I have had a unique academic path in the sense that I have struggled with discovering where my passions lie and how to direct those passions into a major and eventually a career. I viewed the UNC Business Essentials (UBE) program as a way to find direction with my studies. I enrolled at the end of my semester abroad in Spain which was a perfect time because the online modules flexibly fit into my schedule. Throughout the course, I appreciated the real-world applications that the program constantly offered to me. The six different modules gave a very great overview of the aspects of business and instilled a new confidence in me to be able to understand conversations and media within Read More
Tag Archives: business program
Business Essentials Sets You Above the Rest
19/03/2013 – 1:46 pm
I decided to take the UNC Business Essentials program this summer because I knew that it would improve my knowledge about the business world, while also looking great on my resume. As an environmental science major, I often feel that I do not receive much information about business and economics unless it is to teach me about how much a company is polluting during their production process, or how profit driven marketing is causing an overconsumption crisis. My ultimate goal for my career is to be able to bring both of these disciplines together in my own sustainability consulting firm, but in order to do that I needed to acquire some quality business knowledge. UNC Business Essentials was the perfect Read More
Business Essentials – The Key to Opening Doors
12/03/2013 – 5:42 pm
For a long time I was adamant about wanting “nothing to do with the business world”. I thought I could escape from ever having to deal with anything business related. Well, that was fairly naïve of me. Luckily I’m graduating with two degrees from an incredibly prestigious school, but then again, so are a lot of other students. I needed something that could set me apart from the competition when recruiters were looking at my resume and deciding whether or not to interview me. I came across the UNC Business Essentials Certificate program in an email I received, and decided it was worth looking in to. And was I ever right. This program taught me about everything from business finance Read More
Truly Essential Skills
26/02/2013 – 4:22 pm
I am terrible with numbers. What possible other reason could there be for the decision I made to take 20 hours per week of class this summer while working another 35 hours? But, in all seriousness, I am a bleeding-heart liberal arts major who always figured I could save the world without ever managing a budget. My assumption was extraordinarily incorrect. I have been faced with the challenge of setting and sticking to a budget several times, and each time I have found the task incredibly daunting. Enter UNC Business Essentials. Business Essentials offered me education in a skill set that I never would have chosen to study as part of my four year plan to see the world, learn Read More
Beef Up Your Resume
19/02/2013 – 4:19 pm
The thought of graduating college and having to become part of the real world is terrifying for most students. On top of the worries about navigating life on our own, my generation is faced with another stressor—how are we going to get a job? We are constantly bombarded with horror stories of college graduates who were forced to move back in with their parents and work at fast food restaurants just to make ends meet. I always thought a college degree was a “golden ticket” of sorts that guaranteed a well-paid job and an independent lifestyle upon graduation. But in this economy, and with so many people attending college, a bachelor’s degree isn’t as powerful as it once was. I Read More
Business Essentials Helps You Interpret the Word in a New Way
12/02/2013 – 4:16 pm
UNC Business Essentials can be described in many ways on paper, but for me it is more than a new line on my resume, it has changed the way I learn and interact in the business world. UBE has given me a new sense of confidence in my everyday interactions. I now feel comfortable discussing marketing strategy and balance sheets in detail, something I would have struggled through before UBE. The course is structured to give students the ability to learn and practice. After studying the vocabulary and concepts, the student is given the chance to write about them in the context of a real world situation. I really loved this because it forced me to take my interpretation to Read More
Complement the Major of Your Choice
05/02/2013 – 4:01 pm
I will always remember the night my freshman roommate came home after taking her first ECON 101 exam. The week before the test, it seemed as though a highlighter and textbook were glued to her arms and she spent her nights gulping coffee down while she made notecards. She had entered “Business Administration” as her perspective major at CTOPS earlier that summer, and she was dead-set on going through with the major—no matter how challenging she found the classes. She came home from her test devastated and disappointed. She braced for the worst as she checked her exam score online. She opened her squinted eyes just enough to see the “F.” We spent the rest of the night eating ice Read More
Breaking the Mold with Business Essentials
29/01/2013 – 3:55 pm
A young college student has a number of different options when choosing a potential major to focus their studies on for four years. Although there is no wrong choice per say, there are undoubtedly some majors that are more practical than others. It seems as though after making that decision on a major, you are locked into a particular skill set, and if you happen to choose something incompatible with the job world, you are out of luck. This is where UNC Business Essentials comes into play, breaking that mold. Business Essentials provided me with concrete ways to tangibly add to my skill set and make me a more marketable job applicant. Many students who have not had formal business Read More
Benefits of Business Essentials
23/01/2013 – 3:54 pm
The UNC Business Essentials program has been a perfect complement to my Economics and Public Policy double major. After completing the program, I feel like I have a fresh perspective on things I would not have previously noticed. For one, marketing techniques line up perfectly with the lectures and lessons on the marketing module. Going through the program has made it so much easier to identify the different tactics and techniques marketers use to sell their product to their desired audiences. The UBE video lecturer joked about just that, but he was completely right. Additionally, each module of the program has taught me this vocabulary that I had always heard but never really taken the time to seek out information Read More
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
05/06/2012 – 7:43 pm
One thing that I took away from UBE is that unless you try new things, you will never know what you don’t know. Let me explain. Throughout each module of the certificate courses, I consistently discovered new aspects of the business realm that I did not even know existed. It’s one thing to know that you lack knowledge on a certain subject matter, say, quantum astrophysics, and another to not even know that there is a knowledge gap to be filled. For instance, although I was familiar with the economics content in the Economics and Finance module, I knew nothing about the Six Sigma process, the bullwhip effect, GAAP, or the 5 bases for segmentation in the other modules. In Read More