Trying to describe the Ross & UM experience

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:

• Finance is our most popular option but we also have significant numbers of students who go into accounting, consulting, marketing, and general management development programs.
• Chicago is a popular destination for students, and so is New York. But when a student says that she is going to work in Atlanta, Cleveland, or Washington, D.C., no one is really that surprised.
• Many students go directly to work for a large company, but we also have a significant number of students who go to law school or to work in more entrepreneurial environments.
• When students are here, they can be involved in classes or programs that take them to Washington, D.C., Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Central Europe.
• Many students are involved in dozens of different community service events around southeastern Michigan while they are here.
• Student summer experiences range from working on Wall Street or consulting companies to going through Domestic Corps to work with not-for-profit companies.
• About 10% of our students have a dual major or minor in subjects ranging from Economics to Spanish to History of Art to Political Science.
• For some students, their favorite class was their business statistics class (if you can imagine) or their business law class or their finance class or their Bottom of the Pyramid elective or their Corporation & Society elective... The list is quite long and shows how many different types of students we have.

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.