Robert T. Sumichrast
Dean and Simon S. Selig, Jr. Chair for Economic Growth

Published: November 7, 2008 | Vol. 1, Issue 5

The Terry College of Business has declared its intention to provide our students with the best possible education anywhere. We want our students to be actively engaged in a learning community. And to help achieve this goal our faculty are working with our alumni and the business community to extend learning beyond the traditional classroom. Let me give you a couple examples of how we are seeing this happen.

Terry students have opportunities to listen to and question experts outside of class to compliment what they are learning as part of the required curriculum of lectures and assignments. The world's financial crisis was the backdrop for two thought-provoking sessions last month. Our Economics Department organized an Oct. 8 forum called "What Just Happened?" to explain the crises unfolding in the world's financial markets. We invited people from Athens to participate, along with Terry students and others from the University, as three faculty experts shared their perspectives.

Later that same week, our Finance Club brought in a panel of four professionals who helped students understand what a career in investment banking and related fields would be like. The panel included alumni working in Atlanta and in New York. They encouraged our students to think realistically about career opportunities likely to be open in the short term and long term.

These kind of educational add-ons taking place outside of the classroom are some of the most valuable learning opportunities our students will experience while they're on campus. We want to share the best of these panels and forums with you as well, through our podcast journal called Terry Sound Business.

I also want to tell you about another enhancement to our learning community. Our faculty recently adopted a significant change to the undergraduate curriculum. You might be aware that students are currently admitted to Terry as rising juniors. We are in the process of changing that junior year — their first in Terry College — into a "cohort" schedule. What that means is all students in a major will take the same businesses classes in a semester. This will increase the interaction among students within a major so that they get a head start building a professional network of friends and future colleagues.

Some of our faculty have told me that they would like to use this cohort structure to try to share cases and exercises across disciplines. They have suggested that the material in the introductory marketing, management and finance classes could draw on different aspects of a case and give the students a deeper learning experience. Of course, assuring that a specific set of courses is completed during the junior year will also allow faculty teaching senior-level courses to rely more heavily on that preparation and raise the bar for subsequent courses, leading to a more rigorous and relevant curriculum.

In all these examples, you can see that — inside the classroom and outside of it — we are changing the learning community at Terry to deliver the best possible education anywhere.

Robert T. Sumichrast, Dean
Terry College of Business