The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, a school known for its heavy focus on teaching quantitative skills, will roll out a new curriculum next fall incorporating more training in leadership and writing. The school also has moved to teaching core subject areas before recruiters arrive on campus in an effort to better prepare first-years to secure summer internships in an increasingly competitive environment.
Robert Dammon, who became dean last May after serving for 27 years as a professor of financial economics at the school, is shepherding these changes as well as embarking upon an ambitious fundraising effort to build a bigger building to accommodate Tepper’s growing class. He told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in a recent interview that he hopes to expand the MBA program by as much as 50 percent, to 300 students, in order to take advantage of economies of scale.
Dammon told the WSJ that he thinks the curriculum changes will actually strengthen the school’s reputation as a quantitative powerhouse. “It’s a matter of embedding opportunities for students to develop their communication and leadership skills within other courses,” he said. “In our electives, which [are] analytically-focused, we will give students opportunities to present, to do projects. You can do the best analysis in the world on a problem, but you’re going to have no effect on anybody if you can’t communicate what it is you’ve done.”
He also indicated that the decision to push core courses on disciplines like finance, marketing and operations to earlier in the first semester was driven by pressure from recruiters to interview students for internships earlier and earlier. “They would love to come in the first week of classes if they could,” Dammon told the WSJ. “Students were not really getting exposure to the material before sitting in interviews.” In response, the school now offers a new orientation program called BaseCamp designed to give students an integrated view of business before they meet with recruiters. “Instead of learning just finance, or just marketing, or just operations, they’re getting how all these things fit together,” Dammon said.
For more excerpts from the WSJ interview with Dammon, click here.
Read the full article: Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business Revamps Curriculum