The Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis saw a need for their undergraduates that wasn’t being filled: a providing a better sense of what classes to take in preparation for their careers, and a need to know how to pursue that career.
So the academic advising office and The Career Center jointly created Managing Your Business Career Strategy (MYBCS). The class helps students explore their academic and career paths. Students learn how their classes could help with future career choices; they learn job search skills; and they learn the particulars about the characteristics of various career options. It’s the first of its kind at Washington University in St. Louis, and it may very well be the first of its kind in the nation, according to Steve Malter. Malter wears several hats: he’s an associate director of undergraduate advising, an associate in Olin’s undergraduate career center, and he’s one of the primary developers and teachers of the class
In designing the curriculum with associate dean for undergraduate programs, Gary Hochberg, Malter surveyed 50 to 75 syllabi from other universities’ career programs in the hopes of finding some model to follow.
“I saw nothing like what we were trying to do,” Malter said. “We wanted to provide a blended approach, something that explored both academic and career options. Students get a realistic view of what kinds of coursework they should take depending on their major and what careers may come out of those majors.”
The for-credit class aimed at sophomores meets twice a week, once for lecture and once in smaller sections for discussions. For eight weeks, members of Olin’s faculty come and talk about the courses in their areas of expertise. Then there’s a career panel.
“We bring in actual practitioners – alumni mostly – who give advice on the practicalities of their careers and what the students need to take when they’re in school,” Malter said. “Students seem to get the most out of those visits. They frequently talk with the visitor one-on-one after class. Some of the connections that have developed out of those discussions have led to summer internships.”
The class made its debut a year ago and at the time, no one knew whether or not it would be a success. They needn’t have worried. In the fall of 2004, the class had 71 students. This fall, the number of students enrolled swelled to 126, which forced Malter to divide the class in two sections for the lecture: One section is taught by Malter and the other by Sally Pinckard, associate director of the Weston Career Center, who has been integral to the development of the course. Although the course is meant for business school sophomores, about 30 percent of the students aren’t from the business school, Malter said.
Gary Hochberg isn’t surprised by the course’s success. Hochberg and former business school dean Stuart Greenbaum first thought of the idea during a meeting a few years ago. The topic of career education and job search techniques came up, and that’s when Hochberg had his revelation.
“Something prompted me to say, ‘Isn’t it wrong-headed to treat academic advising and career counseling as two different things when they’re not?’ To the students they’re all of one piece,” Hochberg recalled. “It shouldn’t be that students are either knowledgeable about what classes to take or knowledgeable about how to prepare for a job search. Those two things should develop together.”
Malter was able to quantify the benefits the students derived from the class by looking at their certainty in choosing careers. With the help of two organizational behavior professors, Malter designed an experiment to track students’ career certainty at the beginning and end of the semester with a career decision scale. Malter used the other professors’ classes to create a control group.
“By the end of the semester, our students were 30 percent more certain of their academic and career choices than they were at the start,” Malter said. “We didn’t see that kind of jump in the control group. What’s more the level of academic and career indecision decreased for class participants.
In addition to the strong support Malter had from Greenbaum in creating and implementing the class, he also received plenty of encouragement from Glenn MacDonald, senior associate dean and the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy, as well as the school’s current dean, Mahendra Gupta. Malter met with professors from each of the eight disciplines in the business school to help formulate the curriculum. Malter involved his colleagues from Olin’s Weston Career Center and from Undergraduate Programs office to teach some Friday sessions. What’s more, staff from the university-wide career center also teach a few of the Friday sessions.
Word of the success of the MYBCS class has gotten out; Malter and Hochberg were recently accepted to make a presentation at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business’ November conference on undergraduate programs. Malter said he and Hochberg plan to present their model for the class and share the results of the ongoing experiment.