When describing the corporate world, Sharon Smith, dean of Fordham University’s business school and a distinguished economist, quoted hockey legend Wayne Gretzky.

“The challenge to be is where the puck is going to be,” Ms. Smith said. In other words, the aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be moguls under her charge at Fordham must learn to anticipate the future. As does she.

“The challenge for business education is even greater than that for business because we need to position our students to be where business is going,” she added.

Ms. Smith, an energetic 55, became the dean of the graduate school and its faculty in 2001 and has put in 14 years as head of Fordham’s undergraduate business program (during which time she increased undergraduate enrollment by 77%; the applicant pool grew by 60%). By accepting her current position, Ms. Smith became the first female B-school dean at Fordham – or at any a Jesuit university – and one of only a few female business deans across the country.

While she admitted being a woman in economics has sometimes been difficult and lonely, Ms. Smith played down her groundbreaking ascent up the ladder, insisting that focusing on her gender “isn’t productive, it isn’t the right attitude.”

She would rather concentrate on what’s happening at Fordham. Ms. Smith has made substantial changes to the curriculum, and has tapped into her background as a labor economist to predict what skills her students need to cultivate most to succeed. Tuning into the globalization trend, she has urged the graduate students – most of whom are commuter students attending classes part-time – to broaden their ambitions. She has also boosted the number of technology and international business courses.

But one of her biggest coups has been helping to forge a partnership with Peking University in Beijing. The international MBA program in China caters primarily to Chinese nationals, but it also gives American students the opportunity to study abroad in the rapidly developing country. Over the past few years, high-profile American schools have paired up with institutions elsewhere: for example, Wharton’s relationship with France’s top business school, INSEAD. However, the partnership between Fordham and Peking University is forward-thinking and relatively rare for a smaller school.

Under Ms. Smith’s direction, Fordham has taken advantage of the diversity of its campuses surroundings in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Tarrytown. Business students who cannot spend time abroad can have an international experience at home.

Students fluent in Spanish could work for a Spanish language radio station (possibly learning more about foreign languages and cultures than if they went to Spain, lived in a dorm filled with other Americans, and dined at the local McDonalds, Ms. Smith said).

Ms. Smith, born in Jersey City and now a resident of Bergen County, N.J., took her first economics class while in high school. She continued her studies at Rutgers, and upon graduating into a depressed job market, she immediately enrolled in an economics doctorate program, also at Rutgers, which she followed with a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton.

Later, she worked as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where she struggled to help salvage the city’s nearly bankrupt economy. Shortly thereafter, AT &T hired her to help it make the transition from a regulated monopoly into a competitive company.

Her business and research experience led her straight to Fordham, Ms. Smith said.

“It’s really the business of academia,” she explained. “I’m not teaching or researching. I’m running an academic institution.”

Although no longer working for large public firms, Ms. Smith has kept her finger on the pulse of the business world. Her positions on the board of the National Association of Securities Dealers, or NASD, keep her in tune with the concerns of corporate executives.

And on a less theoretical level, the connection has helped Fordham’s students work on projects for the NASD. Some have worked with the NASD’s chief information officer, helping him and other CIOs with large-scale projects, such as determining how firms should store information to ensure it can keep operating in case of another terrorist attack.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” Ms. Smith said. “The CIOs love it. It’s also pragmatic – the students can get experience working.”

While the NASD and other regulatory groups have recently been forced to improve their monitoring of dubious business practices, Fordham has continually emphasized ethics, in part due to the university’s religious tradition.

“Your values are what are enduring,” Ms. Smith clarified. “We try and make that a comfortable way of talking in every one of our classes.”

When it comes to her students, Ms. Smith wants to help enable people to “be who they want to be. “A former finance student of hers was pursuing an acting career, and had landed a leading role in the musical “Grease.” If this woman succeeded in her theater career, Ms. Smith said, her time at Fordham would teach her to manage her own finances. And if her stage career flopped, she could work in the business of theater.

“In schools, we are creating the future by enabling people to make the most important investment that is possible anywhere,” she said. “The investment in themselves.”