News Innovative First Year Seminar Empowers Students
I
RAFAEL SUANES
n the new First Year Seminar (FYS) titled “International Business, Public Policy, and Society” at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, faculty introduced undergraduates to the business world through small, focused classes this past fall semester. To create the FYS program, faculty and administrators, including Pietra Rivoli, professor of finance, and Undergraduate Dean Norean R. Sharpe, first examined similar programs across the country. Sharpe and her colleagues wanted the program to offer global and interdisciplinary perspectives, emphasize communication skills, and expose students to the social and public policy needs of nonprofit organizations. “Rather than replicate what other schools are doing and require all the seminars to be identical, we decided to allow faculty the flexibility to develop their own seminars according to their
specialties, their interests, and their strengths,” Sharpe says. Participating students chose from five seminars, including Grand Strategy: Conceptual Foundations in Strategic Thought; Great Books in Finance; Economic Foundations in Commerce; Markets, Businesses, and Governments in a Global Economy; and Entrepreneurship: A Habit of Mind and Community. With classes of no more than 20 students, the seminars offered first-year students greater contact with senior faculty and encouraged the faculty to focus on in-depth discussions. In addition, the seminars emphasized writing skills with support from Writing Fellows from Georgetown’s English department. To complement in-class discussions, the school partnered with a local nonprofit to bring in speakers and added a case competition. This is one of the first freshmen programs
to pair a course for credit with a real case competition judged by executives from the organization. This social outreach component differentiates Georgetown’s program from similar ones around the country. Each year, a local nonprofit partner works with the FYS faculty to challenge teams of students who must develop real-life business plans, conduct basic market research, and present their recommendations to faculty and executives. This year’s nonprofit partner was D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK), an organization that fights poverty, hunger, and homelessness through job training, meal distribution, and support of local food systems. The competition challenge was to develop recommendations on how to grow its revenue with new food products. To prepare the students for
their task, CEO Michael Curtin delivered the inaugural lecture that described the mission and objectives of DCCK. Curtin, along with Alan Andreasen, professor of marketing, and Sharpe, was a judge during the final competition. He was impressed by the maturity of the first-year students, and especially by the winning team, which proposed selling affordable organic food prepared at DCCK to consumers at metroarea grocery stores. “These projects aren’t theoretical; they’re not in a book,” Curtin says. “This is absolutely real, and to make these projects work, they had to get out in the community.” Sharpe says the FYS program provides students with real business exposure, and the case competition emphasizes the importance of the common good. “The fact that you can do both — you can have a sustainable corporation, and you can still care about the society we live in and give back to it — directly relates to reinforcing the
Undergraduates Alexandra Piedrahita, Eunice Chin, and Alex Kondziolka with D.C. Central Kitchen CEO Michael Curtin