Swetha Bharadvaj jumped as the ringing phone pierced the 5 a.m. silence, though she was hardly sleeping. For three days, she'd been waiting anxiously for news from the Tepper School of Business, and the deadline was today. Tepper was by far her first choice—she had even tentatively rented an apartment in Pittsburgh—but without a scholarship, she'd be getting her MBA elsewhere.
The caller apologized for forgetting the bi-coastal time difference, but Bharadvaj didn't mind when she heard the news—she had received a Forté Fellowship.
The Forté Foundation, a consortium of companies and business schools—such as Tepper, Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School, Deutsche Bank, IBM, and John Deere—is dedicated to educating and furthering the success of women in business. Forté provides education, networking, and mentoring opportunities through events, programs, the Web, and scholarships.
Coincidentally, Bharadvaj had first learned about Tepper while attending a Forté Forum event in Los Angeles. Standing in an interminably long line of pre-MBA women, she found herself snaking past the Tepper table. She began chatting with the admissions officer and soon found herself hooked. "Tepper was not even on my radar until I went to a Forté event," she says.
Providing opportunities to students like Bharadvaj, who will earn her MBA this spring, is what Colleen McMullen Smith says she envisioned when she proposed that Tepper join Forté. Smith, Tepper's director of diversity strategies and programs, was recently reappointed to her second term on the foundation's board.
—MELISSA SILMORE (TPR'85)
