Ran Lu-Andrews is the new associate dean for undergraduate programs at the Cal Lutheran School of Management. In this role, Lu-Andrews will oversee all program directors for accounting, business administration, economics, hospitality management, sports management, as well as all undergraduate faculty members. 

“Before this, I was the program director for the largest major on campus. This is working at a much larger capacity in terms of responsibilities and student interaction, engagement, and also faculty management, retention– things like that,” Lu-Andrews said.

Lu-Andrews explained that the School of Management is also growing rapidly, with anywhere between 550-650 students across  all four years. 

“We’d like to work with other programs on campus and continue the growth…the more we grow that also means the more Cal Lutheran is growing, which is a win-win situation for everybody,” Lu-Andrews said. 

Lu-Andrews said that she is excited about the expansion of the School of Management program and all the work that is being done to the rest of the Cal Lutheran community. 

Lu-Andrews said that one of her favorite of parts working in the School of Management is the diverse student body. 

“I’ve been with the School of Management since 2016, so this is my seventh year now. We have students from everywhere…bringing that diverse cultural exposure to our students is essential in terms of a successful management program,” Lu-Andrews said. 

Vlad Vaiman, professor and associate dean for graduate studies, has worked with Lu-Andrews for several years now and said he is glad she was appointed as an associate dean for Undergraduate Studies. 

Until a few years ago, there was just one associate dean, and Vaiman held this position from 2014 until it was decided to split the role into graduate and undergraduate studies. 

“The AD for UG studies is not a new position, we had this arrangement for several years now–it is just that Dr. Lu-Andrews is new in this role,” Vaiman said. “The best thing here is that the overall responsibilities for student and faculty success can be shared between the two associate deans, who in turn can support the school’s dean even better.” 

According to Vaiman, the best way to be a successful faculty member in the School of Management is to excel at what is needed to be a faculty member–teaching, research, and administration–and organization for effective time management.

Lu-Andrews said one of things she likes the most is how faculty can bring their research and industry connections to the classroom “and introduce students to a lot of different internship opportunities, full time jobs, entry level jobs, and just broaden up their networking opportunities and things like that.”

Lu-Andrews also noted that she is trying to enrich students’ experiences through making changes to the business administration major’s catalog, which was altered this summer.

“We are including more experiential learning components in the major. Now we have academic competition as a capstone–travel seminar as a capstone option–and also we have an introduction to business course which will engage students more in our community, events and orient them towards more successful academic progress,” Lu-Andrews said about new developments in the business program.

Business, finance and marketing major Katherine Ting, who is currently taking an investment analysis course taught by Lu-Andrews, shares how her accounting skills have improved since taking the course, and that she is always a friendly face to see around campus.

“I’ve only had her for a short amount of time and she seems really great, and she’s very helpful and friendly…like I see her around and I had no idea that she knew who I was, even though the class is small. The class is going great, I think that finance has always been a struggle for me and I’m doing better than I did in other finance classes,” Ting said.

Lu-Andrews is also the current faculty advisor of the Women in Business club, which was just founded last year, and is getting increasingly more popular on campus.

“It has grown tremendously…they are one of the largest student clubs and they are inviting a lot of guest speakers on campus,” Lu-Andrews said.

Sophomore Elsa Klubberud who is the treasurer of the Women in Business club at Cal Lutheran said the tremendous success that the club has achieved is in large part due to the expertise of Lu-Andrews.

“I’m super pleased with how the Women in Business club has developed since our founding last year. We really hit the ground running, and I do owe our success to our support from CLU’s faculty, including Dr. Ran Lu-Andrews,” Klubberud said. “She worked with our presidents Brissa and Andrea to get our club from an idea to a full-scale reality. Going from founding to one of the fastest-growing clubs on campus in a year is unreal, and we simply could not do it without Dr. Lu-Andrews’ genius.”

Lu-Adrews said that the discipline she teaches in finance is traditional, and lacks a larger presence of women. She said one of her hopes is to change that. 

“Dr. Lu-Andrews is sponsoring a new generation of women in business, and her work is already paying dividends” Klubberud said. 

Lu-Andrews said she is looking forward to being the associate dean for undergraduate programs in the School of Management at Cal Lutheran.

“I very much look forward to the future in terms of how the School of Management can work with everybody on campus and make sure that we all can benefit from the students’ engagement and the community itself can benefit from that as well,” Lu-Andrews said.