by Tamara Durham
Counseling and Advising
Howard Borkan, CALS ’81, and his brother Michael, ILR ’79, have recently established an endowment in memory of their grandparents, Abraham and Henrietta Brettschneider. The Brettschneider Fund will foster an international undergraduate exchange between CALS and the Birmingham Business School at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The fund supports the CALS-Birmingham exchange by providing travel scholarships for students participating in the program.
photo/provided
University House at the center of England's Birmingham Business School campus. The Brettschneider Fund will help send AEM students to study in England.
Born out of longstanding and informal relationships with a few foreign institutions, the CALS Exchange has evolved into a comprehensive and growing program that has agreements with over 20 prestigious universities around the world. The exchange has developed under the supervision of Bonnie Shelley, associate director of the Counseling and Advising Office and the Study Abroad and CALS Exchange Coordinator. Soon after coming to CALS, Shelley recognized and seized upon the potential to cultivate a unique international education experience for CALS undergraduates. She began working with faculty to develop foreign exchange agreements. Shelley believes that it’s important for CALS students to have study-abroad options that will be new and exciting while also allowing them the opportunity to fulfill academic requirements. She says, “That’s why our exchange agreements are developed with the special needs of CALS students in mind.”
The Birmingham Business School is continually regarded as one of the best business schools in Europe. The Financial Times selected Birmingham — one of only 15 British institutions — on its list of the world’s 100 best business schools; the Economist Intelligence Unit also named Birmingham to their global list of top 50 MBA programs. This distinction makes Birmingham an excellent exchange partner for CALS-AEM. It also makes Birmingham an outstanding study-abroad choice for CALS students majoring in applied economics and management (AEM).
The AEM major, also known as Cornell’s Undergraduate Business Program, is one of only two Ivy League undergraduate business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). The U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges 2007 ranked the CALS-AEM program 11th in its list of the nation’s best undergraduate business programs.
The Brettschneider funds are typically awarded to four students per year, two of them AEM students selected by CALS and two of them Birmingham students selected by the Birmingham Business School. For more information, please contact Bonnie Shelley at brs9@cornell.edu or visit the CALS exchange program website