As Miss New Jersey 2009, Ashley Shaffer spent much of her waking hours meeting the public. She spoke at schools, marched in parades and even sang the national anthem at the Meadowlands Racetrack.
Millstone’s Ashley Shaffer, crowned Miss New Jersey in 2009, is pursuing an MBA at the Rutgers Business School, where she helped start the program’s first-ever student blog. But at Rutgers, Shaffer is enjoying relative anonymity as she focuses on grades rather than glamour. The 24- year-old Millstone resident entered the MBA program at the Rutgers Business School in Newark and New Brunswick in September, and has quickly forged a reputation as an energetic, involved student who helped start the program’s first student blog.
“Nobody here treats me any differently from anyone else — and that’s exciting for me,” Shaffer said during a break in classes at the school’s new 17- story home at 1 Washington Park in Newark. “I am a student first and foremost. I am so proud to have served as Miss New Jersey. But that was then and this is now.”
Shaffer is particularly excited because female enrollment in the MBA program is on the rise. The full-time female students who entered the program in the fall of 2010 account for 45 percent of their class. The class entering the program in 2009 was 32 percent female. An additional 13 women enrolled as full-time students this year. Nationwide, the percentage of women enrolled in MBA programs is about 34 percent, according to the research group Catalyst.
Shaffer is serving as vice president for membership in the Rutgers Women in Business Club, which aims to serve the growing female presence by arranging guest speakers, site visits to companies and more.
“When I first got here, I would ask women in the program about their thoughts on the business world,” Shaffer said. “I would ask them about their experiences and where they see themselves going. What’s nice is that same feeling of support and understanding permeates through all of our classes.”
Shaffer comes to Rutgers from Marist College, where she pursued an ambitious two-track effort, competing in Miss New Jersey pageants and striving for academic excellence. She accomplished both goals. In spring of 2008, she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communications. In the spring of 2009, she was crowned Miss New Jersey after a pageant in which she performed a piece from Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Turandot.”
At Rutgers, she plans to have a concentration in finance with some supplemental courses in marketing. She is interested in sports management and public relations but is still mulling over her career choices. One of her side projects has been helping run the lively new student blog called “Through the Park: The Real Rutgers MBA Experience,” which captures the increasingly diverse, globally focused community of students in the MBA program.
In one post called “Beer, pretzels and the buzz about cultural diversity,” a student writes about attending an event organized by the International Student Organization
“Looking around at all the different faces and the backgrounds they came from gave me a feeling of confidence that I’m better prepared for a … global community.”
Shaffer said the blog reflects an increased focus to reach out to younger people conversant in social media.
“We are trying to make our blog about contemporary topics, and have a global focus,” Shaffer said. “We want to make it not only something in which our students can write about issues that are important to them, but something which prospective students can look at and say, ‘Hey, this is really great; these students are writing about these topics.’ ”