Beedie School of Business

Beedie School of Business News

The latest issue of Ideas@Beedie, the new digital magazine from the Beedie School of Business, is now available online, showcasing the school’s academic research, industry impact and engagement with the community. The new edition of Ideas@Beedie focuses on the subject of international business and highlights the breadth and depth of research carried out by the Beedie School of Business faculty on the topic. The research explored in the new issue includes the role of government […]

Beedie School of Business News

Will Mitchell didn’t come by his decision to attend business school lightly. As an 18 year old, he was pouring lead slag into a furnace for a living at a lead-zinc smelter in Trail, BC when he decided to heed the call of higher learning – from Simon Fraser University.

Mitchell, whose parents were both teachers, grew up in the scenic West Kootenay communities of Trail and Fruitvale. Geographically, he was hundreds of kilometres from the West Coast and the top of Burnaby Mountain. Psychologically, the distance was even further.

But the lure of SFU was neither dulled nor diminished by distance or geography.

At the time, Simon Fraser University was a young institution with a reputation for flexibility and radicalism. The young Mitchell couldn’t resist the mix – and in a matter of days he had made the transition from the smoke-belching smelter to classes in political science, sociology, anthropology, English and math.

“At SFU,” he says, “you could do very interesting things.”