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ALUMNUS
Alan Chamberlain (’82, ’94 M.B.A.)
Alan Chamberlain, the middle of five children, moved with his family to Denton after his father, a minister, took on a church in south Denton.
He learned the roofing trade in Oklahoma, working while he was a student at Bethany Nazarene College, now Southern Nazarene University. After two years there, he decided to return home and enrolled at then-North Texas State University. A friend of his transferred to North Texas at the same time and, both of them having histories in roofing, they decided they would never roof again. However, after several attempts to find other work that paid well fell through, the two jointly picked up the trade again.
Denton Trinity Roofing was launched in 1980 while Chamberlain was enrolled in business at North Texas. He completed his undergraduate degree in December 1982.
Chamberlain married his wife, Linda, in 1985, and she began working at Denton Trinity Roofing, answering phones, computerizing the office and paying bills on time. In 1990, Chamberlain and his then-business partner were coincidentally each expecting their first child. Thinking that the business would not be able to support both growing families, the partners looked for other jobs and agreed that whoever found a new one first could leave and the other would continue to run Denton Trinity Roofing.
With some reluctance, Chamberlain became that sole owner. A child on the way and a business to run all on his own, Chamberlain realized there was an additional challenge he wanted to tackle: another degree.
“I started talking like a roofer, and I started thinking like a roofer,” Chamberlain says. “And that’s not a positive thing. And I just thought, ‘I need more in my life.’”
After talking to his wife about the prospect of going back to school while their family and business expanded, he made the decision to embark on his MBA journey at UNT, completing his graduate degree over the course of four-and-a-half years.
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Published by UNT Alumni Association, 2022
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ALUMNUS
Christopher Graves ('08)
You could say Christopher Graves' love of race cars is in his DNA, passed to him from his father and grandfather before him.
Trips to the raceway have been a family affair for years. From the time he could walk, and perhaps even before that, Graves accompanied his grandfather to the races.
“I’m very passionate about drag racing,” Graves says. “It was a hobby to [my dad and grandfather], but I was like, ‘I’ve got to find a way to make a living in this, one way or another.’”
And Graves did exactly that. Twice. First, with a successful drag racing photography business for two decades, and now with the popular racing competition tour called Funny Car Chaos.
Before that, however, Graves made a pit stop at the University of North Texas, majoring in General Studies, now known as Integrative Studies, with concentrations in business, sociology and psychology.
“If you can pick the classes you’re interested in, you tend to go to class more often,” Graves says. “So, I was really interested in learning about business, but didn’t want to go super far into it, because I kind of knew, ‘I’m going to be in the drag racing industry,’ but I wanted to get a business education and also a people education.”
Graves says one class in particular had a significant impact on the trajectory of his career, that being an entrepreneurship course through the College of Business. He recalls a lecture about the strategy behind naming a business, and how it needs to “catch the eye and make people remember.”
“I named my business Max Cackle Photography, and I named it in class that day,” Graves says. “Cackle is a term used in drag racing for nitro cars because the noise they make sounds like a cackle. And for the next 15 years, everyone knew Max Cackle.”
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Published by UNT Alumni Association, June 2022
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The Deloitte Foundation is helping UNT accounting students break down barriers and reach their potential.
UNT Accounting has been selected to participate in the Deloitte Foundation Accounting Scholars Program (DFASP), which will help support at least ten students in the 2023-2024 program year.
DFASP was founded as part of Deloitte’s commitment to make accounting more diverse and equitable under its MADE (Making Accounting Diverse and Equitable) initiative, which aims to increase representation of racially and ethnically diverse students in accounting programs, nationwide, by funding $30 million in scholarships over the next six years. Scholarships will be distributed to deserving accounting students pursuing a fifth-year master’s degree.
Currently, only seven other universities have been selected by Deloitte to participate in this transformative program.
“Such a collaboration with Deloitte will bring much positive visibility to UNT Accounting and will be terrific for the future of our accounting program and our students,” said Don and Donna Millican Chair in Accounting Dr. Ananth Seetharaman.
