CITI’s contribution to students can be seen through one testimonial of an alumnus, who wrote:
“Your unit gave me during 1983-84, while completing my MBA, the environment to research the then primitive concept of pay TV… I can recall the exact moment and place (on Broadway, near 116th St) where the solution occurred to me, and intend revisiting it on the way to seeing you on the 11th. I pitched the idea to an investor group of newspaper owners immediately after leaving Columbia in April 1984, they bought in, we set up a company called M-Net, launched the service, broke even in 1988 and did an IPO in 1990. … Over the years the group expanded out of its base in South Africa to become the biggest media group by far on the continent of Africa (you may have seen some recent coverage in [Time or on CNN]. We also manage the pay TV platforms (much like your DirecTV) in Greece and Thailand, and own 50% of the biggest instant messaging service in China called QQ, which some 48 million Chinese use… I should like you to know that, if your unit never existed, at least my life and the lives of our 11,800 employees in almost 50 countries would have been very different.”