Bauer Business Focus: Aimee Langlinais
Published on October 27, 2010
On Bauer Business Focus – A conversation on the importance of getting — and giving — female mentorship for MBA students with Ed Mayberry, business reporter for KUHF 88.7 FM.
UH Bauer MBA student Aimee Langlinais spoke to KUHF business reporter Ed Mayberry about how NAWMBA is reaching out to the Houston community and beyond to develop female leaders.
Mentorship is a two-way street for MBA students in the University of Houston C. T. Bauer College of Business chapter of the National Association of Women MBAs (NAWMBA).
The organization’s president, Aimee Langlinais, joined KUHF business reporter Ed Mayberry for a recent Bauer Business Focus to discuss NAWMBA’s role in developing female leaders nationwide and how the Houston business community is getting involved.
“Our mission is all about empowering women,” she said. “The end goal is to project more leadership roles in Houston and nationwide. We want to diversify corporate America.”
The group is doing that through a successful mentorship program, which launched its second year recently with more than three times the amount of participation and a roster of mentors that includes some of the area’s leading executives and entrepreneurs.
NAWMBA members are paired with mentors based on shared professional interests, and throughout the year, meet regularly face-to-face and through telephone and email communication.
“Through the program, we’re giving our members tools to avoid (common challenges women face in the business world) — how to negotiate a salary, how to network,” Langlinais said.
The partnerships often lead to fruitful outcomes, she added, including a mentor/mentee from last year that decided to become business partners and recently opened the first of several Freshii franchises in the Houston area.
NAWMBA is also committed to giving back to a younger generation of females through its Shideezhi Project, which was started by the location chapter and is now a national philanthropy project. “Shideezhi” refers to “little sisters,” or the young girls on the Navajo reservations in New Mexico and Arizona who are mentored by NAWMBA members.
The UH Bauer chapter of NAWMBA recently won a national case competition focused on the Shideezhi Project, where the group was challenged to come up with a five-year strategic growth plan for the initiative and bested schools from across the country, including Georgia Tech, The University of Wisconsin – Madison, University of Minnesota, Lehigh University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and North Carolina State University, the six schools who were also in the final round of competition.
Langlinais, a second year full-time MBA student at UH Bauer, interned with Accenture over the summer and plans to work full-time with the company’s managerial consulting development program in August after graduation.