Beedie School of Business

Beedie School of Business News

The Beedie School of Business brought together some of the world’s leading experts on social inequality to share research and engage in meaningful discussion on how organizations and institutions contribute to or mitigate inequality at the Inequality, Institutions and Organizations Conference. With social inequality remaining a profound issue for both developing and developed societies, the conference sought to further explore the increasing problem of inequality growing in developed countries in conjunction with the growing power […]

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.”