UTD wants to help retail and restaurant companies with their technology needs
The University of Texas at Dallas seeks to build closer relationships with retail and restaurant businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area by providing both resources and ready graduates.
UTD’s Naveen Jindal School of Management created the Center for Retail Innovation and Strategy Excellence, which focuses on “the STEM side of retail like computer science, machine learning and data analytics,” said Charles Haseman, the project’s director.
“Our students all worked at a till before joining UTD and thought they didn’t want to go back,” he said, but now they are learning about the back office needs of these companies. “The tech side of retail has been a huge success factor and recently a major reason for how companies are weathering COVID-19.”
The center offers companies groups of four to five students who tackle a specific problem together with a professor. The center is also able to offer on-going research through its faculty as many of them have extensive retail experiences with companies such as Amazon, Neiman Marcus, and Fossil. The center also plans to hold conferences and career fairs, Haseman said.
A long list of retail and restaurant companies are headquartered here, he said, and many other companies have large tech operations based in Dallas-Fort Worth, such as Walmart’s Sam’s Club tech operations in downtown Dallas and the Amazon Web Services technology center in the north -Dallas.
“Many UTD alums work at these companies and now we can formally contact them to capitalize on our experience,” said Haseman.
UTD is one of four schools in the state that qualifies as Texas Tier One University, a designation given by the state to emerging research universities. UTD received the award in 2018. The University of Texas at Arlington just received the award this year, and Texas Tech and the University of Houston have been Texas Tier One Schools since 2012.
Other universities in Texas also have retail programs, but “there’s room for all of us,” Haseman said, and each school has a unique focus. The Texas A&M Center for Retailing Studies was founded in 1987 and was the first part of a business school.
The University of North Texas at Denton has been offering a new Bachelor of Science degree in retail since 2016 and expanded it two years later. UNT founded its Global Digital Retailing Research Center in 2013, which is dedicated to researching and answering questions about e-commerce.
UNT’s digital retail students work in ecommerce retail and for large digital agencies that manage budgets for search marketing, consumer experience and usability, creative design, and social media management, she said.
“Since our inception, we’ve graduated 468 students with this degree,” said Linda Mihalick, director of UNT’s retail center. “We have a 100 percent placement rate within six months of graduation. Every company, whether traditional retail, start-ups, hospitality, real estate or automotive – whatever – it needs students who are familiar with the constantly changing digital landscape. “
Twitter: @MariaHalkias
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