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: UBE
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
Business Essentials Matters to Employers
05/03/2013 – 12:38 pm
I initially chose to get involved with Business Essentials because I thought it would look great on my resume, but I soon found out how much more value the program has to offer. As a result of completing the certificate program, I have the skill set to expand my career options. With a thorough understanding of financial accounting, economics and finance, marketing, business operations and business communications, I’ve made myself more marketable for employment. This is tremendously valuable in today’s competitive job economy. Completing the Business Essentials program in association with the Kenan-Flagler signals your self-drive and commitment to academic excellence – attributes highly valued by employers. I know this from experience. During an interview at a congressional office this 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
Benefits of the Online Model
02/10/2012 – 10:43 am
The UBE program was my first experience with online learning. I was very wary of starting an online course such as UBE, especially during the summer months. Having spent my entire life as a full time resident on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, my summers always consist of two things: working as many hours as possible and trying to squeeze some beach time in between shifts. I was worried that adding an online program to my to-do list would be too overwhelming and that I would eventually fall behind. Instead, I found that I actually had much more time to work on the program than I thought because the online course format offers so many more liberties to the Read More
Direct Application of Important Business Topics
11/09/2012 – 10:23 am
I have never learned something that had so much real-world application as what I have learned from UNC Business Essentials. There have been many times at employer information sessions, reading articles in the Wall Street Journal, or sitting down in interviews where I was able to follow along and feel I had a grasp on important business concepts. For example, I recently went to a Pengo Loans information session – a local start-up that provides loans to medium-sized enterprises in Africa. While I was surrounded by seasoned business professionals who talked about return on investments and equity, I was still able to understand the message Pengo Loans had to offer. I have also interviewed for several marketing companies. As a Read More
Standing Out in the Health Care Industry
28/08/2012 – 10:16 am
My decision to follow through with UNC Business Essentials was only made after I had found the answer to one of my biggest questions – How in the world will this program help me out in the health care and fitness industry? I had a talk with one of the directors at UNC Career Services, who filled me in on how great the program looks on resumes to employers in my field of interest. After reading some articles on my own and talking to some of the UNC faculty I work with in the Exercise & Sport Science department, I felt confident that this program really is good for anyone, especially me. There’s a business side to health care, whether Read More
Searching for Internships with UBE
17/07/2012 – 7:30 pm
As a junior, I knew at the beginning of the year that I wanted to pursue a challenging internship in a professional environment this upcoming summer. Last summer, at nonprofit called International Development Enterprises in Cambodia, I worked closely with a number of independent consultants. I was fascinated by the work that consultants did and the fast-paced and exciting nature of their work and research, so I decided to pursue a consulting internship this summer. When I started dropping resumes for consulting internships, I literally had no idea what to expect. I quickly realized how challenging the case interview process was and, being a non-business major, was worried I would be extremely unprepared. Although casing took a while to get Read More
E-Learning
10/07/2012 – 7:19 pm
I found that learning online as opposed to in a business school classroom had two distinct advantages. For one, I could customize the UNC Business Essentials program based on my own needs and interests. In a classroom, you learn the course material at the pace that your professor has preset. The pace is strategically set, but does not take into account that each student starts with varying degrees of knowledge on each topic. With the certificate program, on the other hand, I was free to customize the course based on my own needs and interests. For instance, I was free to breeze through topics that I was already familiar with, such as economics, and take longer on others that were 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