Curriculum

The McCombs curriculum prepares students to lead, build, and manage enterprises that create value for stakeholders and constituencies in a dynamic, global economy. The hallmarks of the Texas MBA include a common educational experience that prepares all students for success, a collaborative rather than competitive learning environment, market-driven concentrations, and program flexibility.

• The Basics
• Flexibility
• The Core
• Two-Year Schedule Outline

The Basics

Our goal is to give all MBAs the same grounding in the fundamentals of business and to endow them with general management competence. Through the core, the faculty seeks to instill these essential business skills and values:

• A contemporary, real-world managerial perspective
• Business ethics
• Teamwork and leadership skills
• Cross-functional problem solving
• Effective written and oral communications
• The ability to manage change, risk, and crises
• The ability to manage human resources and diversity
• Personal presentation skills

Flexibility

Unlike many programs, our students are not required to choose a concentration. You have the option of customizing your own program based on your unique strengths and interests, your perceptions of what employers want, and your own conclusions about how best to prepare yourself for a successful career. And whether or not you pursue one of our established concentrations, our MBA academic advisors can help you chart the course of your degree program.

The Core

The core consists of eleven required classes (23 hours) taken during the first year of the MBA program. Additionally, students take three electives in the spring semester of their first year to begin to customize their degree.

Two-Year Schedule Outline

First Year, Fall Semester

Financial Accounting (2 hours)

This course provides an introduction to the concepts and issues of financial accounting, with an emphasis on the interpretation of financial statements. The course presents an overview of the accounting model, its aims, its continuing evolution and the notion of earnings persistence. By the end of the course, students should feel comfortable interpreting a company’s annual report.

Marketing Management (2 hours)

Introduces the student to the marketing perspective on strategy development, to the elements of marketing analysis, and to the functional decision areas of the marketing manager including products and product lines, pricing policies, branding, promotion and advertising, and channels of distribution. The overall objective of this first course in marketing is to provide the student with a structured approach to strategic marketing problems and decisions.

Financial Management (2 hours)

This course provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in finance that provide a framework for analyzing investment and financing decisions. Using a combination of lectures and case problems, the course introduces students to financial concepts and their application. The main emphasis is on the investment and financing decisions in a corporation. The course examines how firms evaluate investment opportunities and identify the appropriate means of financing them. Specific topics covered include present value concepts, capital budgeting, capital structure policy, raising external capital, leasing policy, dividend policy and business valuation.

Operations Management (2 hours)

Provides an introduction to the issues and decisions involved in the production of goods and services. More specifically, the course focuses on designing, operating, controlling and improving the systems that accomplish production.

Statistics (2 hours)

A unified approach to basic concepts in collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, emphasizing capabilities of different statistical methods and business applications. Students will learn to recognize and appropriately apply some of the most common statistical models in business: random process, random walk, regression, forecasting, decision analysis, simulation and probability models. Students are also introduced to statistical software packages.

Managerial Economics (3 hours)

Composed of two segments: microeconomics and macroeconomics. The microeconomics component covers how individuals and firms make economic decisions. The macroeconomics component examines how changes in global economy impact managerial decision making.

Strategic Career Planning (1 Hour)

Guides students through MBA-level career choices and teaches job-search and transition skills that will help students both in school and career. Covers self-assessment, career choice, behavioral and case interviewing, successful marketing and networking techniques, job research tools and company-specific research, business writing, business etiquette and offer negotiation.

Analyzing the Business or Leading People (flex core course - 2 hours)

First Year, Spring Semester

Strategic Management (3 hours)

Examines topics like the role of the general manager, formulating business and corporate-level strategy, managing strategic change, strategy implementation, and developing general managers. The focus is on the function and responsibility of the general manager, whose primary tasks include developing and managing an overall strategy.

Analyzing the Business or Leading People (students take two flex core courses - 4 hours total)

Plus a choice of three elective courses (9 hours)

Flexible Core Course Options - Analyzing the Business

Performance Management and Control

In this course, case studies are used to explore the use of internal accounting information by managers for decision making, planning the design of control systems and for implementing the organization’s strategy. Topics include long-range planning, annual profit planning, activity-based costing, cost prediction, strategic control systems and performance evaluation.

Valuation

This course builds on the topics covered in the Financial Management core course. Topics covered include: Financial modeling, derivatives in corporate finance, business valuation and value-based management.

Business Analytics and Decision Modeling

This course introduces some of the basic concepts in quantitative business analysis used to support organizational decision making over various time horizons. We focus on financial decision-making but the methods explored apply to all areas of the organization.

Analysis of Markets

Introduces students to the data and tools required to analyze the business environment and enable marketing decision-making. Through real-world data and problems, the course develops a set of knowledge and skills used to evaluate strategic market opportunities and assess the impact of marketing decisions in the marketplace. Students are exposed to analytical and empirical tools that address strategic issues of market sizing, market selection and competitive analysis, as well as product management, customer management and marketing function management decisions. The skills developed in this course enable the student to translate a solid conceptual understanding of marketing into quantitative assessments, which are then applied to marketing tactics and strategy decisions.

Flexible Core Course Options – Leading the People

Managing People and Organizations

The purpose of this course is to increase the student’s effectiveness as a manager by providing (1) a framework for understanding the behavior of people in organizational settings, and (2) guidance and guidelines for applying this knowledge. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to diagnose and solve a broad range of organizational problems from a managerial perspective.

Creating and Managing Human Capital

The focus of this course is on settings where a manager must select, develop and retain human capital—particularly the human capital held by knowledge workers and other professionals. You will study the financial impact of various approaches to managing a firm’s human resources and explore how effective management of human resources can be a source of sustained competitive advantage. You will discuss issues such as “whom to hire” and “how to interview effectively.”

Second Year, Fall and Spring Semesters

Five elective courses (15 hours)