| Haas undergraduate business senior Michelle Wald
is pretty calm for a 21-year-old who was just offered
a dream job an hour ago at McKinsey& Co as a business
analyst. After all, a McKinsey consulting job is about
as prestigious as being called up to the major leagues
for a pitching star. The news hasn’t seemed to
sink in yet for the laid-back senior from Sunnyvale,
Ca., a varsity basketball and field hockey player who
starts her new job this fall. “I’m in awe
of you,” says Tara Kramlich, a fellow Haas senior.
McKinsey, which advises big corporations how to better
run their businesses, is “everyone’s first
choice,” confides Kramlich, who’s heading
to her own plum job at Prudential Capital Group as a
corporate finance investment analyst and offers sincere
congratulations to Wald.
In many ways, that’s the spirit of the Haas School,
as convivial as it is competitive.
The undergraduate program at the Haas School has become
even more successful over the years, consistently producing
a bumper crop of diverse, highly successful graduates,
and it is now poised to expand this year to accommodate
the ever-increasing demand for the program.
It’s also a program where the student body is
outstanding, but as diverse as California itself. At
Haas, students are likely to share classes with an Olympic
swimmer, a Hispanic teenager who’s first in his
family to go to college, or the daughter of a working
class single mom who’s studying on a full scholarship.
“It is not elitist, but it is top notch”
says Stephen Etter, BS 83, MBA 89, a lecturer at Haas
who is an alumnus and a partner at Greyrock Capital
Group. “Our student body and the school represent
the best of high school graduates and transfer students
from California and beyond.”
Indeed, the undergraduate business program, founded
105 years ago, has never been stronger. It consistently
ranks in the top four undergraduate business programs
in US News & World Report. Its graduates move on
to work at many of the nation’s top corporations
such as Goldman Sachs, McKinsey&Co., Deloitte &
Touche, Wells Fargo, Gap, and Cisco Systems. A survey
of the Class of 2001 found that 86 percent of the class
is working full-time, a percentage far higher than at
all other undergraduate programs on the UC Berkeley
campus. Most took jobs as analysts or consultants at
salaries that averaged about $54,000. A string of better
known Haas undergraduate alumni include Gap founder
Don Fisher, BS 50; retired Bank of America President
and CEO Rudolph Peterson, BS 25; former US Treasury
Secretary Michael Blumenthal, BS 51; Dreyer’s
Ice Cream President Rick Cronk, BS 65; and current US
congressman Doug Ose, BS 77, (R-CA).
Alumni who have reaped the rewards from their education
are increasingly answering the call to give back to
the school. About two thirds of the money required to
run the Haas School is now provided by private donations,
a huge leap from when Stephen Etter was a student during
the early 1980s and the state provided two thirds of
the funding. “The challenge going forward is for
us to continue to support public education privately,”
Etter maintains.
Though Haas is the second oldest business school in
the country, many credit the school for moving quickly
to embrace change and, as a result, the school has built
a curriculum for the 21st century. While other business
schools mandate a heavy dose of business courses for
their undergraduate majors—diving deep into areas
such as marketing and finance with time for little else—Haas
now seeks to cultivate a well-rounded student who enrolls
in both business courses and classes in other campus
programs.
“We want our students to learn about the history
of Southeast Asia and read Moby Dick,” said Andrew
Shogan, associate dean of instruction at Haas. Dan Himelstein,
BS 83, executive director of the program, calls the
strategy “a general management approach to the
major. You can’t take 15 courses in just one discipline,”
he said. “We’re trying to create future
CEOs and leaders.”
One set of changes to the curriculum began in the 90s
when the school responded particularly well to a general
criticism of business education from business leaders
and members of the media—their claim was that
most undergraduate business schools failed to prepare
students for the real world. Richard Meese, a former
director of the undergraduate program who is now a managing
director at Barclay’s Global Investors, was concerned
that the school was training students to be good accountants,
at the expense of teaching them to communicate and impress
real-world employers. As director, he played a key role
in changing the undergraduate business curriculum. For
one, the school restructured UGBA 10, a business school
class open to all undergraduate students, changing it
from accounting to general management to help send a
new message. The school also added a course in communications
skills. “I think we got a lot of credit for the
changes,” Meese says. “But the proof is
in the pudding—what the companies who are hiring
these students think.”
