A "concentration" at Ross

The Ross School of Business does not have majors. Your diploma will say "Bachelor of Business Administration" but it won't say "Finance major" or anything like that. Just "BBA". But for many, many purposes (e.g., resumes) students like to label themselves, to state what it is that they're interested in. At times like these, the lack of a major can be problematic.

So, what's a student to do?

Essentially it comes down to a self-directed course of study, and you let the market determine the outcome. If you want to call yourself a finance concentrator, but you only take one finance class, you can still say that you have a finance concentration. But during interviews companies will find out that you haven't taken enough finance classes and you won't get any finance job offers.

So, you can call yourself whatever you want with whatever number of classes you want, but you should back it up with the appropriate set of classes.

And just what is appropriate? In different areas, a different number of courses seems to be needed for a concentration. It's probably 2 or 3 courses after the required course(s) in an area; however, this is just a rough rule of thumb.

In my time as BBA Director I haven't been able to find any official or even unofficial documentation on this very subject. Since I think it would be useful for students to have some direction in this matter, I have been gathering information from faculty and as many sources as I can find. Over the next few months I will be gathering information from seniors to help this process along. We'll be publishing this information in a new BBA Web page at some point.