“The corporate offices of multinational Fortune 500 firms and the ultra-fast-paced environments at Silicon Valley start-ups will become classrooms for our Daytime MBA students. IMPACT will unleash teams of talented UC Davis MBA students to tackle challenging business issues and develop innovative solutions for leading companies in the Sacramento–San Francisco Bay Area corridor.” —ASSISTANT DEAN OF STUDENT AFFAIRS JAMES STEVENS
Agilent Technologies, said adding the retooled operations course to the core curriculum responds to corporate recruiters’ emphasis on candidates with exposure to manufacturing and global operations management. “In the annual surveys of employers, they were telling us, ‘We love your students for many reasons, but these are a couple things we’d like to see more of,’” Scaramastro said. The financial crisis, which caused much soul-searching in business schools worldwide, didn’t prompt the GSM’s initiative, but lessons learned from the near meltdown did help to shape the new curriculum, task force members said. “We have a new dean and a new building, and it was time to look at our course model,” Barber said. “This sort of assessment is important to do even if you’re getting things right.” Kelly began the MBA program in the fall of 2008, just as the global financial crisis unfolded. “After two years of absorbing that, by the time the task force first met—and I expect it was true for everyone around the table—it was impossible to say where the influence of the crisis began and left off,” he said. ROLL OUT BEGINS THIS FALL
The new additions to the core curriculum, Articulation and Critical Thinking and Managing for Operational Excellence courses, will debut this fall. The two-quarter Integrated Management Project course will premiere in fall 2012. “There is an enormous amount of work involved in setting this up,” said task force member Hemant Bhargava,
associate dean and professor of management and computer science. “We’ll be strengthening our current relationships and building new bridges with companies that can offer compelling projects for our students. We are fortunate that we have more than a year’s lead time.” A new director will manage the projects, and a faculty member will oversee them, explained Bhargava. “We are all looking forward to getting this off the ground.” View a video and details about the new MBA curriculum @
>> www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/IMPACT