Capstone Advising Information
Advising time is here for rising seniors! Here are the times available for you to come in for advising to receive a permission number:
Friday, March 31: 8:30 AM- 3:00 PM
Monday, April 3: - 11:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Tuesday, April 4 - 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Wednesday, April 5 -1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Please note that we do not schedule meetings for advising. Permission numbers are given first come/first serve so the longer you wait the less chance you have of getting the section you prefer.
When you arrive for advising you should have already chosen the section you want and you should have a back up in case the section is full. Your permission number guarantees a seat in the capstone you choose and you can use the permission number to add the capstone as a fifth course if you need to overload. The sections, times, and descriptions of capstones being offered are listed below.
DESCRIPTIONS
MMS 450.01 - Tuesday 6:15 - 8:45 PM
This Capstone will focus on General Management, Strategy, and Execution of that Strategy. This will be done in two ways. First, we will go over Harvard Business School Cases that deal with the three focus areas mentioned above. We will discuss those cases in class and each student will turn in a brief on each case. Those briefs will be graded by another student and then turned in to me for my concurrence. Second, we will work on a semester long business simulation in which you will have to turn a struggling company into a profitable and successful business. We will form business teams of 4-5 students that will work together to focus on strategy, finance, production, marketing and all the key elements that interact to build their business. There will be a couple of practice rounds to get you used to the simulation and then you will go through 8 rounds of decision making - 1 round per week with each round representing a full year for the company. Through this simulation you will build your business acumen and decision-making confidence as you interpret data, shape strategies and experience the results of your decisions. To learn more about the simulation go to: http://www.capsim.com
MMS 450.02 - Mon/Wed 10:05 - 11:20 AM
How does an idea turn into a business? Where do these ideas come from? How does one discover how many customers really want a product or service, if that product or service is feasible to implement, if it can survive competition, and if it can be profitable? Even if the business idea is sound, does the person or group with the idea have the background and skills to make it happen? This course teaches students to answer these questions using a combination of traditional lecture, case studies, and experiential learning through the generation and evaluation of some of their own business ideas.
MMS 450.04 – Tu/Th 11:45 – 1:00 PM
GOALS:
(1) Offer a capstone course and experience for students in the Markets & Management Studies Program;
(2) Briefly review major perspectives and concepts from core courses that you have had:
(a) with brief review of neoclassical and efficiency approaches;
(b) with counterpoint of institutionalist, ecological, and strategy approaches;
(c) with special reference to global variations.
(3) Apply and test our ideas on a weekly basis with structured discussion of popular press coverage of M&M issues;
(4) In teams, generate and critique a business plan from social science perspectives;
(5) Produce a case study final project of a product, firm, industry, occupation, country, or region, which draws upon two or more different intellectual perspectives (from core courses, or disciplinary perspectives).
MMS 450.05 – Wed 6:15 – 8:45 PM
The course will examine corporate strategy from different angles. We will be analyzing the strategies that companies use that are in different industries, as well as strategies that smaller versus larger organizations employ. We will also be examining the importance of sustainability principles (environmental, energy savings and financial sustainability) and how these principles are part of corporate strategy and how they play into both the reputation of the firm and its efficiencies. Course requirements will include a strategy simulation exercise performed in teams and individual written assignments on specific company cases. Each student will write a paper comparing and contrasting the strategies of two firms in two different industries. Course attendance and participation are also graded.