Core Courses
MBA@UNC begins with core courses that form a common foundation for you and our classmates.
- Financial Accounting – 4 credit hours
- Marketing Strategy, Analysis and Development – 4 credit hours
- Analytical Tools – 4 credit hours
- To learn the basic techniques of data analysis, sampling and estimation, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, decision analysis, and Monte Carlo simulation.
- To apply these techniques to practical managerial decision problems.
- To develop basic skills in the use of Excel.
- To learn how the microcomputer can be used to assist in the analysis of these problems.
- To develop basic skills in the use of Excel.
- To see how quantitative methods impact on the meaning of life.
- Business Communications – 4 credit hours
- Operations – 4 credit hours
- Economics – 4 credit hours
- Introductory Finance – 4 credit hours
- To provide a good grounding in basic concepts of finance, including the time value of money, valuation, portfolio theory, the role of financial markets, asset pricing, and the risk-return tradeoff.
- To establish a “finance mindset” that views finance as applied microeconomics in a business policy context, with value creation as a central concept.
- To develop skills in financial analysis, planning and decision-making.
- To develop perspective and judgment in business decisions and an appreciation for decision-making in a complex world.
- To achieve facility in using finance concepts to make decisions.
- Developing Managerial and Leadership Skills – 4 credit hours
- Help each of you improve your leadership & management skills. Particularly those skills that will make you better able to cope with today’s increasingly dynamic and complex business environment.
- By the end of the course you’ll both be aware of your strengths as a leader and a manager, and of areas where you need additional development.
- You’ll also have enough insights into key skills to build a professional development plan; a critical step in improving your ability to manage and lead yourself and others.
- Business Strategy – 2 credit hours
The role of marketing management in organizations is to identify and measure the needs and wants of consumers, to determine which targets the business can serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. Successful organizations are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organization with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. Our goal in this course is to facilitate your achieving these goals regardless of your career path.
Analytical Tools is a basic course in statistics, decision analysis, and simulation modeling. The course has the following principal objectives:
The course will be conducted using a combination of lecture and case discussion and will cover hypothesis testing, regression analysis, time series, risk and decision analysis.
This course emphasizes presentation skills for a general business audience. Work begins with baseline presentations, and the course continues through both planned and impromptu presentations during which students receive and consider feedback from their instructor, their peers, and their own self-assessments. With an eye toward presentation best-practices, the course covers issues of organization and persuasion, effective delivery (maintaining executive presence, engaging your audience and handling Q&A, integrating PowerPoint slides, visuals, handouts and notes), and targeting each speaker’s individual style and success.
Operations management can be defined as the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s primary products and services. This class provides an understanding of the operations management function and its relationship to other functional areas within the firm. You will develop frameworks to analyze the strengths and weakness of a firm’s operations and to develop viable alternatives in pursuing its goals and objectives. You will also examine the tradeoffs that managers face in emphasizing one goal (such as high capacity utilization) as compared to another goal (such as customer service). The class will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of different strategies and techniques, as determined by industry and global operating environments.
Understanding economics is critical for decision making in most business settings. The first half of the course addresses microeconomics; the second half addresses macroeconomics.
Microeconomics introduces some basic methods of analyzing economic and business situations that are surprisingly adaptable to major issues of today. The course is divided into three sections covering supply and demand, pricing, and risk and uncertainty. In each of these sections you will learn to apply the analytical methods developed to problems covering economic policy and business decision making. During this class, you will ideally gain a new appreciation for hot topics in politics and business.
Macroeconomics introduces students to the major economic factors and relationships most relevant to today’s business decisions. This course focuses on understanding how the current economic environment impacts companies and individuals. Special attention is paid to how economic factors like aggregate demand, employment, and labor productivity affect foreign currency and lending markets. Students are required to follow current events in the global economy and understand how these events impact managerial decisions.
This course addresses the theory and practice of financial management. The course has the following principal objectives:
You will cover the concepts of Value Creation, Business Policy, and Financial Decision Making and sharpen your thinking skills using economics.
The course will be conducted using a combination of lecture and case discussion.
The focus of the course is on surveying key core skills and setting students up for continuous learning of these skills. Accordingly, students will be provided with: in-depth materials for every topic through soft-copies of recent significant articles on the topic, self-evaluation instruments, and specific suggestions for further learning and development of skills through activities available throughout the program.
Objectives:
The purpose of this course is to increase your ability to analyze the strategy of corporations. By strategy, we mean the distinctive approach that the executives within a corporation employ to win in their markets and against their competitors. We will discuss fundamental strategy theories and illustrate their use within a diverse set of corporations. Specifically, we will consider industry structure and generic strategies, the resource-based view of the corporation, and opportunity-driven strategies based on complexity theory. The course will progress from well-defined markets to highly dynamic ones where market structures are ambiguous and the pace of change is often rapid. The ultimate intent of the course is to help you to work more effectively in your professional careers.
Financial accounting is a crucial business tool. There are two goals for students in this class. The primary goal is to become informed users of financial statement information. By the end of the course, you should be able to analyze financial statements, footnotes and other corporate disclosures, interpret articles from business publications, and understand analyst reports. A secondary goal is to ensure that you are comfortable with the mechanics of financial accounting. The course presumes a background in the fundamentals of financial statement preparation; by the end of the course, you should be able to prepare financial statements reflecting a wide range of economic transactions.
While you are not likely to become practicing accountants, understanding the impact of transactions on the financial statements is central to preparing business plans, forecasting financial performance, budgeting and assessing the implications of proposed transactions on the financial statements. Taken together, these skills will give you a solid foundation for other courses as well as in a wide variety of career tracks.
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