Tonight’s graduation ceremony was a good one

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:

• Business is about people, passion, and perseverance.
• Business is a great vehicle for bringing about social change.
• The next big opportunities are in health care and the environment.
• Business people should take bigger risks than they are accustomed to taking.

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.

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.

Having flexible course registration along with cohorts

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):

• Many students bond with their section-mates so much so that they become their best friends.
• Section-mates are a student’s support group as she goes through a difficult set of core courses.
• A student’s section is her home in which she can gain a sense of community in a large university.
• A student’s experiences with her section-mates are some of the dominant thoughts as she reflects back on her time at Ross and UM.

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:

1. The University publishes its schedule, including Ross courses.
2. Students know which section to which she is assigned for the current year.
3. Students look at the Ross courses and bid for electives.
4. Students are notified which electives they successfully bid for. Students have these classes loaded into their schedules.
5. Each student looks at the Ross electives that she got into and the UM electives that she wants to get it. The student determines if these electives conflict with one of the core courses to which he or she is assigned.
6. If the student doesn’t find such a conflict (which would be the normal state of affairs), then the student doesn’t need to do anything and registration proceeds as normal.
7. However, if the student does find a conflict, then she would petition to opt out of the section assignment process for a specific course. Petitions would be more likely to be approved if the student had previously (that is, several weeks or months ago) set up a long-term course of study that requires a certain LS&A or Ross elective to be taken (for example, in order to complete a dual major or minor); they would be less likely to be approved if the student simply wants to get out of an 8:30 section of a course. Of course, the student would end up not being with her section, but this would be a decision that the student thinks is best for her overall.
8. Before any UM students begin to register, all of the students who did not opt out of section assignments would be pre-loaded into the appropriate sections for the core courses. The students who did opt out of these assignments would not be pre-loaded into courses.
9. During registration, students would register for courses as usual; however, students who opted-out of their core sections would also have to register for whatever section of the core that is available. Students would not be guaranteed a spot in a “better” section or even a different section during open registration. He or she would simply be taking a chance that a better section might be open when his or her registration slot comes up.
10. After registration is over, students who for some reason still want to change sections would go to the CTools course swap Web site that we have set up. At this site, the student would attempt to swap her spot in one section with a student in another section of the same course.

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.

Stressed, happy, and sad

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.

Class size for BBA Program

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.

Cohorts or not?

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:

• Should students be grouped into cohorts for their core classes?
• How long should those cohorts exist — that is, should they have different cohorts each year?
• How rigid should Ross be in enforcing the assignment of cohorts — what type of reason should a student have that would enable him or her to opt out of the cohort assignment?
• If students are not assigned to cohorts, how can we ensure that attractive sections (e.g.., those not taught at 8:30am) are at least theoretically available to all students? And, even if we can ensure this, should we ensure this?

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.

Representing the BBA Program

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.

Interest in the 3-year program

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.

Purpose of having freshman and sophomore admissions

The Ross School has two paths by which students can gain admission to the program. The first is the “preferred admit” program for high school seniors and the second is the standard program for college freshmen.

Our preferred admit program allows us to target those high school students who have both built a very attractive resume out of high school and know that they are interested in getting a business education. After gaining admission to this program, they can become full-fledged Ross students their sophomore year if they maintain a 3.3 GPA during their freshman year while taking several required classes (including microeconomics, freshman writing, and a math class).

The standard admissions program yields us several types of students, all of whom have done well at Ross in the past:

• Students who are late bloomers and distinguish themselves more in their college application than they did out of high school,
• Students who discovered their interest in business after enrolling at Michigan, and
• Students who, though they distinguished themselves in high school and were interested in business, were not chosen during the preferred admissions process. Unfortunately, there are lots of students who I would like to admit into the program out of high school that I simply don’t have slots for in the PA program. This means that they have to re-apply after their freshman year and I can only hope that they do so.

