Business and the Liberal Arts
Teaching in a different venue affords Tuck faculty the opportunity to broaden their teaching expertise.
Earlier this year, Catalina Gorla D'09 got a call from a recruiter in the large insurance company that was planning on hiring her after graduation. He asked if she could take an accounting course to prepare for her new job. "Of course," Gorla replied, without the faintest idea of how she was going to make good on her promise. She neglected to mention that Dartmouth didn't offer accounting.
She later discovered that Tuck was about to begin teaching several business courses for Dartmouth undergraduates. First up was accounting. "It was the complete answer to a prayer," Gorla says. Financial Accounting, taught this spring by Professor Robert Resutek, was the first of three so-called "free electives" Tuck will begin offering Dartmouth seniors, juniors, and sophomores over the next year and a half. A marketing course will be added starting in spring and a strategy course in the fall of 2010. The three courses were selected because they have clear relevance to a liberal arts education, do not require any specific prerequisites, and can be taken in any order and independently of each other.
"The courses really answer a big question," says Gorla, an art history major. "What is the role of liberal arts graduates in the financial world? These are skill sets that are important for everyone."
Dartmouth isn't the only Ivy League school at which the graduate business program offers courses to undergraduates. But rather than adjunct professors, as is often the case, Tuck's full-time, tenured, or tenure-track faculty will teach the new Dartmouth courses. "We think that's who should be teaching students at any level," says Tuck Assistant Dean Penny Paquette T'76.
While the school has been teaching undergraduates in the four-week Tuck Business Bridge Program since 1997, teaching in a different venue and to a different kind of student affords Tuck faculty the opportunity to broaden their teaching expertise. And with one of the nation's top graduate schools of business and top undergraduate colleges sharing the same campus, it simply made good sense. "The main reason we started this was because it was the right thing to do educationally," says Tuck Senior Associate Dean Bob Hansen.
Resutek says the approximately 100 undergraduates in Financial Accounting were a lot like the students he teaches in the MBA program—bright, motivated, from diverse backgrounds, and with varying degrees of familiarity with accounting. The difference was in their life and real-world business experiences. "At the beginning, it was up to me to extract information from them," says Resutek. "But as the semester rolled on, they got more comfortable talking in front of the class."
For Alex Cook D'09, who majored in African and African American Studies and started a job in investment banking in July, the new accounting course couldn't have come at a better time. "It's the missing piece of the puzzle for Dartmouth students competing against undergrads from other schools," Cook says. "This makes us more prepared and will make us more competitive."