As a scholarship recipient, Deloitte will assist with 75% of students’ tuition, excluding books and living expenses.
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Assistant Professor Zinat Alam receives "Best Paper Award" for compensation disclosure research
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Assistant Professor Zinat Alam received this year’s FMA European Conference Best Paper award, for her work titled: “Do firms' disclosure choices conform to social attitudes? Evidence from the CEO pay ratio estimation.”
“Receiving a best paper award gives a validation from the academic community that the paper is interesting, relevant and timely. It also helps targeting the journals that are best suitable to publish the research,” said Alam.
Under SEC rule, a public company is required to disclose the pay ratio of its CEO to the median compensation of its employees. While the rule intends to provide valuable company insight to shareholders, companies have flexibility in how they calculate those ratios.
Alam’s research focused on examining the pay estimation process as it relates to social attitudes.
“Our research highlights the importance of understanding the disclosure rules and the impact these rules have on the pay estimation process,” explained Alam. “Our results show that firms make disclosure decisions that respond to local social attitudes toward income inequality. More specifically, firms are more likely to choose complex methods, and hence disclose a lower pay ratio, when their headquarter states exhibit stronger income inequality aversion and when the CEO has higher pay or reputation concerns.”
Furthermore, Alam’s research found no evidence of companies making actual changes to pay disparities because of the disclosure ruling.
All papers that were presented at the FMA European Conference were entered to win a “Best Paper” award, but only three researchers were deemed this year’s winners, with Alam’s paper being the only one in the “Corporate Finance” category.
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Dr. Hoda Vaziri honored with 2022 Award for Responsible Research in Management
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Dr. Hoda Vaziri, assistant professor of management at the G. Brint Ryan College of Business, has taken home the 2022 Award for Responsible Research in Management. The award is co-sponsored by Fellows of the Academy of Management and the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM).
“It is an honor to win this award. It is particularly meaningful because it provides an external validation (being selected by company executives) that our research matters and has a great potential to impact business practices and improve employees’ work-life balance,” said Vaziri.
Vaziri’s research, titled “Changes to the work–family interface during the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining predictors and implications using latent transition analysis,” helped develop “best practices” for organizations to adopt during the pandemic, to better serve employees and increase job satisfaction and work-life balance.
Published in The Journal of Applied Psychology, a Financial Times' top 50 journal, the research “identifies best practices that can be implemented by organizations both prior to and during a crisis, including training, recognizing and rewarding compassionate supervisor behavior, and adopting and training employees on new technologies that support remote work.”
The Responsible Research in Management Award substantiates the importance of Vaziri’s findings relating to one of the most life-altering events of the current workforce, COVID-19. Out of one hundred and twenty scholarly publications Vaziri was one of eight winners identified from a thorough two-stage review process.
According to the RRBM, the winning works “exemplify the principles of responsible research, strive for broad and significant societal benefits, and will leave the world a better place by informing policy, improving practice, and advancing theory.”
Vaziri is continuing to explore other ways to better understand work-family dynamics and examine what employees (and organizations) can do to improve their experience and well-being.
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Looking Forward, Giving Back
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You might say Devin Miles is an old soul. He’s a college junior whose inspiration is a 92-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist.
“The reason I chose to study accounting is Warren Buffett,” said Miles. “My interest in equities started at 17, and it’s been one of my hobbies ever since. Every business needs an accountant.”
Another example where Miles showed wisdom beyond his years? An admission he wasn’t performing up to his academic potential.
“I needed some tough love,” recalled Miles of the place he found himself 18 months ago. His “aha moment” came during a conversation with an academic mentor at UNT.
“While we were discussing my goals for the upcoming year, my mentor asked if I had heard about the Professional Leadership Program (PLP) and encouraged me to apply, so I did,” said Miles.
The PLP began in 1994 to help UNT business students develop leadership skills, recognize the importance of volunteerism and build their professional networks through mentor relationships.
“The program really stretches our students in encouraging their growth and development,” said Jose Grimaldo, executive director of the PLP. “Each year, I empower the group with this phrase: ‘Over the next year, you will learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.’ They quickly understand what that means.”
