Curriculum: Business Foundations Graduate Certificate

This course educates students in the fundamentals of finance and accounting. The methods covered are used extensively throughout the MBA program. Topics include: the accounting process that results in the preparation of financial statements for external users, techniques for analyzing a basic set of financial statements, using accounting information to support management decisions, and using time value of money techniques to evaluate capital asset decisions. (MS Accounting students cannot earn credit by taking this course.)

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to: 1. Apply concepts and perform Time Value of Money calculations 2. Understand differences in interest rates (due to differences in risk, horizon, and compounding) 3. Use present value calculations to solve bond pricing and risk applications 4. Use present value calculations to solve stock valuation applications

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a foundation in the study of Organizations (Management) in preparation for the MBA or MS program. The goal is to provide students with an introduction to the study of organizations (strategy, structure, design, and context) to help students navigate through the advanced graduate course work and to become a more effective manager. This entails understanding how organizations work as well as developing requisite personal skills in problem analysis and writing.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a foundation in Marketing. Concepts such as segmentation, targeting, positioning, customer and market analysis, and basic marketing planning will be introduced.

Understand how managerial decisions are made in corporations using accounting data. Special emphasis is given to cost allocation, break even analysis, ABC costing, product costing and budgeting decisions. (MS Accounting students cannot earn credit by taking this course.)

Develops a manager's ability to exercise informed judgment with regard to the ethical and legal issues that arise in domestic and global business in the context of the employment relationship, financial decisions, environmental protections, and product development.

Introduction to data analysis and statistical methods with focus on practical decisions using quantitative models in a spreadsheet environment. Topics include sources of data, descriptive and graphical statistical methods, probability, distributions, sampling and sampling distributions, estimation, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing.

Continuation of BANA7011. Topics include regression modeling and analysis including simple and multiple regression, decision analysis for making decisions under uncertainty, risk analysis and simulation of complex models in a spreadsheet environment, what-if models and spreadsheet engineering, optimization models and solving them with spreadsheet tools, optimization models in business applications such as marketing and finance. BANA7012 should not be taken for credit by MS-Business Analytics students.

This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of economics at the graduate level for students without previous economics coursework. Students will be exposed to the essentials of both microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics topics to be discussed include the supply and demand mechanism,how markets are affected by regulation and taxation, costs of production, and how market structure affects outcomes. Macroeconomic topics to be discussed include the fundamental measures of the aggregate economy, the sources of economic growth, explaining short-run fluctuations in economic activity, and how government policies can affect these fluctuations. A particular focus will be to understand how fundamental economic principles at both the micro and macro level can affect companies, investments, industries, and national economies.

This course is designed to introduce students to economic tools useful in managerial decision-making. The course proceeds from describing the general demand and cost conditions faced by a firm, to its market environment characterized by few to many other firms in the market, and finally to its extended environment of potential competitors and upstream and downstream members of its supply chain. Besides the substantive aspects of the course, students will be expected to describe consumer demand and costs using spreadsheet software. Specific topics include profit and revenue maximization, consumer behavior and demand, production and cost, competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, social welfare, merger policy, limit pricing, vertical arrangements such as franchising, and game theory.

Building on the foundational material covered in FIN 7000 (time value of money, stock and bond pricing), the main goal of this course is to develop a set of techniques for valuing capital investment projects in privately and publicly traded companies. To support this goal, the course (1) develops a set of investment criterion, (2) examines valuation techniques, (3) develops asset pricing models (the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) in particular) to determine the appropriate required or opportunity cost of capital for discounting future cash flows, (4) considers basic risk management techniques, (5) examines how firms raise capital, and (6) analyzes the effect of financing choices on shareholder wealth, firm value, risk, and tax payments. The course also defines real options and examines how real options are valued and affect capital budgeting decisions. To support this task, the course examines the definition, use, and pricing of derivative securities such as financial options. A secondary goal of the course is to consider what firms should do with the profits they generate given effective financial policies and decisions. In particular, the course examines payout policy. Throughout, the goal is to have students develop intuition on financial issues so that they are not only able to analyze a variety of standard finance problems but are also capable of analyzing new issues that will arise in the ever-changing business environment.

This course employs the case method to discuss the managerial and strategic implications of the use of Information Systems in organizations. The course starts with a review of concepts related to Information Technology in the realm of networking,databases, application development, and architecture. Next, it examines the value of Information Technology in modern organizations. Finally, multiple cases are discussed, covering themes like Enterprise Resource Planning, Digital Convergence, e-Marketing and Social Media, Disruptive Innovations, Virtual Teams, and IT Resources and Capabilities.

This course focuses on concepts and applications related to organizations and the individuals who design and work within them. The goal of the course is to help you better understand and practice individual and organizational management.We will cover micro-level issues (e.g., individual differences and motivation), mid-level issues (e.g., leadership, groups and teams), and macro-level issues (e.g., organizational culture and structure). By focusing on concepts, applications and issues, you will be better able to see and understand organizational phenomena that you might now take for granted. This course will also help increase your understanding of yourself and others so that you can be more effective in the organizations in which you manage and participate.

This course aims to describe many phenomena in marketing. As consumers we develop a surface familiarity with the activities and institutions of the market place but we need a closer look at the players, decision-making issues, processes and key lessons from the commercial trading environment. We also intend to develop an understanding of system dynamics and causal linkages in the marketplace. Why do some products fail? How can we structure productive relationships? What will happen to prices when we intensify distribution or advertising? The course takes up these questions and more.

This course introduces basic operation principles through a collection of case studies and exploring major operations problems. Areas of focus include decisions and activities related to product and process design, the use and control of resources, scheduling and quality management, supply chain management, and project management. Prerequisite: Students must be enrolled in one of these Programs 22MAS, 22GOP, 22DOC, 22GC.

 

The electives listed above represent the typical set from which most students will choose. Students may be able to choose other electives to match specific career goals, with the approval of the Program Director.