THE PENDULUM

The Martha and Spencer Love School of Business is continuing to reinvent itself, according to dean of the Business School, Mary Gowan at a meeting with business majors. At the Business Fellows reception March 5, Gowan announced the passing of new majors into the program. They are finance, management, marketing and entrepreneurship.

"I personally am very excited about the new majors introduced," freshman Business Fellow Chris Welch said. "I had been interested in finance, but was hesitant to pursue it as a concentration. Having finance offered as a major creates new opportunities, and I am excited to see how the program is developed."

The current curriculum allows for students to graduate from the

Business School with a bachelor's degree in business administration and a concentration in finance, entrepreneurship, marketing or management, but the new curriculum will allow students to graduate with a bachelor's in business administration degree, with a major in one of the concentrations.

Most business schoolseitherhaveaBachelor of Science in Business

Administration or Bachelor of Business Administration degree, and the Love School of Business decided to go with the B.S.B.A degree because it wanted to maintain the quantitative and scientific piece of the degree, Gowan said.

"We needed to provide more depth and focus for fields of study," Gowan said. "As we continue to place our students in excellent internships and jobs, we want to make sure that they are really prepared to hit the ground running and be competitive with their peers."

The process of developing the new majors involved a large amount of collaboration, Gowan said. Faculty looked at what other top business schools did for those programs and talked to students about what they would want in those majors.

They also asked ideal employers such as Dell and UBS about what skills they are looking for in potential applicants and talked to alumni and students about internships, job experiences and what they are finding they need to know in the workplace.

Each department then put together a proposal of courses for their respective majors while the Business School reviewed the core curriculum in its entirety, determining whether minor or substantial changes were needed. This twofold process allowed the faculty to review the curriculum, which was last assessed in 2002.

"It caused all the programs to really look at what they are offering because evaluation of the curriculum is always important. The student body has changed. "The world has changed, so it was really time for us to take a hard look at what we were doing," Gowan said.

One major change is focusing more on the Legal Environment of Business course.

"This course has been revised from a two- credit hour course to a four-credit hour course to include a business ethics component," Associate Dean Cassandra DiRienzo said. "The name of the new course is the Legal and Ethical Environment of Business."

The range of credit hours for the new majors now range from 73-76. The business school is also introducing two new minors along with its business administration minor, which will be offered as a minor and not a major.

"The first is a minor in professional sales and is an outreach of the Chandler Family Professional Sales Center," DiRienzo said. "The second is a minor in entrepreneurship and is an outreach of the Doherty Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Both minors are open to all Elon students."

The business administration major currently requires three economic classes. With the new curriculum, each department is allowed to keep the current economic course or opt for a course more focused in their particular major. Finance is now requiring a money and banking economics class for its third required economic class.

Gowan said the future of the Business School is globalization. The school is partnering with the foreign language department to develop a strong international business focus to complement a student's functional area of business. The Business School is also pushing more students to study abroad and obtain international internships.