Thursday, August 24, 2006

An exciting time of the year

Students are arriving back in town. The band is practicing. (I love hearing the band play off in the distance or driving by Elbel Field and watching them work on the tiniest details so that they can provide part of the Michigan experience on game days.) Faculty, including me, are gearing up for class. There's a buzz in the air throughout Ann Arbor as students start to arrive on campus.

We've also been busy in the BBA Program Office over the summer. Incredibly busy, as a matter of fact. We admitted three entering classes this last year, two of them over the summer. We read applications from November through July. I’ll have more detail later on this, but we were incredibly successful in our goal of admitting high quality, well rounded, analytically prepared students who have an interest in business.

Other summer activities that I will be discussing in future posts:

  • The Washington Campus program in our nation's capital
  • The new study abroad partnerships that we have developed
  • Our advising program (including our new advisor who came to us from LS&A)
  • Our outreach program so that we can communicate with students in ways that are predictable and easy for students
  • Our new admissions director and clarified admissions process
  • Our high school outreach efforts
  • The Mastery Project, a joint effort by the Ross School, the math department, and the economics department directed towards preparing at-risk students to succeed in analytical classes and in their careers
  • The Ann Arbor version of “The Big Dig” and how it will affect BBA classes

And then there’s my on-going work on revamping BIT200 “Personal Productivity with Information Technology”. It's been something like 5 years since I have taught in the BBA Program (that’s horrible!) and I am very much looking forward to doing this again. I would bet that I will have plenty more to say on that topic as the semester progresses.