From the dean >
BBA program soars >
Bonding on the slopes >
Meet the professor >
Inquiring minds >
Alumni, faculty maintain worldwide connections >
Making diversity count >
Program spurs entrepreneur >
GMSC presentations >
Building alliances >
What ever happened to...>
In the news >
Doctoral student "inspires" >
Kudos >
K@Emory celebrates fifth year >
New faculty releases >
Park project aid city of Atlanta >
BBAs mine information gold >
Real deal on work/life balance >


Real estate careers >


Alumni news >
Mentors meet ‘mentees’ >
First international board >
2006 class gifts >
Muta Issa ’04EMBA >
Class Notes >
Igor Saveliev ’94MBA >
WEMBA class endows
nonprofit scholarship
>
Marc Forest ’85BBA >
Intercontinental Hotels Group >
Remembering
Bart Herbert ’92EMBA >

Library fills research gap >
Art and business merge
at Goizueta>


Archived issues >

 


Park project to aid city of Atlanta

Michael Sacks wanted to try a different approach this year for the final project in his MBA Introduction to Leadership class. Rather than broadly analyze a diverse range of organizations, Sacks, assistant professor of organization and management, decided the class should design a specific project for an organization that could truly implement the class’s findings.

The project? A first-ever assessment of the city of Atlanta’s parks. With funding from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the students would apply several of the skills they’d learned in their core classes, including data collection and analysis—but with a twist. “It’s easier to collect financial data because numbers don’t have feelings and emotions,” notes Sacks. “You have to be very careful when studying human behavior.”

B.J. Gessler ’07MBA found drafting a survey to be a challenge. “The survey has to be accurate, get right to the point, and speak to the people you’re giving it to or you’re not going to get good information,” he says.

Karen Soberg ’07MBA, right, surveys visitors to Piedmont Park. Students used PDAs to enter survey data.

Once the surveys were good to go, students took to the parks and used PDAs to enter survey information on site. Karen Mumford, lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, also contributed to the project.) Data was later uploaded into an Excel spreadsheet, allowing data compilation to take place in minimal time.

When Annemarie Milton ’07MBA began to analyze the data, she was surprised. “I thought park users would be mostly women with kids. We didn’t take into account what motivates people and what their concerns were,” she says. It turns out that safety is a huge concern, as are parking access and working bathrooms.

Early 2006 saw the continuation of the project, as a dozen students signed up for a directed study with Sacks to complete the analysis. Currently, they are navigating their way through reams of data. “It sounds easy, but there’s so much data to look at,” says Gessler. “We want to focus our research to satisfy the most stakeholders in the city.” The students are looking at four areas: relevance of park amenities, safety, accessibility, and condition of the parks.

This May, the students will present their findings to a large group that includes representatives from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and the Office of Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Though the project had its share of setbacks, Sacks thought it went well overall and would like to do something similar in the future. “To take on an ambitious and important project like this isn’t going to be a clean process, and these students will run into that challenge the rest of their lives,” observes Sacks. “They might as well learn that now.”

Allison Shirreffs

 


^ top