Students

Many students graduate from the Costello College of Business at George Mason University with bold plans to start their own companies. Bethany Rivera and Alex Tugbang, both undergraduate marketing students and classmates in Jiyeon Hong’s marketing course, had already launched their respective businesses Rivera’s Photography and Photuggraphy prior to enrolling.

The Class of 2024 graduated into a relatively challenging labor market. Jackie Brown, assistant professor in the Business Foundations area at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, said recent grads should be leaning a little harder into core professional skills, such as networking.

When Joonhyuck Lee had to choose between going to college in Korea or taking a gap year, he decided that the study-abroad track would be much more beneficial than attending a local Korean university.

When hearing the term “sustainability” in business circles, there’s often a misconception that it hinders growth. For the last three years, the MBA elective course Environmentally Sustainable Operations has offered interested graduate students from across George Mason University the opportunity to work with companies from multiple industries on making the business case for sustainability.

After two years of studying management and marketing at the Costello College of Business and the Honors College at George Mason University, Rakibul Alam’s academic credits have put him a semester ahead of schedule.

George Mason researchers Nirup Menon and Brian Ngac recently won a two-year award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, to create unique experiential learning opportunities and workshops designed to enhance cybersecurity education and workforce development.

Business major Lucy Hong is finishing her first semester at the Fairfax Campus this spring, part of a two-semester sequence in Fairfax that all Mason Korea students include in their four-year plan. She plans to graduate this winter.

Led by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) within the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, the Patriot Pitch Competition supports early-stage business ventures and ideas from Mason students and recent alumni. On April 11, the finalists made their final pitches on the Fairfax Campus. 

The students’ trip to the headquarters showed them how they could apply what they have learned in the classrooms as future professionals, whether it be at the SEC or elsewhere.

Co-founded in 2018 by Trevor Montano, BS Accounting ’00, and Derek Horstmeyer, a professor of finance at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, the Montano Student Investment Fund (SMIF) is an all-equity investment fund administered by finance students at the Costello College of Business.