Concerning the relative sizes of the PA and standard admissions programs, I would like to balance them so that the third type is minimized while still allowing a strong and large group of the first and second types. It will probably be several years before we know what the proper balance should be between the two admissions paths. I have a feeling, though I am not sure, that there is an actual difference between the students in the two admissions paths — not in their performance or eventual career success but in their interests. We like the diversity of student interests that we have always had here at Ross, and I don’t want us to mess that up. If having two separate admissions routes helps us maintain our general diversity, then we’re going to have two admissions routes.

We have strength in finance, consulting, accounting, operations, marketing, etc. We have a strong job placement success in the Northeast and Midwest (because that’s where our students are generally interested in working) though we generally are able to provide some help in placing students wherever they want to go. I think this diversity is a strength of ours. I will continue to be a strong proponent of maintaining these two paths so that we can learn more about the strengths of each and maintain the diversity of our student body.

Competition for preferred admit program

We are extremely blessed here at the Ross School. Through a combination of factors, there is a great competition for the slots in the preferred admit program by which high school seniors can gain tentative admittance to the Ross School. (I say “tentative” because these students have to maintain a 3.3 GPA during their freshman year at Michigan before they become full-fledged students of the Ross School.)

This program was approved as a two-year pilot program by the Ross faculty in which we would hope to enroll about 70 freshmen per year. Last year got off to a great start and we were able to enroll a great group of students. This year has been even better. (The following numbers are tentative but are indicative of how competitive the program is.) UM received about 25,000 applications this year. Of those, about 2300 indicated that they would like to be considered for the preferred admissions program. 2300! I went to the Ross faculty and said that, though 70 sounded like a good number a couple of years ago when the program was approved, I’d like to enroll about 100 students this year. I showed them the evidence of the quality of these students and they were convinced. Thus, this year we should have an entering class of 100 preferred admit students.

We do not know if 100 will be the number of slots for this program into the future. I bet that it’s going to increase in coming years but we’ll just have to see how the applications look. For now, I’m glad that we have been able to provide an avenue for these students to get into Ross right out of high school. I look forward to seeing great results from them (and all Ross students) in coming years.

Work load

In BusinessWeek’s recent ranking of undergraduate business programs, they reported that Ross School students report that they put in more hours per week studying than students at other schools. I wouldn’t dispute this. Probably surprisingly, while I think that putting in the work is a good thing, I’m not going to hang my hat on this and say that this indicates that we have the best students around. While I do think that we have the best students around, I’m not sure that this indicates this. To me, it simply indicates to me how interested they are in their studies, in getting a good grade, and in making sure that their transcript looks like they want it to going into each recruiting season.

I think this willingness to work hard is a distinguishing characteristic of Ross students. The fact that it’s distinguishing manifests itself in two ways. First, first-year students (from other schools and, especially, other universities) find the transition to the demanded and expected workload at Ross very difficult indeed. Many students have been able to get good grades in other schools without putting in the hours required at Ross; they find this new work load unexpected, at the least, and, more likely, hard to comprehend. “I’ve always been able to get good grades while partying three to four nights a week!” We hear this every year and we have to break the news that it’s no longer possible to live that way consistently and get the grades they are used to getting.

The second way that this willingness to work hard manifests itself is in the success that our students have both in getting good jobs in demanding professions (consulting, financial analysts, et al.) and in making quick transitions to successful performance in those jobs because they are so used to working long, hard hours. BBA’s wildly successful job placement record is a matter of public record so I need not go into that here. Their success in those jobs can be both inferred from the fact that these companies continue to come back to Ross to recruit and supported by personal anecdotes that I have heard from students and recruiters about how well the transition of Ross students goes relative to students from other schools.

Let me close by stating that we’re certainly not all-work-and-no-play. Not like that at all. More like work-hard-and-play-hard. Just don’t come to Ross and think “I’m smart; I’ll do fine.” Well, as far as I can tell, almost everyone here is both smart and hard-working — and if they’re not, they’re really good at fooling a lot of people a lot of the time. It’s a challenging and fun place to be.

