Up.

That seems to be the only direction Javeria Farooqi can go, at least metaphorically. Farooqi, an MBA graduate student and president of the MBA Association, has been the recipient of many honors this semester. On May 11th, she became one of the newest honorees of the Texas Business Hall of Fame scholarship. The award comes with $10,000.

"I was doing what I love doing and in the process I was honored with such great awards. I believe when you sincerely love what your doing it just comes naturally. My goal is not to win awards. My goal is to continuously gain and share knowledge and that is a never ending goal and if while doing that I win awards then that's just the cherry on top of it all."

The Texas Business Hall of Fame scholarship is awarded to only 15 students who have demonstrated academic excellence and leadership, and have a propensity for entrepreneurial achievement.

Five outstanding business degree majors at the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg have been awarded academic scholarships from the Insurance Council of Texas (ICT). The students, many of them first generation college graduates, were awarded $1,000 scholarships in ceremonies near the campus.

The UT Pan American scholarship recipients are Julia Maldonado, Sandy Salinas, Erika Marquez, Eric Leal and Sally Marie Balderas. The students' Insurance and Risk management professor Steve Lovell said all of the scholarship recipients were exemplary.

"Nothing has come easy for any of these students," said Lovell. "Most of the students support themselves by working on or off campus, yet they have excelled in their classes and in leadership roles. These young men and women will be successful wherever they wind up."

ICT has provided more than $300,000 to students and insurance and risk management programs in Texas over the past eight years. A recent survey showed at least one out of every three scholarship recipient found a job in the insurance industry.

The Insurance Council of Texas is the largest state insurance trade association in the country consisting of approximately 500 property and casualty insurers writing business in Texas. For more information to ICT's Web site at www.insurancecouncil.org.

Success was the message Pedro Salazar, executive director of the Edinburg Economic Development Corporation, gave to guests at this year's second annual VIP Stars Award Ceremony on April 23.

Salazar, executive director of the Edinburg Economic Development Corporation, was the keynote speaker for banquet and focused his presentation on three key points vital to success. First is opportunity and the ability to seize it. Second is readiness and the difference between what is inherent and what is practiced for. The final key to success according to Salazar is effort. Be prepared, said Salazar. Aggressively seek out the opportunity that others sit and wait for.

Salazar spent 13 years in economic and small business development with UTPA before moving on to banking. He then became a banker for Lone Star National Bank and then an account executive with First Franklin, a division of Merril Lynch Bank & Trust, where he was consistently one of the top 25 performing account executives in the country.

The VIP awards banquet was created to recognize CoBA student accomplishments, especially those related to Values, Initiative and Professionalism (VIP).

This year's Winter Texans were promised that a donation would be made to the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, if they responded to a survey. And respond they did! More than one thousand Winter Texans participated in this year's Winter Texan Study, according to Dr. Penny Simpson, director of the Valley Markets and Tourism Research Center in CoBA.

As a result, Simpson presented a check for $1,000 to Food Bank RGV representatives Crissy Cruz, Manager of Communication & Advocacy and Karen Featherston, Special Events Manager in April. Cruz and Featherston thanked the Center and Winter Texans, saying that the donation should provide about 5,000 meals for the hungry.

"The response of Winter Texans to our research is usually very good but I think the added incentive of helping other via a donation to the Food Bank was a crucial factor in this year's record number of study participants," said Simpson. "Our Winter Texans are usually generous volunteers for charity while in the Valley and we're grateful to play a part in that charity this year."

For more than 20 years, the Center has been conducting research on Winter Texans in the Valley and their economic impact on the regional economy. This year's report should be available this summer. For summary information on Winter Texans studies, visit http://coba.utpa.edu/tourism.

"You need to have the passion. The ganas. You're going to have many obstacles as an entrepreneur, but you need to be a risk taker," said Javier Martinez, trade coordinator for the UTPA Small Business Development Center and guest judge for the First Annual Business Plan Competition.

The Business Plan Competition, sponsored by CoBA, required that students develop and present a business plan. Three finalists were selected by a panel of three judges on April 25. Zebra Finch Advertising, a company that would create a business networking website for the Valley, won the grand prize of $1500 to start their new business. Bikram Yoga, took second place and the audience choice award for a prize of $500.

The biggest factor in the judges' selection of winners was passion and experience, said Martinez. As Martinez said of the winning group presentation, "Their business plan might need some work...but I do foresee that they are going to be really successful because they have a passion. They really believe in what they are going to be doing."

The music industry has been attempting to halt the transmutation of their music ever since Metallica, a heavy metal band, filed a lawsuit against Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program, back in 2000. However, not all industries have met the changing of their products with the same resistance.

"The computer game companies...they pretty much did not try to interfere with it at all, in the first place. They are the first ones to really learn how to monetize it in the second place," said CoBA CIS assistant professor, Jerald Hughes.

A recent study conducted by Hughes indicates that Web 2.0 companies should incorporate the transmutation of their products as part of their business model. The research, titled Supplying Web 2.0: An empirical investigation of the drivers of consumer transmutation of culture-oriented digital information goods, was made available online on March 4 in sciencedirect.com and delves into transmutation's development in cultural goods.

