By Jennifer ChenThe Daily Northwestern
Almost as soon as the e-mail unveiling the Kellogg School of Management’s new undergraduate certificate program hit inboxes campuswide at about 1 a.m. Thursday, program director Carol Henes started getting e-mails of her own.
By the time Henes checked her inbox Thursday morning, about 10 students already had sent her messages with questions about the program, she said.
Most e-mails came from freshmen and sophomores in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science or the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, although there were one or two juniors who expressed interest as well, she said.
SESP junior Rishi Shah, chairman of the student-run Institute for Student Business Education, said the programs are “a step in the right direction.”
“I think this will help us compete for a lot of the marketing jobs we want, from banking to consulting to finance, even public equity,” Shah said.
Shah’s group, which in the past has attempted to compensate for Kellogg’s lack of undergraduate courses, offers a Sunday class in finance taught by Kellogg instructors.
“Besides ISBE there aren’t a whole lot of groups that have a lot of Kellogg interaction,” Shah said. “I think this is going to change that. You’re going to have undergraduates in Kellogg, with Kellogg instructors and TAs. I think it’s exciting for every student here.”
Shah said he, ISBE’s past president and economics Prof. Mark Witte also received an e-mail from Kevin Rodrigues, Weinberg ’06, who said the news was “amazing” and that the people in his Boston investment banking firm were talking about it.
“Most elite campuses don’t have business programs, so by doing this we really set ourselves apart from and admissions standpoint,” Shah said. “NU is about finance now for a lot of people who will probably be coming in.”
But Weinberg senior Paul Bryan’s had a different reaction: “Great, just in time for my graduation.”
Had the program been around when he was an underclassmen, he would have “definitely looked into it,” Bryan said.
“Students have been clamoring for (something like this) since I was a freshman,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like we organized anything, but it was a known fact on the NU campus that we were in dire need or an undergraduate business program … I love my experience with the Business Institutions Program, but I think the Kellogg program will be a step up, an upgrade.”
Younger students, such as Weinberg freshman Jenny Cheng, said this news could mean a change in their course of study.
“I think the programs are great,” Cheng said. “I’m in (the Mathematical Methods and Social Science program), and the sequence kind of fades after your sophomore year, so this is a great way to keep up the dynamic.”
Despite the change in her four-year plan, Cheng said the managerial analytics program is something she will consider.
Weinberg freshman Colin Campbell said his reaction was much less enthusiastic: “Oh, that’s cool. I’m not going to do it.”
Campbell said he is sure the programs will be well received by many of his fellow MMSS students, but he said he is interested in academia, not “investment banking or Merrill Lynch.”
Meanwhile, the e-mails are trickling into Henes’ inbox.
“We’re all really excited about this,” she said. “My hopes are that we’ll be successful and have a lot of interested students, and that we meet their personal and educational goals.”
Reach Jennifer Chen at [email protected].