BusinessWeek ranks us #5

The BusinessWeek undergraduate business rankings came out today. We moved up to #5 this year from last year’s #6. It is quite an honor to be ranked as high as this among this group of top notch schools. We are pleased that we have moved up but, as competitive as we are, we would like to receive a higher ranking — but only if it is an accurate reflection of our status. We are continuing to do all that we can to improve the experience of Ross students while they are here and hope that these improvements are reflected in the next rankings.

There are several parts of the survey that are of immediate interest to Ross students:

• The best undergrad b-schools: This is the lead article for the survey. It highlights four schools including Ross.
• Undergrad Rankings 2007: the rankings themselves. Ross is ranked #5.
• Ross profile: there are some errors that I am going to try to get fixed
• Business immersion the U of M way: a slide show of the Michigan and Ross campus
• Cracking the books: a table listing the (self-reported) number of hours per week that business students say they study. Ross students reported that they work, on average, 21 hours per week, most in the survey. The average for all schools is around 14 hours per week.

Let me know if you have any questions related to this survey.

Winter break

I don't normally go on the road during winter break — too much to do. But this year is different. I'm taking my oldest daughter to Lakeland, FL to watch Detroit Tigers' spring training for a few days. I'm looking forward to sitting out in the warm sun and chillin' for a bit. I have never been to spring training before so this is a real treat.

A new class on web-based information resources

I spent much of the end of January and beginning of February designing a new class that I am going to teach in Fall 2007. This course is BIT330, Web-based information resources. All of what I currently know about this course is available on this Web site. On this set of pages I list the assignments, schedule, books and other information about this course. I will continue updating these pages over the next several months, but they are quite close to the form they will have next September.

I think this course would be useful for nearly any undergrad (and, actually, any master student, PhD student, or professor) who is going to use the Web over the next several years to look for information or keep up with current events. Here's the beginning description on the course Web page:

Do you want to learn about how to use Google and Yahoo to a more in-depth level than the average student? Do you want to know where and how to find interesting blogs, images, and podcasts? How about RSS feeds and email alerts? Do you want to know how to use software to monitor Web pages without programming? Finally, do you want to learn how to stay current on developments in all of these areas after you leave UM? (After all, technology is going to continue to change after you leave school.)

Any rising junior or senior at Ross is eligible for this course and would benefit from taking it. Let me know if you have any questions by posting a comment here or, if you would rather not, by emailing me.

The value of an education at Ross

There has been quite a swirl in the Michigan Daily (the university's daily student paper) about the value of a BBA. First, a student who apparently didn't enjoy his time here at Ross wrote an opinion article and, now, a BBA wrote a response describing his much more positive experience. Speaking as the BBA Faculty Director, I hope that readers take seriously the points made in the second article and discount the first as the rant of a student who is still finding his way.

Speaking as a parent and educator, my position expands somewhat on this. As a student, your education should be a highly personal journey. Each school, department, professor, student, class, and extracurricular activity has something to offer you, and what you can get out of any one experience is different than what someone else can get out of it. For better or for worse. You are unique and bring something different to the table that differs from what someone else might bring — again, for better or for worse. How your strengths, weaknesses, hopes, desires, and attitude match up with each particular situation all goes in to the possible value that you might gain from it.

Further, the actual value that you gain from any one situation (school, department, professor, student, class, or extracurricular) will frequently not be clear to you until many years after you have completed the activity. I know that I did not enjoy the professor of my introductory calculus class as a freshman while I was a freshman but, by my senior year, he had become a valued acquaintance and advisor. I also absolutely never enjoyed my modern algebra class and cannot point to any particular event in my life that would have changed because I took Western Civ. I still cannot point to any specific benefit that I got from either one of these classes. However, looking back I absolutely know that the training (in how to think, analyze, argue, listen, write, and read) I received from my undergraduate education was, if not priceless, valued more highly than anything that I ever will, might, or could own.

