Husband and wife Igor Georgievskiy and Zhanna Georgievskaya envision future careers in health care, perhaps owning and operating their own hospital or consulting firm.

They have found a school that will tailor a program to make that vision possible.

Learning about Alcorn State University School of Business from a friend in their hometown of Voronezh, Russia, the two young students made a bold decision to move thousands of miles away to pursue their dreams.

Dr. Steve Wells, former associate dean for ASU graduate business programs and now interim dean of the School of Business, is seeking investment partners from the business and wider Natchez-area community to keep such dreams alive.

Now in the master of business administration program at the Natchez ASU campus, Igor and Zhanna have mastered a new language, become comfortable in a new culture and, most important, are moving toward their goals of MBA degrees.

“They even have organized special courses for us,” Zhanna said. “We are studying medical marketing and medical management. It’s difficult to find a program like this.”

Wells said providing programs to fit students’ goals is a unique characteristic of the ASU business school model.

“We try to provide individualized programs of study, attending to each student’s needs,” Wells said. “This makes our MBA program unique from others.”

Student Markel Hall of Natchez, a sales consultant at Southland Mazda, grew up in the small Delta town of Shelby. He also has a specific goal in the business world.

“My interest is in pursing an independent record label,” he said. “Financial accounting and business law have been two essential courses for me.”

Kim Stephens is a CPA at Callon Petroleum. For her, the opportunity to attend graduate school in her hometown is a dream come true.

“I’ve enjoyed being in class with students from other countries,” Stephens said. “It gives all of us a better view of business around the world.”

Like other business schools around the country, Alcorn is looking outside the usual funding sources for universities. It has become essential for graduate business programs to do that, Wells said.

From the beginning, in the 1990s, when a judge mandated that ASU provide a graduate business school at Natchez as part of the decades-old desegregation case filed by Jake Ayres, university officials saw the MBA program as a way to engage the Natchez-area community while providing a useful program, Wells said.

“It was one of the first decisions by Judge (Neal) Biggers,” he said. “We started the program in 1997 in the school of nursing building.”

The graduate program continued in that building until the new building was completed in August 2005.

“It’s a handsome building and conducive to learning,” Wells said. “It has provided high-quality classrooms and technology.”

Successful student-oriented programs and a highly trained faculty are goals fulfilled, he said. Now the graduate school looks to the community for helping to keep the good work going.

“We have the faculty willing to work with students. We have an excellent faculty, and to keep them we have to have financial support. We need investment partners,” Wells said.

“Currently there is a high demand for business school professors,” he said. “I suspect all of them here could find positions paying more money than they are making now if they were willing to leave this area.”

The campaign for partnerships began in December with the mailing of a brochure outlining ways businesses and individuals might make memorial or honorarium gifts.

For example, an investment partner might donate $25,000 to equip and furnish the student lounge and have that space named in honor or memory of a person or business.

For $200,000, the spacious lecture hall could bear the name of a business, family or individual. For a $100,000 donation, the investment partner may name the learning resource center or the executive MBA program suite, for example.

“The brochure has some suggestions, but these are not the only way someone can participate,” Wells said.

Faculty members already have bought into the program, he said. “Their percentage of participation is very high. This is important. To ask someone outside the school to invest, we need to be able to tell them of the internal participation.”

The graduate business program has enjoyed hearty support from the Alcorn administration from the beginning, Wells said.

It began with the vision of the late Dr. Clinton Bristow, when he was president, and with Dr. Malvin Williams, now serving as interim president.

“We hope to have that same kind of support from the new president and new administration, both for the business and nursing programs in Natchez,” Wells said.

The nursing school and business school together have provided the basis for a full-fledged Natchez ASU campus, and that reality is good news for Southwest Mississippi, he said.

The operating budget for the business school alone is $1.5 million. Using an economic multiplier of six, “you can see how much that means to the economy of Natchez,” Wells said. “And that’s just our operating budget.”

Wells said an interesting study recently showed the correlation between the number of residents in a community with Ph.D. and the growth and development of the area.

“When you add this campus to Lorman, you can see we have the potential to drive economic development in Southwest Mississippi,” he said.