I have previously written about Ross’s support for dual majors and minors (in other disciplines); read this post for a better idea of what I think about this. However, I haven’t ever listed the wide variety of disciplines that students have pursued for their dual or minor. Here is a list of them:
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Don’t read this as an exhaustive list. Read it as an indication of the variety of possibilities that lie before you as a UM/Ross student.
My attitude to the preferred admit (PA) program might surprise some people. (And I’m writing about it here so that incoming students don’t end up being surprised.) My goal for the PA students is that they use their freshman year to immerse themselves in the activities and culture of the university while at the same time becoming acquainted with Ross. The University of Michigan is a complicated enough place without us overwhelming the PAs with a bunch of Ross-related requirements. The diversity of options (programs, people, events, classes) at the university is probably our greatest strength. I want the PAs to be comfortable about all of the resources outside of Ross available to them so that they can take advantage of them during their time at UM.
We don’t let the PAs simply roam around the campus without interacting with us. We started off the year with a short orientation whose purpose was generally to allow the PAs to meet each other and to get introduced to our staff. Starting soon thereafter we offered a series of weekly seminars (attendance required) just for the PAs. The purpose of these seminars is to introduce the PAs to business and to Ross. The following are those seminars that we offered this year. Next year will most likely be somewhat different but the general structure and purpose will be the same.
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We will be updating this series of seminars over this summer so don’t hold up this list to me as some kind of promise for future services to be rendered.
In addition, during the year PAs can use both their LS&A advisors and their Ross advisors to help them put together their academic plan. Given that many of these students are planning on working toward a dual degree or minor, these academic plans need to be constructed fairly carefully.
What we are trying to do is to give PAs a bit of a head start into business and Ross since they are “our” students. For those sophomores who do not get into Ross as PAs, the information that we provide to PAs is not something that they wouldn’t be able to pick up during their time at Ross; however, this does allow PAs to learn about business and Ross without being under the academic pressure of upper-level classes. We think this low-key introduction to business provides a reasonable place to start for students who we want to integrate fully into the university’s life.
Students frequently ask what classes they should take. “What are the best classes?” This is a both an easy and difficult question to answer.
Yes, sometimes you will have to take “required” classes, and these aren’t always the most fun. But look for a professor who really loves the class (if you have a choice), and hop on for the ride. Might as well make the most of it.
The graduation ceremony for the BBA class of 2007 (and other programs) was tonight. It was actually a fairly nice program. Steve Case, formerly of AOL Time Warner, was the main speaker. He made four main points:
Lots of good points can be made here. Given his background these points carried additional weight. I enjoyed listening to him. Before him there were some pretty good speeches by students — funny, passionate, and insightful. Good stuff.
One of the more difficult tasks that I have as BBA Program Director is to answer the question “What is it about Ross & UM that makes it so special that I (or ‘my son’ or ‘my daughter’ or...) should go there?” Well, it’s not hard to answer — it’s just hard to answer in any kind of succinct and compelling way. The difficulty is that our strength is in the diversity of options that a student has when he or she is here. A student has many different paths that he or she might take:
I think you can see how hard it is to describe the Ross and UM experience in one short simple sentence. So, what we’re doing to try to help this process along is to make videos about specific experiences that BBAs have had during their time at UM and Ross. The first one (that we just posted) is about Neal Uppal and the fantastic Domestic Corps/internship experience he had during the summer between his junior and senior years. You can see this movie if you go to the BBA home page. We will be posting more of these during the coming year.
In a previous post I discussed the complex relationship between the decision of whether or not to have cohorts and the ability of students to have a flexible course registration process. Here at Ross we need a flexible course registration process — or, at least, we need one at least as flexible as the one we have now. A more flexible process would probably also be welcome as long as it could be implemented in a reasonable way by a reasonable number of people working a reasonable number of hours.
It would be easy to implement a very flexible system if we just got rid of cohorts — the practice of putting students into groups that persist across courses. Simply let students register for whatever courses they want that are still available when their registration time comes up. Of course, this doesn’t allow Ross to continue to use cohorts.
I have talked with about 30 seniors over the last two weeks in some depth about this issue. I can’t give you any conclusive proof that what they told me is perfectly representative of the rest of the class, but I can tell you that these students really, really are happy that Ross had cohorts (or “sections”, as they call them):
Any decision to abolish the use of sections would alter the environment of the school and is outside my current goal: to improve the flexibility of the registration process (within the confines of our cohort-based system).
I have received several recommendations from students and staff related to this situation and we’re beginning to narrow in on a proposal. I have already run this exact scenario by about 20 seniors and they liked it. Note that the following isn’t necessarily implementable within the university’s registration process, but it’s worth thinking about. I am writing all of this so that I might hear from students and staff what they think about it.