Regardless of all of this, a student still has to go to some particular school at some particular university. This is where I feel pretty good about Ross and UM. We have a lot of strength in a lot of different academic areas; we have really hard working, smart students; we have dedicated, smart, interested faculty; we have a lot of resources (money, centers, staff) in many areas. We try to communicate these strengths as clearly as possible to possible applicants to minimize the possibility of having enrolled students who end up not liking or appreciating their time at Ross. While we may not be a perfect fit for everyone, we offer opportunities to many types of people who, if they take advantage of those opportunities, can prepare themselves for success in life (no matter how you want to define "success").

Does this mean we're right for everyone? No. Does this mean that everyone who is admitted should stay because we're so great? No. What it does mean is that many students will, while they are here, have many opportunities to work with many other smart students in many interesting situations. Further, they will not only have the opportunity to have a great, well-rounded undergraduate experience but they will also graduate having had many opportunities to prepare themselves for life after graduation. Other schools and universities probably try to provide the same type of preparation; they are not my concern. It is my concern to do what I can to provide more and better preparation to more Ross/UM students while they are here. We have been and will continue to work on this.

WSJ article on tagging

In the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal on February 10-11, there was an interesting article "The Wizards of Buzz" by Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen. This article focused on the influence of people who tag heavily and well at sites such as digg, reddit, Newsvine, and, my favorite, del.icio.us. Anyone who takes the BIT introductory class at Ross knows that I think that del.icio.us is a great way to keep your bookmarks, organize your bookmarks, and locate and discover new information. This article highlights the influence that prolific taggers can have on other companies and people.

I was interviewed for this article and thought I was going to be mentioned in it, but it was not to be. Oh well. At least they wrote the article and helped make the point I make in the class that these sites (or sites like them) will be important parts of our Internet future.

Dual majors and minors

One of the reasons that I pushed for the creation of the 3-year BBA Program was that I thought it would increase the chances for students who want to get a dual major with business or to get a minor along with their business major. Well, we are not even one year into the change to the new program but I can give some preliminary results on this point.

We have increased the number of students who are pursuing a dual/minor from about 3% two years ago to about 10% today. And this number should continue to increase since the sophomores are not anywhere near the deadline for filing (which really is sometime in their junior year). I think this change is fantastic for Ross and for BBAs.

First, though, you may wonder why this increase has occurred. The reasons I can come up with are institutional support, time, and student support.

• Institutional support: Rob has worked with Academic Services to make sure that the schools or departments in question can come together to figure out all of the details related to course sequencing and requirements and put them together in a way that students will be able to fulfill.
• Time: None of this would matter if students were not BBAs during their sophomore year. This gets them better access to the advisors and gives them three years in which to complete their academic plans for the dual/minors. The student's schedule is less full with business classes because they are stretched out over 3 years instead of 2; this allows them to take longer sequences of courses from other departments (as well as from Ross).
• Student support: Our BBA Program Student advisors (Rob, Katie, and Michael) can help students think about the possibilities for making the most of their time at UM and are available to help students put together their academic plan in order to make the dual/minor a reality.

Okay, so it's easier for students and they are taking advantage of the opportunity. I happen to think this is a great thing for students, UM, and Ross.

• Students: I think it's a great thing for students because I believe a broad-based, liberal arts education is in the student's best interest. I believe it will lead them to live more interesting, productive, and fulfilling lives. I also think it will make them better employees and better citizens.
• UM: UM's strength as an institution is its strength across a wide variety of disciplines and the accompanying strength of the affiliated faculty and students. Attracting more students who have an interest in a broad range of disciplines will only strengthen UM's already diverse character.
• Ross: Ross's strength is in general management and its overall strength in many disciplines (as opposed to being known specifically for a strength in finance or marketing). Ross does not really allow students to take 75% of their undergraduate education in business; it's more like 50%. We do not want our students to focus too narrowly on business; we want them to develop their other interests.

The Ross BBA Program wants to attract students who have a broad range of interests. Students should not come to Ross if they want to student finance or marketing (or whatever) to the exclusion of other disciplines. They should come here because they have an interest in business, want to develop it, but know that there's more to life than options or product line extensions.

