The Kellogg School of Management Certificate Program for Undergraduates, which was launched last September, will offer a new certificate in Managerial Analytics for the 2008-2009 academic year.
The Managerial Analytics Certificate prepares students for corporate roles in management consulting, strategy or planning by building on the analytical skills of students proficient in mathematics.
The Certificate Program, housed at 555 Clark St., began Fall Quarter by offering its first four-course sequence certificate in Financial Economics to 44 students across three undergraduate schools: the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Communication.
“When we started the program, we wanted to maintain the science liberal arts model that Northwestern has but (also) provide students with training in order to enter the field of business,” said Kellogg Associate Dean Kathleen Hagerty, who teaches a course on derivatives to students enrolled in the certificate program. “We want to fit in and be a complement to those activities, not to compete with them.”
Unlike top business schools such as The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania or New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, which have undergraduate business degree programs, Northwestern does not offer a Bachelor of Business Administration to undergraduate students. Most universities that offer BBA programs require students to take on a four-year study of one or more areas of business concentration, limiting the number of general elective classes that students may take.
The topic of developing a BBA program on the undergraduate level at NU comes up periodically within Kellogg but has not been a main concern for faculty and administrators, Hagerty said.
“With Kellogg, everything has to be super-high quality; To do something like that and execute it well would be a really complicated task,” she said. “We always consider every option every time, but it doesn’t really fit the Northwestern model at this point.”
