Leadership Spotlight

A Chance Meeting
Marc Hodak, WG'86, and Theresa Boyce, WG'85

Neither Marc Hodak, WG'86, nor Theresa Boyce, WG'85, was celebrating a class reunion at the opening night reception on May 15. But though their classmates were not around, they felt plenty of nostalgia standing in Huntsman Hall that night. The couple met at the building's opening in 2002 and they are getting married next year.

Actually on campus for the Alumni Association meeting— Boyce serves as a board member—Boyce and Hodak saw the Friday night party and Saturday picnic as a chance to celebrate their own two-person reunion. "It's one more touch point to be grateful for. Being involved with another Wharton person has been fabulous," says Boyce.

Even though their time at Wharton overlapped, Hodak and Boyce did not know each other as students. Both were active in student life, and one fleeting extracurricular connection eventually brought them together. While working as a reporter for the student newspaper, Hodak wrote about Boyce's campaign for president of the Marketing Club. (She won.)

Seventeen years later, when Hodak encountered Boyce at the opening of Huntsman Hall, she looked vaguely familiar to him. "I'd just come down from New York and was touring around the building for the first time when I saw her. Then I heard her name, and it clicked."

At the time, Boyce was working in brand development for Lennox International in Dallas, TX, but the two quickly developed a long distance romance. They got engaged in July 2003, and she moved to New York at the end of the year.

The turn of events may not have been surprising for Boyce, who has long been an active member of the Wharton alumni network. "Over the years, I've been involved in the Wharton club in whatever city I was in. Many of the best friends I've made have been Wharton grads," says Boyce. She remembers once calling up Robert Crandall, WG'60, then-CEO of American Airlines, looking for job leads, around the time when she was thinking of relocating to Texas from North Carolina. She was shocked when he called her back from his yacht in the South Pacific to offer advice and encouragement.

For Hodak, though, the 2002 event at Huntsman Hall marked a recently revived interest in nurturing Wharton connections. After graduating, Hodak lost contact with his classmates, and for more than a decade, he was focusing on his career in management consulting and raising his two sons, Max and Sam, from a previous marriage. Earlier that year, he'd decided to go out on his own as a management consultant and began to meet Wharton alumni through the New York Club. Since then, he has been rediscovering the virtues of the Wharton network, and Boyce's involvement has encouraged him to get even more active.

"I've been carrying Theresa's bags to alumni meetings. I like coming to Philly with her for these events: I'm reconnecting with a lot of interesting people," he says.

The soon-to-be newlyweds definitely plan to attend their 20-year reunions in 2005 and 2006, but it's a safe bet they will be back on campus before then.

Mini-reunions All Over The World
Marta Lieb, WG'99, and Florencia Jimenez-Marcos, WG'99

Talk to Marta Lieb and Florencia Jimenez-Marcos, both graduates of Wharton's Lauder Program in 1999, and you'd think that Miami Beach was just a couple of bus stops from Paris. The two alums have managed to maintain a close friendship—and even as classmates around them screamed with excitement at seeing long-lost pals, their meeting at the reunion was hardly dramatic. "I see Marta all the time, so it wasn't such a big shock," says Jimenez-Marcos.

Lieb and Jimenez-Marcos met when they both began Lauder's French program in May, 1998. With the intense schedule, they bonded quickly, finding common ties: Lieb came to Wharton from Sao Paolo, Brazil, while Jimenez-Marcos was born in Argentina. As an international student, Lieb found their mutual support system invaluable, and Jimenez-Marcos, who had been in the U.S. since she was 5, helped Lieb acclimate to life in Philadelphia. Lieb can remember taking trips to IKEA in a tiny car and coming back cramped between furniture boxes. "When I got here, I didn't even know what IKEA was," she says.

For their first-year summer program in Paris, the two sublet an apartment from a Wharton alum who was working in Asia. Lieb recalls having difficulty getting to sleep because they were up all night talking. "We had a great time discovering together all the idiosyncrasies of Parisian life, love and the pursuit of the perfect croissant," says Jimenez-Marcos, who thinks of that summer as a fantastic bonding experience that cemented the foundations for what she expects will be a lifetime of friendship