Here’s the process that I’m thinking about:
I’m not sure how to handle students who are not able to get into a core course section that does not overlap with the electives that she has gotten into. The real problem that I see with this is whether or not there is time to do all that this process requires. I look forward to hearing 1) from students about whether or not this process seems reasonable and which parts might be more important than others, and 2) from staff about whether or not this process can, or even should be, implemented.
Again, I’m sure that I will be writing more about this at a later time.
No exciting news here today, just a bit of reflection. It is such a stressful time of the year for everyone: students taking exams and worrying about their grades, faculty grading term projects and exams and worried about assigning grades, and lots of events for everyone that can be fun but can also be stressful if you are trying to ensure they go off well.
It is also, certainly, a happy time of the year. Students are done with classes (who cares what I got in the class because I’m done!), faculty are soon to be done with grading (and that’s always a relief), and the daily press of scheduled events is soon to be over.
However, mostly, for me this is a sad time of the year. Students have to say goodbye to their friends who they won’s see much, if at all, over the summer. This was always the worst part of summer for me when I was a student. I hated for summer to come because I would have to go home and live with my parents. (Not that they were anything but good to me, but they weren’t my friends and I had to live by their rules and all of that. They were paying the bills so it’s not like this was torture. Ah, the pains of growing up.) I’ve also spent quite a bit of time with seniors over the last few weeks and have seen, up close and personal, what goods kids they are and what good representatives of UM, Ross, and the BBA Program they will be as they go out into the world. I’m going to miss having them around. And I’m also dedicating myself to have more frequent contact with more students. I’m in the midst of trying to figure out just how I can do this.
We had our BBA Celebration in Rackham Auditorium yesterday. It’s a beautiful facility and one that I always enjoy visiting for whatever reason. (That’s not to say that I won’t enjoy having the event in the auditorium in our new building in two years.) I had a great talk presenting to the graduating students my summary of their experiences here and my hopes and good wishes for them for the future. Then with the sharing of good food, highlighted by a chocolate fountain, we went on our way. We’ll see each other at graduation one last time.
And before I know it, it will be September and we’ll start the process all over again.
Over the last five years or so, the BBA Program has had about 350-360 students graduate per senior class. We had never before had such a large graduating class. Given the high yield rate of students who were admitted to the program and students who ended up enrolling in classes, we usually admitted no more than 360-370 students after their sophomore year.
Now we’re playing a different game. We are admitting students directly from high school and after their freshman year. The yield rate is much lower for the high school students than the freshman students because they have not yet picked a college to attend. The school now has two decisions to make: what percentage of the graduating class should be admitted directly out of high school, and how large should the graduating class be? I’ll take these questions one at a time (though, of course, they are related).
Since Ross had never before admitted high school students, we have been conservative in our first two years related to the size question. We enrolled a class of 70 students in 2006 and hope to enroll around 100 students in 2007. We will continue to monitor the performance of these “preferred admit” students as we strive to determine how to create the best possible class of graduating BBAs.
As stated before, recently we have had graduating classes of around 350 students. We are in a transition period here at Ross because of the construction. We are going to have access to limited classroom space here on the Business School campus until sometime late fall 2008. However, after that, the Ross School is going to have more space than ever at our disposal — not a lot more for classes, but some. The question becomes how are we going to use it (as a school). Do we have a larger Day MBA program or BBA Program? Or do we add specialized degree programs such as the Masters in Supply Chain? Do we add more programs jointly with other schools and, if so, which schools? Do we add more electives, and to which program? These are not easy decisions to make and have not been fully decided yet.
We are looking at all possibilities. We know that there are students who are not in the BBA Program who would like to be in the program and would succeed once enrolled. But, as discussed, the situation is not that straight forward. I will write about this as more decisions are made.
At the Ross BBA Program we currently cohort our students; that is, we assign students to specific sections across several different classes. Cohorts provide the benefit of giving the student a set of students with which they can bond more strongly than they could without the cohort because of repeated interaction with those students. As such cohorts provide a more socially safe environment for students.
Not all is positive related to cohorts. Students don’t get to know as many students as they might otherwise; in a program as small as the Ross BBA Program, that probably should be addressed. Further, academically cohorts aren’t always positive; students can get too comfortable with each other; students can get slotted into defined roles from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves; and faculty can have a hard time breaking into the culture that the students have defined and created (from previous classroom experiences with each other).
