shape and grow have all contributed significantly to the technological landscape around the world. In 1986, Jones co-founded and chaired Boston Technology, Inc. until 1992. Employing his patented voice-messaging technology, Boston Technology, Inc. became very successful and later merged with Comverse Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed firm. The offspring of this merger was a multi-billion-dollar company whose products are used by the majority of telephone companies throughout the world. That was the 1980s. More recently, while the music labels are having a miserable time developing a standard for online music distribution, Jones has developed Gracenote, the technology that allows MP3 players to read information and operate in a more user-friendly fashion.

When asked what would follow the telephone, television, computer and World Wide Web, he answered after a brief pause, "life sciences generally and genomics specifically."

Despite all of this past success and vision throughout, Jones has also not forgotten his roots. He is Chairman of the Indiana Technology Partnership, Chairman of the Gazelle Fund, Chairman of GrowIndiana Media Ventures, and a director on the boards of the state-funded 21st Century Fund and the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership. Through such activities, he plans to establish Indiana as a nationally recognized high-technology region.

The lesson is that while it is important to give, you should also spread the wealth to those that did not play a role in your development. Canadian high-tech pioneer Ted Rogers has built quite an impressive media empire. He not only gave $25 million to the University of Toronto in 2000, he then gave an additional $12.5 to rival Ryerson University. Talk about spreading the wealth.

But don't think that you can only contribute with your wallet, there are other ways.