The approach is working. Demand for enrollment in the
program is at a record high. Historically about half
of the continuing UC Berkeley students who apply make
it into the competitive program (that number is even
less for transfer students), which, like the rest of
the university system, is gearing up to meet Tidal Wave
II. That name refers to the throngs of baby boomers’
children who are expected to flood the public university
system in California until 2010. To accommodate the
bubble at UC Berkeley, all programs in high demand on
the campus were asked to submit proposals asking for
the required resources to expand. As one of the impacted
programs, the undergraduate business program is expected
to expand from 550 students historically enrolled in
the two-year program to 700 by the 2004-2005 academic
year, providing more access to both continuing UC Berkeley
and transfer students.
Part of the expansion includes summer classes. About
6 percent of Haas students have historically taken summer
courses. Now, both continuing UC Berkeley students and
transfer students enrolling in Haas will be required
to start the program in a special summer session that
kicks off this July. All new Haas students will be split
into two cohorts and take two core business classes
two afternoons and evenings per week for six weeks.
Summer session will provide crucial bonding time for
all new students, something the undergraduate program
lacked in the past, Himelstein said. “MBAs go
through almost everything together in and out of class,”
he said. “We wanted to simulate that as much as
possible.”
Part of the challenge is that students do not enter
Berkeley as business majors. They generally apply to
begin the program during junior year. Additionally,
about 10 to 15 percent of Haas students are double or
triple majors so their interests aren’t limited
to business. Kramlich, for one, came to Berkeley not
only for business, but to study German, one of the programs
for which Berkeley is known. Older students with business
career aspirations are also welcomed into the program.
Derek Swafford, a 28-year-old senior and former Cal
football player, credits the business school with opening
a new door for him when his athletic career ended due
to an injury. “They just polished me up,”
said Swafford, who recently accepted a job as a credit
manager at Wells Fargo and eventually wants to start
a sports management company. “It was like I was
being coached in business like I was coached on the
field. They taught me about resumes, interviews, everything,
you name it. I learned the stuff that I am going to
use every day in life.”
Some students find coming to Haas gives them the chance
to have a very rich extracurricular experience. Kinman
Tong, a native of Malaysia who transferred into Haas
from community college, is starting two new fraternities
on campus. Tong’s aunt attended the Haas business
school in 1995 and his parents, who still live in Maylasia,
are both accountants. Tong, who will work at Deloitte
& Touche after graduation, is hoping to return to
Berkeley to get a joint MBA/law degree.
Like many students, Tong loves case studies. Anyone
attending Haas knows about case competitions, which
require students to huddle together to solve real world
business problems. There are two types of case competitions:
external competitions, where students compete against
teams at other business schools such as Wharton and
University of Texas, and internal ones held at the school.
Major firms such as Goldman Sachs, Cisco Systems, and
Deloitte Consulting, which employ many Haas alumni,
get involved with the case competitions as donors, mentors,
and judges.
For the competitions, students work in teams of four
that include one student from outside of the business
program. Finalists present their case to a panel of
judges comprised of company representatives, teachers,
and alumni. Annie Lai, BS 95, director of undergraduate
admissions and operations at Haas, says the students
put all they have into these cases, pulling all-nighters,
and doing hours of case study work on top of regular
class work. “The value they gain from it is just
so amazing,” she said. “Through these competitions
they get a taste for the complexity of real-world problems.”
For George Leng, BS 99, a programs manager at Cisco
Systems, participating was so crucial to him that he
now mentors students involved with the internal case
studies, coming up with problems for them to tackle.
“It really gave me a flavor for what the real
world was like,” he said. “It’s really
up to you to figure out the key issues. Students don’t
get this from just taking tests. Under high-pressure
situations, case competitions really mirror what students
will find in business after they graduate.”
It’s these soft skills—working on teams,
getting along with all sorts of people, and delivering
quality work under pressure—that students and
their future employers will value as highly as the knowledge
of straight business and economic theories studied in
books. And this balance is key to the Haas School Undergraduate
Program.
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