College athletes may miss out on a number of career-shaping experiences that their classmates take for granted. Study-abroad opportunities, internships and the typical career exploration that goes on at college sometimes bypass athletes who are locked into competition schedules and expected to train year round, says Steve Reinemund, dean of the Wake Forest University Schools of Business.
Reinemund feels their pain. Wake Forest began offering a Masters of Arts in Management degree five years ago. The program is intended as a business finishing school of sorts for liberal arts graduates. Students take classes in managerial accounting, operations management and economics to strengthen their quantitative skills. Other classes are devoted to helping students polish their resumes and decide where they want to go professionally. The program is different from an MBA in that most of the students have no prior business-related work experience.
“We love getting athletes into the program,” Reinemund says. “They’ve learned to compete, they’ve obviously learned discipline, but their athletic careers have required many trade-offs.”
Business, along with education, kinesiology and social sciences are the four most popular majors among student athletes, according to an NCAA report on student academic performance and career trajectory published in 2007. Former athletes were more likely to major in business and social sciences than non-athletes, and they were less likely to major in science, math and engineering, the report found. In other words, a large portion of the college athletes that don’t graduate with business degrees might be interested in the added quantitative skills classes that Wake Forest has to offer.
Read the full article: Wake Forest Masters Program Attracts Athletes