President Peter Salovey on SOM’s Connection to Yale

Peter Salovey, president of Yale University and the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, welcomed incoming MBA and MAM students to the Yale community on August 18 during SOM’s weeklong orientation program. Salovey remarked on the great diversity and global reach of the incoming students and encouraged them to take advantage of the unique opportunities that SOM and Yale offer.

Dean Snyder wants to strive to have SOM be the business school most integrated with its home university, the eminent and purposeful Yale. This is, to me, exactly the right aspiration, the right vision, for a business school in a university that has the special properties of Yale. What are those? One, we have enormous scope—12 professional schools, 53 departments in the arts and sciences offering the PhD, close to 80 undergraduate majors… But we don’t have great expanses of students. We are small. We have this enormous scope, but we have modest scale, and what that allows is a more unified Yale. It allows us to leverage each other’s talents, perspective, and resources. And you will see this every day, because SOM is able to harness what’s going on in the rest of the university, and the rest of the university is able to harness what’s going on in SOM to the mutual advantage of the students across this place. You have the opportunity to feel you are part of a school, but you are also part of a university, and you will have a lot of relationships reflecting both of those levels.

I am proud that SOM, under Dean Snyder’s leadership, has really exemplified this by reaching out and creating joint-degree programs with so many other parts of Yale. About 50 of you in this class are pursuing joint degrees. It is very much in the Yale DNA that this place is collaborative, and that will impact you, because you will go on to careers in the business world, in the public sector, but also perhaps in the arts or in environmental studies…in architecture, in almost any imaginable discipline. And your experience here at SOM—because it is an experience at Yale University—will embolden you to move in those directions.