Entrepreneurship program being restructured, refocused

Changes being considered to appeal to non-business majors

Humanities students typically would never step foot into Kamm Hall, but Lori Long, Chair of Management & Entrepreneurship, said that with restructured programs and new courses that might change.
Long said that the School of Business is currently going through the process of getting approval to revise the entrepreneurship program with focus on the minor. The goal of this is to make the curriculum more accessible to non-business students. Part of this restructuring includes discontinuing the entrepreneurship and innovation major.
“The major, while a great idea, we think was a little bit too big to be attractive to students outside of the school of business,” Long said, “It was designed as a second major and we just found that students weren’t able to fit it into their schedules.”
With these changes, Long said that they are currently revising the entrepreneurship minor to be more accessible to students of other majors.
The minor previously had two accounting course requirements, which will now be replaced with one course designed for non-business students, Long said. This course will provide the essentials of accounting and finance.
“We are revising those courses to make it less of an emphasis on starting a business and more emphasis on launching any kind of venture or enterprise,” Long said. “So students that have an interest in social entrepreneurship will find it more useful.”
Long said that another benefit to the revisions being made to this program is the capstone course that will be included in this minor will also designed as an experiential learning course, allowing students to fulfill that required credit.
With these revisions, Long said, the entrepreneurship minor will be more attractive to students of all majors.
“We think these revisions are valuable to those students because the idea behind studying entrepreneurship is not about starting a business,” Long said, “It’s about taking action on whatever you’re interested in so therefore it’s an exciting minor to support any major.”
The entrepreneurship program is not the only efforts being made to support non-business students. Long said that they have also recently gotten approval for a new course, BUS170 Exploring Careers in Healthcare which is open for registration for Spring 2018.
This one credit course is available to students of any major, Dr. Susan Kuznik, professor at Baldwin Wallace said. Healthcare majors also have the option to take this course in replace of one internship credit.
“The reason that we started this course is that we have a lot of students that are interested in healthcare but there’s so many different things that you can do with a healthcare management degree,” Long said, “We found that students were having a hard time finding an internship because they just didn’t know what they wanted to do.”
With a wide range possibilities with healthcare degrees, such as working in hospitals, companies providing healthcare services and insurance companies, Kuznik said that this course will help to give students more focus to find an internship and ultimately a career within a variety of options.
“It’s really just opening the door to so many different things that can be done,” Kuznik said, “Even as a public relations major you could work in healthcare … somebody has to do PR to say ‘come to our hospital’ as opposed to somewhere else.”
Kuznik said that since this program is designed so that any student on Baldwin Wallace’s campus can take it. This course can also help undecided majors see what working in healthcare means and what options they could pursue.