Juan Sebastian Hoyos, who plans to resume his studies in international business and management in the College of Business Administration as a senior in the spring, wants to change the way people order from restaurants. During an internship at a start-up marketing company, he handled finances, did record keeping, and then moved into sales. He also was charged with another responsibility: getting lunch.

“We had a few menus on hand and, being located in South Beach, we had lots of choices, but still it wasn’t easy when people wanted something different,” he said.

That’s when the idea for Menu King (www.menuking.com) began to take shape. The site makes it easy for people to find restaurants, view menus, and even get directions.

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With eleven years of Army experience to her credit, Erica Courtney, the first woman selected as scout helicopter commander in her unit at Fort Drum, could have slipped easily into an administrative position. Within another nine years, she could have looked forward to a comfortable pension. Instead, she opted to leave the Army and prepare herself to start her own company—possibly a helicopter transport business.

“I wanted to see if I could reinvent myself,” said Courtney, who also wanted to spend more time with her two young sons and her husband. They met in flight school at Fort Rucker in Alabama and he now is a rescue pilot based in Miami.

Her first step is to complete a master’s degree—the Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) in the College’s Chapman Graduate School—even though her Army experience had already led to six-figure job offers.

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Have you ever based a purchase decision on a price comparison in the store? Or wondered if the products that weren’t marked were more expensive?

Shazad Mustapha Mohammed (BBA ’99), who majored in international business and marketing in the College of Business Administration and now is a doctoral candidate in marketing, has brought scholarly attention to the question. And his explorations brought him to the attention of the judges for the 2005 Doctoral Dissertation Competition, sponsored by the Fordham University Pricing Center.

Five pricing researchers judged dissertation proposals from entrants from all over the world and leading universities in the United States. The 2005 panel awarded Mohammed first prize. The distinction carried a $1,000 cash prize and gave him the opportunity to present his dissertation proposal—“An Examination of Within-Category Effects Versus Across-Category Effects of Partially Comparative Pricing”—at a conference this November at the Fordham University Pricing Center.

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What do Knorr Soups and Lourdes Figueroa (BBA ’85) have in common?

Both had a great product but a false start in the market.

“In a marketing class in the College of Business Administration, we looked at a case study about Knorr Soups—a powdered product that was a huge seller in Europe but was doing very poorly in the United States,” she said. “Then, the company discovered through a housewife that when the soup was mixed with sour cream, it made a great dip. Instead of having to pull it from the market, they repackaged it as a condiment.”

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“I started out in computer engineering, but I found it extremely technical and dull,” said Alex Hernandez (BBA ’05). “I always understood business and how it works and I wanted to be able to integrate business and technology. I think that many people in computer science are focused on the technical and have no business knowledge. And the opposite is also true.”

He found the answer to his quest for an integrated approach in his undergraduate work at in the College of Business Administration, from which he graduated with a major in MIS and a minor in computer science. His parents also are both graduates of Florida International University: his mother with a degree in political science and his father with a degree from the College of Business Administration.

Hernandez is a success story in a difficult and highly competitive field.

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In the past few months, Maria Andrea Castro (MSF/IMBA ’05), has completed two degrees in the College of Business Administration and landed a new job. Along with several other students, she took advantage of the joint degree offerings in the Chapman Graduate School of Business, earning a Master of Science in Finance (MSF) and an International Master of Business Administration (IMBA) in a mere two years.

“At the end of the IMBA, we had the opportunity to choose electives,” said Castro, who now is working for a start-up hedge fund that’s a new venture of GP Asset Management, LLC, a Miami-based company that advises high net worth families in Miami and Latin America. “When I started choosing, I was selecting courses in finance. I realized with one more elective I could get a banking certificate and with just six more courses I could get two degrees in two years.”

Castro had earned her undergraduate degree from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, had studied at Indiana University of Pennsylvania as part of a study abroad, and had worked in Colombia for BP, as well as for a publishing company in Miami that targeted the Hispanic market. When she decided to go to graduate school, she said chose Florida International University over University of Miami for a number of reasons.

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