The student has just graduated with high grades from a university in Atlanta and starts in his or her position, along with three other undergraduates from esteemed business schools. His or her first position out of college is a management training program position with a prestigious bank at its headquarters. Let’s say the student chosen is majoring in finance. ![]() Strengthen presentation and Excel application skills through relevant use in weekly assignments.īefore covering the Core Purposes, I create a hypothetical situation based on a random student’s actual major.Push students to become more strategic, more creative, and more resourceful problem solvers.Provide broad and comprehensive foundation in marketing management including technology driven topics.Realizing the Importance of Problem Solving Skills to Career Successĭuring the first session of a marketing class, I review the Core Purpose of the course: Unfortunately like in many business school courses, these Corporate Finance students were robbed of worthwhile problem solving opportunities and only expected to mechanically “plug in” some numbers. Third is confirming the meaningfulness of these comparisons by verifying that their industry is comparable, and their relative size is similar, through some appropriate standard, such as annual sales, property units, square footage of operation, etc. The second step is analyzing the financial strengths and weaknesses by comparing the ratios between the companies in the study. ![]() The real-world application of financial ratios would be to first compute ratios for companies that share a common industry and relative size. The students simply had to pick numbers from financial statements and perform math calculations for about 15 common ratios. ![]() Lost Problem Solving OpportunitiesĪn example of this gap was in a Corporate Finance course where I was instructed to follow the learning objectives developed by the course coordinator. Far more valuable in preparing today’s business students to solve tomorrow’s business challenges is a curriculum that focuses on problem solving. Too much of today’s business school curriculum involves memorizing and regurgitating terminology or mechanically plugging numbers into formulas without any analysis. A top objective of undergraduate business schools should include preparing students to be highly productive to their future employers upon arrival, but there is a wide gap between academia and the real world today.
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