The ceremonial first shovelful of dirt marking the start of construction of the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego was barely out of the ground before school officials celebrated another landmark event , a new satellite office in Washington, D.C.
On Feb. 23, the Beyster Institute at UCSD’s business school officially opened a new location in the nation’s capital at the University of California Washington Center.
“This office gives the Rady School the first UC San Diego presence in Washington, D.C., and on the East Coast,” said Robert S. Sullivan, the school’s dean. “The Rady School will have access to national and international leaders, increasing UC San Diego’s visibility outside of California.”
The nonprofit Beyster Institute, named after J. Robert Beyster, the founder and retired chairman of the board of San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., will pay a lease rate of about $20,000 a year for its offices in the center, said UCSD spokeswoman Keri Minehart.
The point of having the satellite location will be to gain government and private-sector consulting contracts for entrepreneurial training, Minehart said.
One such U.S. State Department contract recently brought some 60 senior-level business executives from Middle Eastern and North African countries to San Diego for training with local companies, she added.
Ray Smilor, the executive director of the Beyster Institute, said it “looks forward to serving clients from its new home in UC Washington Center.”
“We will continue to develop innovative proposals, promote the benefits of employee ownership (companies) and expand our global work in entrepreneurship and economic development,” Smilor added.
The Washington, D.C., office is the latest Rady School expansion. In December, the university purchased the former SAIC headquarters in La Jolla, using private donations. This building houses the Beyster Institute’s California staff. Additionally, it has an entrepreneurship center in Russia and others are planned for Morocco, Bahrain and Kazakhstan.
UCSD broke ground in January for the Rady School’s 50,000-square-foot, $31 million facility, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006.
Minehart said the Rady School has received a little more than $65 million in private funding, including cash pledges and planned gifts.
The Rady School will be the first instruction and research facility at UCSD to be funded entirely by private donations.
