In 1980, Karen Peetz enrolled at Johns Hopkins as a master’s student in a predecessor of the Carey Business School. One of 25 students selected for the Hopkins Fellows in Organizational and Community Systems program, Peetz—just starting out her career in banking—had classmates from fields as diverse as education and telecommunications, and from organizations that included the United Nations. Over the course of a year, the group tackled coursework and projects related to the unique challenges presented by their various workplaces.
“My program revolved around the study of change in business—how you could assess situations, decide on the elements of change that might be needed, and work with whoever your team happened to be, big or small, and help them agree on what needed to be done,” says Peetz, whose nearly four-decade career included serving as the president of BNY Mellon and a member of the board of directors of Wells Fargo. “Banking certainly changed dramatically over my career,” Peetz adds, “so that learning, that methodology, was fundamental not only to how I operated but why I ended up going the distance.”
The role Hopkins played in Peetz’s professional trajectory was one of the reasons she joined the university’s board of trustees and in recent years chaired the Carey Dean’s Advisory Council. It also motivated her to join a group of Carey alumnae whose philanthropic leadership is boosting support for students in the school.
In the past few years, Peetz; Linda Mistler, Bus ’83 (MAS); Diane Delozier, Bus ’84 (MAS); Jenny Morgan, Bus ’86 (MAS); Andrea Weiss, Bus ’86 (MAS); Susan Galicki, Bus ’93 (MAS); Tina Wilson, Bus ’98 (Cert), ’03 (MBA); Lynn Hackney, Bus ’03 (MBA); and Debra Charles, Bus ’06 (MS), have made bequests and endowed gifts totaling more than $5 million in support of student financial aid, the Carey Career Development Office, and the Women in Leadership academy to be launched by Carey’s Executive Education program in January 2020.
Learn more about these alumnae in the summer 2019 edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine.
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Topics: Alumni, Carey Business School, Fuel Discovery, Support Scholars