A reenergized Corporate Advisory Board is better serving the MBA experience

The Mendoza Corporate Advisory Board (CAB) is undergoing a transformation. It is still a board of alumni from a range of industries and geographies who volunteer their time to empower MBA candidates to achieve lasting career impact. Board members still leverage their networks, their expertise and their positions within their companies. What is transforming is how and when the board is activated in order to deepen that impact and maximize Mendoza’s network. “We have CAB members who are committed and supportive and ready and willing to help, but there was some conversation around how maybe we were not utilizing the board’s full potential,” said Christina Frank-Lieberg, director of external engagement at Mendoza. “It's really about aligning the CAB’s cadence with the student experience.” The MBA journey, like nearly everything else related to the business world, is changing rapidly. The recruiting cycle is faster and more intense. Industries are more globalized and with technological advancements, opportunities are closer than one might realize, so long as they know where to look. 

“As Mendoza [made changes to the MBA program], it also meant looking at ourselves to reflect that and consider how to best interact with the students and help them,” said CAB co-chair Kevin Lange (MBA ’15), senior manager at EY in Tampa. In order to align with the evolving MBA experience, CAB now meets on campus to connect with students earlier in the semester and the board has expanded its mentorship program so that it’s not so one-size-fits-all but instead addresses each individual’s specific needs. “We're trying to become experts on the student experience and meet the students where they are while supporting the program as it goes through its reconstruction and finds new focus,” said Robbie Singley (MBA ’19), CAB co-chair and product manager at Cisco Systems in San Francisco. Lange and Singley are leading the program’s redesign by partnering more closely with those who stand to benefit the most from CAB: the students. “The power rests with the students,” Singley said. “They have things that they need to do to succeed and we're here to help augment that or fill in the gaps where needed, but it's up to the students to decide the type of experience that they want to have.” Two students, Katie Wiggin (MBA ’26) and Pablo Elizondo (MBA ’26), have been especially proactive in leveraging the CAB community and bridging the gap between the board and their classmates. As a first-year MBA student, Wiggin attended a CAB panel and was surprised that only a handful of other students were there. “I thought, ‘These are people with powerful positions in corporate America.’ It just seemed like a no brainer to attend the event,” she recalled. “But there was no marketing for it.” Wiggin saw an opportunity to change that when she was elected vice president of alumni relations for the Notre Dame MBA Association (MBAA). She updated the criteria of the position to include working with the board and used WhatsApp to invite all of her classmates to the next panel, which she moderated. By her second year, Wiggin and Frank-Lieberg were utilizing the school’s marketing team to create flyers and send emails to promote CAB. Meanwhile, Elizondo was elected to the MBAA as the VP of career development and joined Wiggin in surveying their classmates to learn how the board could most benefit them. For example, some students expressed more interest in developing interview skills while others wanted to learn how to network in general. “At the end of the day, both the Corporate Advisory Board and the students want the best outcomes,” said Elizondo, who presented the student survey results alongside Wiggin at the fall ’25 CAB meeting. “So for us it was really about, how can students leverage these resources and contacts for their specific needs?” To help meet more specific needs, the board launched mentorship pods, which comprise a small cohort of students with similar goals who are matched with a relevant CAB member. From there, it’s in the students’ hands to build a one-on-one relationship with that member. “The goal that we're trying to get to is more transparency, more access to us,” said Lange. “Students might not know that they can reach out or when they should reach out or how they should reach out.” Both Wiggin and Elizondo agree that initiating a relationship can be extremely intimidating for some students, but that the mentorship pods have really helped to ease that intimidation. They also both know first-hand the power of the CAB network. Wiggin landed a position at PwC thanks to networking with former CAB chair John Potter (BBA ’96) who is a partner there. Elizondo, who came to Mendoza to pivot to the financial services industry, sought out prior CAB member Jake Frego (MBA ’87) due to his long career as an executive at Bank of America. While the changes already implemented have proved promising, Lange and Singley agree that there is still a lot of potential to grow CAB in the future. One priority is to create a knowledge reservoir so that board members and students have access to what worked and didn’t work in previous years. Another goal is to engage Mendoza faculty. “We're very tactical and hands-on right now because we understand that's what the program needs, but there is that advisory capacity,” said Singley. “The faculty are the subject matter experts, but we want to share how the business world is moving in our respective industries.” He and Lange envision board members exchanging information with professors and potentially advising on the more experiential elements of course curriculum based on their industry knowledge. Frank-Lieberg shares this vision and believes that opportunities for alumni to engage with the curriculum will only draw more interest in joining the CAB. Plus, faculty engagement would more fully integrate the CAB into the Mendoza ecosystem. “I wish we interacted with faculty more because I know they interact with students so often,” added Lange. The CAB is also committed to promoting lifelong career growth for Mendoza graduates and to serve as an anchor to Notre Dame’s broader mission to “grow the good in business.” Both Lange and Singely believe that by forging these relationships on campus, students and alumni will continue to reap positive benefits in the future. “We hope to be the beginning of their professional network or an extension of their professional network,” said Singely. “If they're finding value in that, we hope that relationship continues on for the rest of their career.”