Welcome back, Scott

I've been away for a while. I was teaching last semester and it all got to be too much. I was teaching 210 students, grading 350 students, reading and scanning the blogs of 120 groups of students, and scanning the del.icio.us tags of the same 120 groups. Just got to be too much. Didn't see the family barely at all; didn't provide as much direction to the other folks in my department. I'm just now getting a bit out from under it all.

As part of that effort, I'll start posting a few entries here as well.

A couple interesting BusinessWeek articles

For those of you who might have questions about the newly-structured BBA Program, there are a couple of interesting and useful articles in BusinessWeek:

• “Big Changes for Michigan BBAs”, September 27, 2006: An interview with Michele Thompson, head of Ross Undergraduate Admissions.
• “A "Luxurious Position" at Michigan”, April 17, 2006: An interview with Al Cotrone, director of the Office of Career Development at Ross.

Taken together, these articles provide a lot of clarifying detail about getting into the program, about the program itself, and about getting a job after graduating.

While I don’t have anything to add to the articles themselves, I am going to take the opportunity and reply to a couple of the more uninformed comments at the end of the Thompson interview:

• We have lots of reasons for having a direct admit program, and copying Indiana’s program (or anyone else’s) was certainly not on the list. We added this because we wanted to provide attractive, high-performing high school students with another option. UM’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions had told us for many years that this would be an attractive option for high school students. They have the option of going to MIT and Wharton directly out of high school. We wanted to give the cream of the high school crop the opportunity to apply directly to Ross — given the quality of the applications that we received and the quality of the students who matriculated here this fall, I am happy to report that we have exceeded our expectations (in no small part due to the efforts of Ms. Thompson). Further, we are not going to be going to 100% direct admissions because we know that many students do not decide to go into business until after they get to college.
• As for the size of our courses: Core courses have 70 students, while electives usually have between 25 and 50 (usually around 40). I’m an associate professor and head of the BBA Program, and I have office hours twice a week for the students in my sections of the core.
• Related to the BBA and MBA: If you get a Ross BBA, then you may or may not need an MBA. It all depends on your desired employer. Some companies require that their employees get an MBA as a prerequisite to moving up in management. Others don’t care about it at all. For others, getting certified as a financial analyst or a CPA is what is really needed in order to advance. It just depends. A typical Ross BBA shouldn’t worry about this type of thing until several years out of school; he or she is very well prepared to succeed in his or her job immediately after graduating. The BBA is neither simply a preparatory degree for receiving an MBA nor a deterrent to getting admitted into an MBA program. It is simply an undergraduate degree that is also very good at preparing a student to succeed in business. Further, it is an excellent preparation for law school or graduate studies in public policy. We have an excellent track record at placing students in the best programs in the country in these fields of study.

So, that’s it for now. If you are interested, or if you have a friend or family member who is interested in the Ross BBA Program, pass along these links.

Taking charge of your classwork

I’m teaching juniors this year in my BBA introductory course, BIT200. We have had a busy semester already, with a couple of assignments already turned in and several other assignments in progress. I have thrown a lot at them with varying degrees of success.

The primary difference that I have noticed that distinguish the better students from the pack is that he or she takes charge of his or her classwork. She knows what to do on an assignment and, if she doesn’t, she uses her resources (friends, online) to try to determine the answer but if she can’t find the answer, she asks. She understands what’s going on in class and, if she doesn’t, she uses her resources (friends, online) to try to determine the answer but if she can’t, she asks. She doesn’t wait until the last minute to do her homework so that, if she has a question, — guess what? — she can ask.

This is not to say that this person becomes a pest and asks a question every time doubt creeps into her mind, but it is to say that she doesn’t let uncertainty dominate her thoughts. She takes charge so that she knows what to do, she’s on top of her schedule, and she doesn’t rush to finish her assignments just before they’re due.

We can’t always reach this ideal. But this is what distinguishes the strongest students and is a sign of their maturity. It’s not a sign that they are overly compulsive about their work — it’s a sign that they understand how to give themselves the best chance of succeeding.