Our lead feature is the "President's Letter" contributed by Betty Whitten, University of Georgia. In the May issue, Betty reviewed the Institute's objectives for the coming year. In this issue, she focuses on the internationalization objective and discusses the Institute's progress in that area. In the "International Issues" column, Don Bonsper and Chris Keller, Defense Resources Management Institute (DRMI), Naval Postgraduate School, discuss the DRMI and its role in U.S. international educational efforts in countries with emerging democracies.

The "Production/Operations Management" column features a discussion by Daniel Steele, University of South Carolina, on the current state of P/OM education. He approaches the issue by asking and offering answers to questions about whom P/OM serves and the value which the discipline provides. The "Information Technology" column takes a look at the impact of the current downsizing trend on information technology. Lance Eliot, Eliot & Associates, describes how companies are simultaneously expecting IT shops to streamline and, at the same time, take on extra work to support the downsizing efforts of other functional areas in the firm.

With the annual meeting rapidly approaching, placement is an issue on the minds of many doctoral students and faculty. In the "Doctoral Issues" column, Hal Jacobs, Decision Line's managing editor, offers insights into DSI's placement message service at the annual meeting. Hal's experiences in managing the message operation for the last decade give him a unique vantage point for suggesting how to most efficiently use this system.

Andrew Vazsonyi, University of San Francisco, offers his thoughts on the value of continued emphasis on mathematical models in our curricula in his column, "The Specialist with a Universal Mind." He offers the opinion that there is no need to teach the algebraic formulations of many of the problems covered in texts, and that emphasis should be shifted to spreadsheets as a "primary model."

In the "From The Bookshelf" column, Andrew Ruppel, University of Virginia, also addresses spreadsheets in decision-making. He reviews several new quantitative methods and decision-making texts which use either spreadsheets or cases and case studies as part of their content.