In the study, Hughes defines transmutation as the simple changing of the original product, such as the conversion of music in an audio CD into mp3s. Personnel computers allow the casual occurrence of transmutations, so much so that some industries are having trouble adapting to the new variable.

In some cases, Hughes explains, game companies have actually purchased the rights for some of the transmutated games and sold them as their own, in exchange for returning some of the profits to the altered game's creator. So rather than spend millions in legal costs to bandage a gushing wound, they have saved millions in development costs and profited from these transmutations.

Although transmutation remains in its infancy, it has already developed three distinct levels of transmutations:

Lvl 1 Basic transmutation: People who recode the product. The product will look and sound the same but will now be a different file format, such as an audio CD's conversion into mp3 files.

Lvl 2: The consumer makes a minor change to the product. In music, this can be seen as a simple remix, while in games as the creation of new levels and changes to the way characters look.

Lvl 3 Deep remix transmutation: The consumer brings together many created products to create an entirely new piece of work, such as the combination of various songs and beats.

Led by Ellery Buchanan, president and CEO, the centrifugal forces of FibeRio made their first entrepreneurial appearance at the Entrepreneurship Speaker Series' April 13 presentation.

Buchanan explained to a crowd of students and professors that while freedom and independence are part of why people decide to become an entrepreneur, accountability for one's actions is always a constant.

Additionally, entrepreneurial success depends on four variables: people, focus, customer service and balance, said Buchanan. And while all four are vital, he keystone to his success has been the people.

"You cannot survive, you cannot be a company unless you have top notch people. You need to treasure them, treat them right and give them the right kind of benefits," said Buchanan. Later, Edward Peno, Kial Gramley and Karen Lozano, who formed the rest of the FibeRio team, joined Buchanan for an open question segment on the company's plan to develop their corporation.

FibeRio is The University of Texas-Pan American's first spin-off corporation. The Company's equipment will provide the world industry a new cost and energy-efficient way to gather nano-fibers

For more information on the dates and times of Entrepreneurship Series events, contact Dr. John Sargent at jsargent@utpa.edu

Careers of all types are available to students in the insurance industry, according to speakers at this year's Insurance Symposium held in CoBA on April 15. The event features speakers from New York Life, AFLAC, State Farm, United Fire and the Texas Department of Insurance.

Breakout sessions during the lunch hour informed students of the diversity of career opportunities available in the insurance industry--it's not just about sales. Opportunities include claims adjustment, underwriting and actuary, according to speakers, and, of course, sales.

The insurance industry will be badly in need of employees in the next decade, noted guest speaker, Joe Johnson. He said that a large number of employees in the insurance industry are baby boomers who will be retiring in coming years. This translates into numerous career opportunities in the industry.

Steven Lovell, a CoBA lecturer on economics and finance, helped orchestrate the event after speaking with John Baldibia, a student and head of the student organization Insurance and Financial Planning Association (IFPA). IFPA students were responsible for organizing the symposium.

AFLAC provided pizza and soft drinks during the lunch breakout sessions and New York Life sponsored the 5 pm networking social.

The symposium concluded with a panel discussion on current insurance issues. The even was open to the public.

The Masters in Business Administration Association is planning a dinner to help fund one of Cesar Chavez's last social efforts, Proyecto Azteca (PA).

Proyecto Azteca is an organization that helps impoverished families build their own home. Javeria Farooqi, president of the MBAA, helped organize the dinner in an attempt to help the social foundations of all causes.

"If our foundation is not built properly then we can't just be treating the symptoms, we want to treat the cause," explained Farooqi as to why they decided to help PA.

Proyecto Azteca was founded in 1991 in response to the colonia housing crisis in Hidalgo County. The organization is located in San Juan, but receives little help from local institutions.

"They were very surprised. They said they had been wondering why people from the Valley have not been very involved with them," said Jesus Solis, MBAA director of public relations.

Solis continued to say that while other universities, such as the University of Massachusetts, have let a helping hand, no university in the Valley had ever physically contacted them until now.

The event, Fostering Dedication One Home at a Time, will be held at the UTPA Wellness & Recreational Sports Complex on April 30 at 7 pm. For more information, visit http://www.mymbaa.com/dinner.php

CoBA graduates Aziz Trevino and Susan Val Verde returned to CoBA this month to share their experiences as entrepreneurs. The two grads were the first in this semester's Entrepreneurship Speaker series established to motivate entrepreneurial hopefuls. Treviño, supervisor and co-owner of Aziz convenience stores, spoke of his family's humble beginnings and about the business becoming a top convenience store chain in the Valley. It takes more than just money and the desire to create a successful business, Treviño told the audience of CoBA students and faculty. It takes knowledge. Val Verde's experience was different. As executive director and a franchisee for Sylvan Learning in the Valley, Val Verde has been to Baltimore and back in her quest to bring the Sylvan Learning franchise to the area. This experience led to a paradox. "When you have your own business, you crave this freedom and that's one of the things that drove me into doing this, but you also have a lack of freedom because you're really chained down to the work that has to be done," said Val Verde, noting she had to return to the office after her speech. "When you own your own business, it's not a 7 to 5--it's a 24 hours a day business. You're always on call," explained Treviño. The entrepreneurs had different business stories but agreed that owning a business was more than a job--it's a lifestyle.