A New Approach to the World 

Mark Farrell ’87BUS’s most memorable experience at Columbia is a personal one.

“My wife, Cathy, and I arrived at Columbia about a month after our wedding,” he said. “We were each moving to New York from small, faraway towns, and we were both transitioning to new professional roles. We recognized that if we could adapt to the significant change and embrace our new life at Columbia, we could accomplish anything.”

Mark’s path to Columbia Business School (CBS) was circuitous. He grew up near Albany, New York, and graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in Modern Languages. After that, he traveled to Germany to study at the University of Tübingen and earn an MA from Tufts University. From there, he received a PhD in German from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after a dissertation research fellowship at the University of Göttingen, Germany. After graduation, he served on faculties at Bowdoin College and East Carolina University.

Then he decided to make a major career change—to business.

“Although I had some administrative and budgetary experience in academe, I recognized that I lacked adequate credibility for the change I was contemplating,” he said. “CBS was an obvious choice for a host of reasons: its reputation as one of the nation’s leading business schools, its curricular balance between the quantitative and qualitative, and its location in the nation’s largest business hub.”

CBS taught Mark a new approach to the world. “I encountered people from every conceivable background,” he said. “To my surprise on day one, I found that I wasn’t the only former academic in the class. Whereas academe requires independent thought and scholarship, CBS’s case studies put a premium on teamwork among diverse participants.”

Majoring in finance and accounting gave him the intellectual tools for a career in finance and banking, he continued, but CBS also provided valuable non-curricular learning, from résumé writing to networking opportunities to hints on dress.

“CBS is a magnet for corporate recruiting,” he said. “I made the effort to attend many and varied information sessions hosted by visiting companies. Each presentation provided a first-hand view of life at the company and helped me to formulate a career path.”

After Columbia, Mark spent several years in corporate banking in New York and then in Portland, Oregon, where he worked on tax-exempt bond transactions for university and business clients.

Then came another significant career development. “I made a complete transition into public finance and banking that lasted for the next 25 years,” he said. “I became the national director of government banking for two different West Coast banks.”

Ever since graduation, Mark has contributed regularly to CBS’s annual fund. More recently, he established a charitable gift annuity (CGA), which offers a lifetime annuity to him and a future benefit to CBS.

His CGA also confers a valuable tax benefit. “After reaching the age for required minimum distributions (RMDs) from my individual retirement account (IRA),” he explained, “I was able to fund the CGA on a tax-free basis as a portion of an annual RMD."

While his motivation for giving is to support the outstanding teaching and research that contributes to CBS’s global reputation, Mark has requested that his gift be used to support curricular development in municipal finance.

“My early years in public finance were a time of considerable on-the-job learning,” he said. “Corporations and governments have different and distinct legal constraints, accounting rules and decision-making practices. I often wished I’d had a course on municipal finance.”

Mark encourages fellow alumni to consider similar gifts.

“Before I made my gift to CBS, an acquaintance actually advised against it, saying it would be inconsequential to a university with Columbia’s resources. He was wrong. If every one of my classmates made a gift comparable to mine, the impact would be enormous.”