By Elliot Davis
Recently, I have been assisting with preliminary research involved in the preparation for an event in April: the Redesigning Undergraduate Curriculum Symposium (RUC). Much like its predecessor, Redesigning the MBA: A Curriculum Development Symposium, RUC aims to provide its participants with an understanding of the changing undergraduate business degree landscape and the ensuing challenges and opportunities, along with implementation strategies and best practices. Throughout our initial research phase, I was struck by the inventiveness of many of the experiential programs and centers we had the opportunity to learn about.
The experiential programs we learned about can be categorized into several distinctive buckets, including service learning, cultural immersion, business planning/new venture creation, simulation, and internship/live case. A small sampling of these programs is listed in the table below. The majority of these experiential courses aim to equip students with the skills that are increasingly becoming an important factor in the work place. Their goal: to make their graduates even more competitive in the job market, and provide opportunities to refine critical skills such as leadership, communication, thinking and reasoning skills, and global awareness.
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Business Plan/ New Venture Creation |
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Simulation |
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Service Learning |
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Cultural Immersion |
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Internship/Live Case |
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Often, undergraduate programs combine experiences in two or more categories, as is the case at the University of California, Berkley's Haas School of Business, which embraces both simulation and service learning in its undergraduate curriculum. The Center for Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH) coordinates an integrative capstone experience for seniors called Leading Strategy and Implementation. This experience has two distinctly different yet interconnected components. Students first engage in a simulation where they are teamed into an account management group. Students make a series of business decisions and submit a report on their proceedings to the faculty. Subsequently, a selection of these students take the follow-up course, where they redo the simulation but as the CEO of their team. The wrinkle? Their team is made up of five local, at-risk high school students from the Bay area. The high school students make their own decisions under the supervision of the facilitating Haas undergraduate, who acts as both boss and mentor. This experience is designed to serve the community while providing hands-on leadership and team building opportunities for the participating Haas senior.
Yonsei University's Creative Leadership Curriculum focuses on a series of six programs designed to instill students with the school's three core values: creativity, global perspective, and integrity. Through this curriculum, Yonsei delivers a blend of cultural immersion and live case to its students through uGET (undergraduate Global Experience Team-project). uGET involves significant field work with students receiving sponsorships from overseas companies. The students travel to their designated company overseas for four to eight weeks, perform research and analysis, and then complete a report and presentation for their sponsoring company.
One other particularly unique program which adopts the cultural immersion category for experiential learning, still in its infancy but with very ambitious goals, involves a partnership between three universities (The University of Southern California, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Bocconi University in Italy) where students will study on at least three different continents and subsequently earn three bachelor's degrees, one from each of the participating institutions. This program, called the World Bachelor in Business (WBB), will admit its first cohort in Fall 2013. The WBB's worldwide approach aims to broaden its students’ global awareness through immersion in three divergent cultures.
The internship experience still remains one of the fundamental ways for undergraduates to gain real-world experience before graduating into the work force. Many schools noted that their students continue to engage in internship programs to supplement their academic experience. In particular, the Trulaske College of Business' BA 4500 requires an internship experience. BA 4500 is the final component in the college's Professional Development Program (PDP), a requisite for graduation. The PDP offers seminars from top level executives, skill-building workshops, and a professional development course focused on business communication and presentation.
As evidenced, the variety in undergraduate experiential coursework abounds, fueling our desire for rewarding dialogue over the future of the undergraduate curriculum. RUC aims to explore this topic of experiential learning, including the dissection of several innovative programs, but will also encapsulate a much wider range of emerging undergraduate curricular trends, including topics such as the development of critical thinking skills, the integration of the business disciplines, and various pedagogical advancements.
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