Fostering Badger Connections
Eager to explore other cultures and devise a life plan, Mike Sanders (BBA ’89) took a one-year break in the middle of college. After living in France for several months helping a UW alumna restore an old chateau, Mike went on to explore Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific. While visiting a developer living in Malaysia, he was amazed to see financial documents rolling in from Europe via the developer’s early fax machine. “I thought, ‘Wow ’. You can transfer a piece of paper from France halfway across the world through a wire? That is when I knew: I want to be in business. I want to be part of making human connections and moving ideas forward,” says Mike, who immediately enrolled in the Wisconsin School of Business upon his return to the UW.
Previously a marketing and sales executive with Cisco and CDW/Berbee, Mike is now vice president of Rosh Review. The educational technology startup delivers comprehensive medical content to doctors and physicians’ assistants studying for board or recertification exams. And he’s doing precisely what he set out to do—spreading ideas and making human connections.
However, Mike is the first to admit that whenever he’s struggled to figure out his next move, people associated with the UW have helped him find a path forward. “When I look at all the critical points of my life, who was there? It was a Badger,” he says. “There’s a Wisconsin tradition in which people are always there to help you make connections. It’s not standing aloof but being right in there with you, caring and wanting you to make something better.” One of his mentors in the WSB, marketing professor Clarke Caywood, a UW grad now working at Northwestern University, showed him that ”whenever you’re at a loss, you invite more people to the table to collaborate,” Mike says. “In the business school there has always been an openness to interdisciplinary thinking, cutting across any boundary—economic, geographic, or political—to very practically develop an idea further. I think of it as progressive in the greatest sense.”
—Mike Sanders (BBA ’89)
Along with serving as a member of the Wisconsin Business Alumni (WBA) Board and generously supporting the School, Mike volunteers as a Madison Business Mentor. He drops in to Grainger Hall, where his eldest son, Nick, is now a junior majoring in finance, to answer students’ questions and help them hone their communication skills through mock interviews. “We go through fundamentals—posture, composure, handshake. I also try to help students clearly project their individual strengths and gifts, rather than speaking as though they’re seasoned veterans, or trying to tell interviewers what they want to hear. I’ve met some truly outstanding students. I look at them and think, ‘I’m glad I’m not interviewing against them. I couldn’t compete!’”
Mike is ardently committed to staying involved with the Wisconsin School of Business—where he also met his wife, Stacey (BBA ’89)—because he knows firsthand how powerfully alumni support benefits everyone concerned. “I’ve heard folks say, ‘The WSB doesn’t need my help. They don’t need my money and they don’t need my time.’ But that’s not true,” he says, emphatically. “All you need to do is sit down with students, see how hard they’re working to develop and grow and make some contribution. You cannot walk away from a conversation with a student and not be impacted, drawn in to say, ‘Well, how can I help?’”
Mike strives to mentor students now in the same warm, organic way as others who have mentored him in college and beyond. He brings principles he has learned in the healthcare industry to his own mentoring, including the impressive attitude he often sees when working closely with doctors and other medical professionals: “They believe it’s a privilege to be able to interact with and care for people. And whether we’re helping students, growing a team, or taking care of a customer, I think we in business can learn a lot from healthcare here. If you have the view that you’re standing up on a ladder, reaching down to pull someone else up, that’s not very helpful,” he says. But “when you’re able to help someone by being right there with them, able to empathize, that is a privilege, a real gift.”
Gratitude is the other big reward of being a Business Badger committed to seeing other students succeed. The thanks Mike and other donors receive from students in return for their guidance and support are real and deep—often delightfully so. In his senior year, before the dawn of electronic calendars, Mike developed a datebook for students. To show his appreciation to the School of Business, he pumped the profits into a $1,000 scholarship to be awarded annually to an ambitious junior or senior marketing student showing a commitment to community service. The Michael Sanders Scholarship Fund, managed by a business student group after he graduated, had a good six-year run—until print datebooks became a casualty of the tech boom. A few years out of college, however, Mike called to congratulate a student who had been awarded his scholarship, and he heard back—after a long pause—“You’re Mike Sanders? I thought you were dead!” Mike found the misunderstanding amusing, but it also underlined a lesson he is very glad he learned young: “It can be rewarding to give while you’re still alive.”