I have been thinking a lot recently about cohorts and related issues:
Generally, over the last couple of years I have moved Ross to a more flexible policy related to requests to get out of specific cohort assignments. The reasons for opting out that I have looked favorably upon come from students who have an academic plan in place for their remaining time at Michigan (and have had that plan for a while), and a specific course that is needed to fulfill that plan conflicts with a core course assignment. We want to be as supportive as possible of students who want to challenge themselves academically.
Now that we have a three year program with two fairly significant years of core courses (instead of just one as we had before), we have started out assigning students to cohorts one year at a time. That is, a student’s cohort in the sophomore year will be composed of different students than in the junior year. We believe that this will provide students with a “home” in which the student will be comfortable but will also allow him or her to meet more students during the course of his or her time at Ross.
This issue has come up more frequently for two reasons. First, we have more students getting dual majors and minors so their schedules have to be planned better, are more specified, and have less leeway. Second, the classrooms that we use for BBA core courses have less extra space than we used to have in the old building and less space than we will have in the new building. This means that we can’t simply move a student from one section into another because it is entirely possible that there would not be a chair for the student to sit in.
I have not decided one way or the other what to do. I am trying to come up with the best solution for the most students. If you have any thoughts on this from whatever perspective, please let those thoughts be known. I’m sure that I will have more thoughts on this later and, eventually, I will provide more information about what we end up doing.
When you’re meeting people, you may not realize it but you represent groups that you’re affiliated with. The other day this point was made to me when I received a very nice email from the Dean’s executive assistant (Audra Asher) that relayed a conversation she had with the Dean. Here’s the background.
The Management & Organizations (M&O for those of us at Ross) core course for juniors had an assignment in which student groups were to investigate an organization from several viewpoints. One particular group wanted to interview the Dean. They sent an invitation to him a couple of weeks early and asked for 30 minutes of his time. They arrived on time, conducted the interview with several students taking turns leading the interview, told him when their 30 minutes was over, wrapped up the interview, and sent a thank you note the next day.
The note that I received from Audra was effusive in her praise for the group and thanked me for helping prep them for the meeting. Well, let me tell you that I had nothing to do with prepping them. They did it all themselves. From my way of looking at things, this was just BBAs being BBAs. I have the utmost confidence in the ability of BBAs to act appropriately in these professional situations.
The Dean doesn’t have much time or many opportunities to meet with small groups of BBAs in the course of his day. When he does, it’s probably because of some issue that has come up and needs to be addressed. This doesn’t leave him much of an opportunity to have a reasoned, thoughtful exchange of ideas with the students. This was one such opportunity and he and Audra came away extremely impressed with this group of students. Better, he also left the interview feeling pretty darned good about BBAs and the BBA Program. The Dean represents all of the students and programs at Ross (BBA, Day MBA, Evening MBA, Global MBA, Executive MBA, MAcc, Exec Ed and, soon, Masters of Supply Chain) to a wide variety of audiences. The more good stories that he can tell (and this is definitely one), the better he can sell the benefits of hiring or working with the BBAs.
The students went into this meeting with the goal of getting some information for a group project for a core course. I’m guessing that they didn’t give a second thought to these ancillary effects when they were in the meeting. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And that’s just the point that I’m making. Any particular student isn’t just one person — he or she represents the BBA Program, Ross, and the University of Michigan (among other groups). If that person does well (or poorly), he or she is affecting his or her own reputation and that of the other groups with which he or she is affiliated.
This happens whether or not the student realizes it. It happens when students are at a hotel participating in the BBA Formal; it happens during job interviews; it happens during a student’s group projects in his or her LS&A classes; it happens when the student is working with a company during a class project. All of these affect the reputation of the BBA Program and Ross. All of our students are our ambassadors. We professors take this role seriously; we staff members try to admit students who will represent us well. We all try to instill in these students the pride that we feel in working at Ross. It does all BBAs good when a single BBA conducts him or herself professionally or takes pride in a job well-done. I continue to take pride in my association with BBAs. It’s an easy thing to do.
This last weekend was the deadline for applying to the 3-year admissions cycle of the BBA Program. Again, we are quite blessed with the interest that students express in the program. Nearly 900 students — historically, these have been very qualified students and I don’t expect this year to be any different — applied for admission into an entering class that is severely limited this year to less than 280 students. The reason for this limit is the size of the classrooms that we are using while we are in temporary quarters. We simply cannot squeeze more than 70 students into the classrooms that we will be using until December 2008 (a conservative estimate for when our new building will be done). After that date we should have a bit of leeway as to how many students we are able to accept into the program; for now, we are going to have to hold tight to that limit.
As in years past, I am very much looking forward to admitting a strong group of smart, hard-working students who are interested in integrating the study of business into their undergraduate studies. Thanks to all who applied to us. It’s the competition among these many strong applicants that makes us great.
