In last week’s Trivia Tuesday, we discussed the certificate program at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, through which students can receive formal recognition for in-depth study in each of five key areas: entrepreneurship, global management, health management, technology and real estate. We have since learned that Haas is in the process of phasing out its certificate programs and instead will feature several new “Areas of Emphasis,” which it will help students to develop.
The Haas faculty voted in favor of the shift at its concluding faculty meeting last semester, in part because very few Haas students take advantage of the existing certificate option and also because the five areas captured by the program failed to encompass the many areas in which Haas has deep strengths.
“If you think about it, by establishing a program in some areas and not in other areas, you are implicitly saying you shouldn’t come to Haas if you are interested in an area not covered by our certificate program,” Dan Sullivan, Haas director of academic services, said as part of a webinar for prospective applicants about the changes. “We have deep strengths in a lot of areas not covered,” he continued, including finance, strategy/consulting, marketing and energy/clean tech. “The shift toward Areas of Emphasis was motivated in large part by a desire to better represent our offerings in the career paths that our students actually follow,” he said.
The new Areas of Emphasis will allow full-time Haas MBA students to focus their studies on an expanded number of in-depth academic areas. In place of the five certificate programs, Haas students can now select from nearly a dozen Areas of Emphasis designed to provide direction in achieving specific career goals. The current Areas of Emphasis include finance, marketing, strategy/consulting, corporate social responsibility, energy and clean technology, entrepreneurship, global management, health management, nonprofit and public leadership, real estate and technology.
In place of a list of required courses that students had to complete to receive a certificate, the new Areas of Emphasis will consist of a series of recommended courses complemented by extracurricular activities and summer internship options designed to help students prepare for career paths in a wider range of industries. “We reviewed this with recruiters before we made this change and they agreed,” Haas Recruiting Director Lisa Feldman said in the webinar. “We are confident that it is going to work out for the career search,” she added.
For more details about Haas’s new Areas of Emphasis, click here. To listen to the webinar featuring Director of Academics Dan Sullivan and Recruiting Director Lisa Feldman, click here.
Read the full article: UC Berkeley’s Haas School Phases Out Certificate Program, Introduces Areas of Emphasis
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