Poole College Welcomes New Jenkins MBA Career Management, Student Services Professionals

The North Carolina State University Poole College of Management announces the appointment of three professional staff members, filling vacancies on the Jenkins Career Management Center and Jenkins MBA program’s student services teams.

Ayo Agunbiade is assistant director of academic advising and student affairs for the Jenkins MBA Program. Roderick E. Lewis and Elisabeth Zimowski are associate directors in the Jenkins Career Management Center, which provides education, resources and coaching in the areas of leadership development, job search, and internal career advancement for the Jenkins graduate programs.

Ayo Agunbiade

Ayo Agunbiade has six years’ experience in academic advising, including managing student success software systems and coordinating student progress and retention in NC State University’s Exploratory Studies and the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes, and lecturing on topics related to transition into a diverse community, introduction to university education and strategies for college success.

Prior to his academic advising roles at NC State, Agunbiade was academic services assistant in Student-Athlete Academic Services at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. He received his bachelor’s degree in communication from Southern Connecticut State University, his master’s in education in community and college counseling from Longwood University, and has completed professional training and certificate programs related to academic advising. He resides in Fuquay-Varina, N.C.

Roderick E. Lewis

Roderick Lewis has more than 15 years’ experience nationally and internationally helping students reach their career goals. His areas of expertise include training and development, global relocation and negotiation, performance management and appraisal, and recruitment and selection strategies. Lewis has worked with consumer packaged goods, energy, petrochemicals and automotive industries.

Most recently, he was a business education instructor and co-op coordinator in the Tuscaloosa County School System in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Prior to that, he was founder and principal consultant for VJS Careers Consultancy in Lisbon, Portugal, providing contract consulting services, including implementation of  an outcomes-measured professional development program, for European business schools. In other roles, Lewis designed an international MBA career center for the Católica-Lisbon business school’s MBA program, managed operations of a global internship at Georgia Tech, and managed recruitment for Kimberly-Clark in Atlanta and Latin America.

Lewis is fluent in Portuguese and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Alabama and an MBA from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He has written and published a book on the topic of corporate recruiting, “The Corporate Recruitment Game: What Recruiters Don’t Tell and What Employers Try to Sell,” as well as a research article, “Equality & Non-Discrimnation compliance in European Organizations.” He resides in Morrisville, N.C.

Elisabeth Zimowski

Elisabeth Zimowski brings more than 10 years’ experience in higher education career management and recruiter relations to her new role. Her strengths include MBA career services, communication and outreach, program start-up and management, student development, cross-campus and employer relations. Most recently, she was an independent higher education and student affairs consultant working with Triangle area business schools, providing executive coaching and developing and teaching courses designed to improve student success.

She has held career management positions with the MBA program and Master of Public Administration programs at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School and the UNC School of Government and The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business and Ohio State’s College of Engineering. In these roles, she designed or re-engineered and delivered integrated career development curricula and programs for on-site and online students and managed employer relations and on-campus recruiting. She also has worked in university relations for Dell, Inc.

Zimowski is an experienced group facilitation leader for undergraduate, graduate and working professional students, covering a range of topics related to leadership development. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Tennessee, a master of arts in higher education from The Ohio State University and has completed coursework toward a doctorate in education at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has studied Italian, Spanish, French and Russian. She also was a news reporter and photographer early in her career. Zimowski resides in Durham, N.C.