Texas A&M University recently recognized 70 engineering undergraduate and graduate students who earned business management certificates.
The Business Management Certificate program (BMC) provides students an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills associated with business to complement their technical engineering skillset. The program covers accounting, finance, marketing, supply chain management and communications through an intensive 70 hours of instruction.
“The BMC program has been a great success since its inception because of the value it provides to engineering students by immersing them for two full weeks in the business world,” said Magdalini Lagoudas, executive director for industry and nonprofit partnerships. “Every year, we have students who just graduated and are about to start their professional careers, but [they] invest in the program because they value that experience.”
Established in 2005, the BMC is a joint program between the Texas A&M University College of Engineering and the Center for Executive Development in the Mays Business School that allows engineering students to receive in-depth instruction on business principles to complement their engineering degrees. The program occurs during a two-week period every May.
While in the program, students are required to work on an engineering team project and apply all the knowledge acquired during the program such as market assessment, findings from customer interviews and business plans to give comprehensive final presentations to a panel of business and engineering faculty judges. Overall, the students worked on seven projects: automated lawn mower, Cycle Fit, tactical data system, Space Race, PediaPod, wrist-hand-finger orthosis and a smart valve monitoring system. The teams competed for more than $2,000 in awards. The top two awards were awarded to: Team Tactical Data System A (Jonathan Gaw, Lian Ma, Alaina Eoff and Andres Barrios) and Team Tactical Data System B (Jusung Lee, Sarin Apisaksirikul, Jose Marino and Duo “Sean” Qui).
As one participant said, “this is a great program for all students and I'm very impressed with the dedication of all the faculty and staff. The assigned project has given a good hands-on experience. I really enjoyed the program and I am very thankful to all the people behind it.”
Students who complete the course are awarded a business management certificate from Mays Business School’s Center for Executive Development. This year, there were 47 undergraduate and 23 graduate students representing 10 different engineering majors. Certificates are awarded on the final day. The competitive program received more than 170 applications this year.
The program is offered to students at a significantly reduced cost through the generous support of Halliburton.