Teaching Business Sense to Liberal Arts Students

Joseph D'Cruz has three academically accomplished sons any parent would be proud of -- one is working on a PhD in philosophy, another has just completed a linguistics degree and a third is thriving in a liberal science program in the United States.

Yet, like so many parents of liberal arts and science majors, Prof. D'Cruz, frets about "what they are going to do when they grow up."

As a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, he knows -- better than most -- that it takes more than fantastic marks and an excellent education to break into the business world. Employers look beyond marks and want to know what else job candidates have done, either through prior work experience or volunteer activities, he says.

So, drawing from his own family experience and borrowing a page from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Prof. D'Cruz created and conducted a "bridge to business" boot camp for liberal arts majors this June at Rotman.

His first class of 57 students included philosophy, criminology, anthropology and English lit majors. Prof. D'Cruz threw some engineering grads, economics majors and a PhD candidate in molecular genetics into the mix, and then immersed the entire group of twentysomethings in a month of intensive business training -- 12 hours a day, six days a week. (He marvels that they still had the energy to party after class.)

To give students real-world experience, professors created a miniature version of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, where they participated in an "open outcry auction," buying and selling shares. In the finance lab, they sat at workstations "just like the ones on Bay Street, with access to financial data from all over the world," Prof. D'Cruz says.

The students also created marketing plans for two music groups that are actually signed with Sony BMG -- and Sony now plans to incorporate some of their ideas.

At the end of it all, the students emerged "market ready," most with at least one solid job offer. The only ones who did not have immediate new job prospects were those who already had jobs, or who planned to return for post-graduate studies.