General Introduction of Courses

The Master of Business Administration (MBA) program comprises 60 credits and additional required noncredit workshops in basic skills for managers.

Introduction of Field Concentration in MBA program

Information Systems Management -- This field is concerned with issues related to modern information and decision support systems in private and governmental organizations. Areas include systems analysis, user system psychology, and trends in information systems. The program is designed for the professionals responsible for analyzing the information system needs of an organization in terms of both analyzing these needs and developing an implementation plan for information flow. Courses in this field are offered by the Department of Management Science.

The program consists of four components.

1. Basic Skills for Managers -- All M.B.A. students must satisfy the program's basic skills requirements in finite mathematics and calculus for managers through required workshop attendance and/or proficiency examination prior to the first semester of study. The non-waivable workshops in communications for managers and team building and self-assessment must also be completed before the start of the first semester of enrollment.

2. Core Courses (30 credits) -- First year curricula.
Please refer to the Description of the Courses below.

3. Capstone Course (3 credits)

4. Concentration Courses (12 credits) -- These courses give students depth of understanding in a selected field.

5. Elective Courses (15 credits) -- Electives can include no more than one course in the student's selected field of concentration and must include one course with a global focus related to the field.

6. Second year curricula:

Fall Semester, 1999

Financial Decision Making - Elective
Database Management for Information Systems - Concentration
Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management - Elective
Strategy Formulation and Implementation - Capstone
Human Factors in Information Systems - Concentration

Spring Semester, 2000

Electronic Commerce - Elective
Project Management - Elective
Web based system development - Concentration
Telecommunications: Technology, Applications, and Operations -Concentration
International Business Finance - Elective

Description of the Courses

Managerial Economics
Intermediate microeconomic theory, with emphasis on production and costs, market structure and pricing, risk analysis, and investment theory and capital budgeting.

Organization, Management and Leadership, I and II
Integrative approach to organizational concepts, management principles, and the effects of leadership styles and human resource policies and practices on organizational performance in a global and competitive work environment.

Financial Accounting
Basic concepts and methods used in financial statements. Use and preparation of the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows; application of concepts to accounting and reporting issues, including revenue and expense recognition, cash, receivables, inventory, marketable securities, long-lived assets, and debt and equity securities.

Managerial/Cost Accounting
Cost information in managerial decisions and operations of the firm. Cost data collection and analysis. Cost accumulation process. Techniques for using cost data in decision making, planning, control, and performance evaluation and in financial reporting and performance evaluation by others.

Statistical Analysis for Managers
Statistical concepts employed in the solution of managerial problems. Descriptive statistics, frequency distributions, probability, sampling distributions, statistical inference and testing, correlation analysis, regression modeling, analysis of variance. Introduction to forecasting and statistical process control. Statistical software is used for applications.

Information Systems Technology
Survey of the advanced information technologies used in various business areas. Introduction to digital multimedia, virtual reality, expert systems, advanced computer networks.

Marketing Management
Emphasis on the marketing process from the viewpoint of the firm. Market analysis, product planning, channels of distribution, pricing, and promotional decision making; developing an integrated marketing plan.

Operations Management
Fundamentals of operations management and strategic and tactical decision making. Inventory management, resource allocation, production planning, project management, location and transportation analysis, investment planning, queuing systems, equipment selection and maintenance.

The World Economy
Assessment of international economic and financial developments and their effect on corporate business activity.

Financial Management
Theory, policy, and practice in financial management; financial analysis, sources of funds, investing, capital budgeting and structure, risk analysis, cost of capital, and dividend policy.

Business and Public Policy
Political, legal, economic, and ethical forces acting on business. Interaction of the market system and public policy process in the development of law and regulation.

Strategy Formulation and Implementation
An integrative approach to strategic management, stressing formulation, implementation of strategy and policy, and evaluation and control of strategy in various types of organizations. Prerequisite: M.B.A. degree candidacy and completion of all other M.B.A. core requirements.

Systems Analysis for Information Systems
Development of a specification for an information system. Topics include CASE tools, data gathering, information flow modeling, object-oriented analysis, data file organization, input/output and other nonfunctional requirements, such as performance reliability, environmental conditions, and training. (Fall and spring)

Telecommunications: Technology, Applications, and Operations
Basic technical concepts, applications, and trends of telecommunications; operations; cost considerations of implementing telecommunications systems.

Database Management for Information Systems
Theory, architecture, and implementation of database management systems in corporate and organization information systems. Designing databases for business applications and implementing such databases using commercially available packages.

Human Factors in Information Systems
The user-computer interaction, human factors of on-line dialogues, interfacing, and various approaches to user-system interaction. Emphasis on the development and evaluation of user-computer interfaces using software such as Visual BASIC and Windows.

Web-Based Systems Development
The conceptualization, design, and development of business applications using the World Wide Web and emerging technologies.

Financial Decision Making
Theory and practice of business finance, emphasizing the impacts of long and short-term uses and sources of funds on the firm's value.

Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management
Risk-reward analysis of security investments, including analysis of national economy, industry, company, and market; introduction to portfolio management; emphasis on theory and computer methods.

International Business Finance
Analysis of major issues and developments in international business financial management and their impact on multinational corporations and financial institutions.

Project Management
Practical examination of how projects can be managed from start to finish, including specific emphasis on planning and controlling to avoid common pitfalls. Identifying needs, defining requirements, project costing, scheduling, resource allocation, and project politics. Configuration

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