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Alumni in Action

Business Casual: January 2025

An informal but informative newsletter for WSB alumni and friends

By Wisconsin School of Business

January 27, 2025

Maxwell Bracey posing with scuba gear
As part of his nonprofit organization, DiverSeaFy, Maxwell Bracey (BBA ’12) encourages students to explore careers in sustainability and conservation. Are you interested in exploring career pathways in these growing fields? Register today for Planet, People, Profit: Careers in Corporate Sustainability, a virtual event on February 25 hosted by WSB and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW–Madison. See 'Alumni Opportunities' section to register. Photo by Jim Newberry

The Briefing

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WSB alum Katie Lorenz shares lessons learned in entrepreneurship
Build a foundation of trust. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Remember the ‘why.’ These are just a few of the lessons that Katie Lorenz (BBA ’12) has learned on her entrepreneurial journey. As the founder of Campo Alpaca, a fair-trade apparel company that works with Peruvian artisans, Lorenz continues to scale her business and create positive change with her alpaca-inspired products (many of which are Wisconsin themed!).

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Students practice Agile project management using Legos
Led by WSB’s Peter Commons, students applied the Agile project management methodology, which is gaining steam across the business landscape, to build a fictional city out of Lego bricks. The exercise mimicked an authentic project management process and allowed students to experience the pressures and constraints of working with large teams and managing clients.

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Full circle support through WSB’s Career Engagement Studio
UW–Madison has over 15 career services offices that help guide students from classroom to career. This includes WSB’s Career Engagement Studio, which Alisha Kulkarni (BBA ’24) initially sought out as a first-year student to get feedback on her résumé. She also used the center’s support to land a job-shadowing opportunity and practice interview skills, and later found herself helping other students as a career peer advisor.


The Ticker

  • Gold stars on global engagement: See why UW–Madison was recently ranked #8 for study abroad participation and #18 for international student enrollment.
  • Getting acquainted with AI: During a hands-on workshop, artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur Ishan Anand presented his approach to making large language models more accessible to WSB graduate students.
  • The finances of health care: Wisconsin Public Radio recently featured insights on hospital revenue challenges from WSB’s Stuart Craig. Professor Craig’s research on hospital mergers as a way of measuring the impacts of rising health care costs is also featured in the latest issue of Update magazine.
  • Top-notch teaching: Professors Aziza Jones (BBA ’13) and Moses Altsech were named among Poets and Quants’ 2024 Best Undergraduate Professors.
  • Rising in research: UW–Madison is now #6 in a national research ranking—up two spots from last year.

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Back to School

Help us Showcase 125 Things to Love About WSB

This year, the Wisconsin School of Business is celebrating its 125th anniversary—and we want you to join in on the fun! Tell us what you love about WSB for a chance to be featured in our anniversary issue of Update magazine, which publishes in October 2025. Need some inspiration? Here are just a few examples from alumni and friends like you:

  • “Talking with and taking a class from Professor Jim Graaskamp (PhD ’65).” —Steve Stiloski (BS ’87, MS ’89)
  • “The social connections made by studying in the library or hanging out in the lobby of Grainger.” —Logan Rosenthal (BBA ’00)
  • “The fact that WSB is held in such high regard around the world.” —Melanie Swanson (MBA ’11)

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Tip Sheet

Where’s Your Ikigai?

As part of WSB’s M. Keith Weikel MBA Leadership Speaker Series, Alice Ferris (BA ’91, MBA ’94), the founding partner of GoalBusters Consulting, discussed the concept of ikigai: a Japanese philosophy for discovering your purpose. In ikigai, there are four main areas that make up your life purpose: what you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be rewarded for. Ikigai, and a person’s life purpose, lies where all four of these areas intersect.

Check out Ferris’ three strategies for finding your own ikigai:

  1. Do something: Ferris urges people to take the pressure off themselves and take the leap to begin this journey. “Sometimes it just takes some experimentation, because there will be those things that you don’t know you’re good at yet until you try to do it.”
  2. Embrace failures as lessons: “It’s the ‘you’ experiment. And there will be a lot of things that go wrong.” She encourages those seeking ikigai to find the humility to learn from their mistakes—despite how difficult that may be—and use them to guide their future steps.
  3. Don’t worry about passion (yet): While being passionate about what you do is important, Ferris argues that it shouldn’t be your primary focus. Instead of starting with passion, she advises people to start with what they’re good at and go from there. “What you love to do comes last, because you may discover something that you’re good at that you learn to love.”

Alumni Opportunities

February 18: Attention Bay Area Badgers! You’re invited to WSB in the Bay Area: A Conversation on Innovation, Starting Up, and Starting Over.

February 25: Join us for Planet, People, Profit: Careers in Corporate Sustainability, a virtual event at 5:30 p.m. CST hosted by WSB and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW–Madison.

April 8–9: Save the date for UW–Madison’s annual day of giving, Day of the Badger, to support experiential learning at WSB!

Share the love: WSB is celebrating its 125th anniversary—and we want to know what you love about our school! Your submission might be featured in a future publication or other WSB communication channels.

Recognize excellence and impact: Honor a deserving individual by nominating them for a 2025 WSB alumni award.

What’s new?: Submit a Class Note to share life and career updates with fellow alumni in Update magazine.

Get connected: Network with other Business Badgers and gain access to exclusive resources by joining the Wisconsin Business Alumni LinkedIn group.


About Business Casual

Every other month, alumni and friends of the Wisconsin School of Business will receive insider updates with news about our alumni, faculty, students, and programs. If you want to share Business Casual with friends, they can sign up at go.wisc.edu/wsb-biz-cas.

Questions or comments? Email businesscasual@wsb.wi


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