Regions Bank in Dallas has worked with UNT’s PLP during the past two years, most recently supporting the program’s End of Year Celebration in May. Perhaps even more valuable are the career exploration discussion and mentorship provided by bank associates.
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Published by Kim Borges, Regions Bank, June 2022
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Murphy Center invites bold ideas to take the stage
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The Murphy Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, in partnership with Look Out For Everybody (LOFE), is offering students a unique opportunity to be bold this semester.
Throughout the month of September, students are invited to submit their winning ideas as part of the newly founded Bold Ideas Competition.
All UNT students, regardless of major, are asked to pitch their solutions for electricity and packaging waste. Up to five finalists will then be selected to hone their message and prepare for the main live-audience event on October 13, where they will compete for a grand prize of $500.
Everyone is welcome to attend the final presentations, where giveaways, music, and bold ideas will take center stage. Join us in the UNT Lyceum on October 13.
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UNT alumni draw national attention with strong first showing at The Basketball Tournament
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Bleed Green, a team of University of North Texas basketball alumni recently made their debut competing in The Basketball Tournament (TBT), a single-elimination tournament played each summer. A total of 64 teams, which included more than 70 former NBA players, competed for $1,000,000 in prize money.
The team of past and present Mean Green basketball players brought their best to the court, winning their first two games. Their third game was a close call, narrowly losing 70-69 to the team called Aftershock.
Bleed Green’s impressive inaugural effort in TBT already secured the team a spot on next year’s roster.
The task of organizing the team was spearheaded by UNT alumni J.J. Murray (’21), pictured right, and D.J. Draper (’19, ’20 M.B.A.), pictured left. Murray had expressed interest in TBT a couple years ago, but with him and Draper both being students and actively playing for UNT at the time, it couldn’t work.
But this past spring, everything began falling into place.
“As soon as [Murray] graduated this year, he reached out to me and just said, ‘hey, I think this is a good time to put a team together because we’ve got some momentum,’” Draper says.
Murray, who is working toward an M.B.A. in Supply Chain Management in UNT’s G. Brint Ryan College of Business, said he wanted to build a competitive TBT team to increase the sense of national pride in UNT.
“We just appreciate the experience we had at UNT and we feel indebted to the university,” Murray says. “We have a pride that we feel is undervalued and underappreciated on a national level and we think that this opportunity, and knowing the caliber of schools in this tournament, we feel like our university should be seen in that same light.”
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Published by UNT Alumni Association, 2022
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PHILANTHROPIC OPPORTUNITIES AT THE RYAN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
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THE WILSON JONES ENDOWMENT FOR RYAN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS CAREER SUPPORT SERVICES
Alumnus Wilson Jones (’85) and his wife, Jane, donated $5 million to the college earlier this year to create a new career center in the G. Brint Ryan College of Business. This generous gift will not only go towards the build out of a space that will serve to better prepare students for successful careers, but it will also fund the hiring of new staff and resources to support the college's growing student body. Working in conjunction with this gift, the Wilson Jones Endowment for Ryan College of Business Career Support Services will provide additional assistance to reach these goals and support services that promote career readiness.
G. BRINT RYAN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS DEAN'S EXCELLENCE FUND
The Dean’s Excellence Fund also provides immediate, essential support to our students. This fund serves as a vital resource to help our students and campus respond to opportunities and challenges as they occur. When you support the Dean’s Excellence Fund, you support the strategic vision of the college by allowing the Dean to have flexibility in directing the use of resources to the priorities of the college during this difficult time.
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G. BRINT RYAN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS SUPPORT FUND
Frank Dudowicz was an ardent supporter of the G. Brint Ryan College of Business. Before he passed away on May 1, 2022, one of his final requests was to have memorials be made to the Ryan College of Business Communications Support Fund, a testament to his ongoing efforts to be a positive force in the UNT community. Donations made to the Communications Support Fund aid Dudowicz’s most recent board efforts to increase brand awareness for the Ryan College of Business. Click here to honor Frank's memory with a gift. |
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