When I first decided to get my MBA, one of my main motivations was to establish the fundamental business skills I would need to transition to my target career. I knew that I needed core business coursework as well as specialized courses to build the skills I needed for my career. The Wisconsin MBA program offered me the opportunity to fulfil both. My experiences in core classes have helped shape how I understand business challenges, as well as how I approach them.
Like many MBA programs, the first year is mainly dedicated to core coursework that builds the business fundamentals from Finance to Strategy. One key difference is that each specialization also enrolls in one or more courses required by their specific program. This allows students like me to learn these subjects with my fellow MBAs across different specializations, while also honing a specific set of skills and knowledge. Working in a core team with members of different specializations allowed me to see all the different lenses through which business challenges can be examined. From each core class, I learned a new strategy for how to approach common scenarios in my career. In our business strategy class, we learned how to discover the valuable problem a business could solve. In marketing management class, we studied ways to consider the “4 Ps” with marketing ideas. Finance taught how to calculate the value of a project appropriately, and accounting showed how the different projects are recorded. Our business ethics and teams classes also provided me with valuable tools to help approach the complexities of structures and relationships within a business.
While I chose the specialization model for the career focus, the core classes in the program provided me with the foundation to build that career.
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