Issue: Summer 2012 | Posted: June 18, 2012
Germantown MBA Students take on Practical Challenges
Michael Gray, MBA student, presents to members from Union’s Center for Excellence in Health Care Practice.
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Students practice football at Youth Visions’ after school program in Frayser, Tenn.
The sometimes-dreaded “capstone case study” awaits most students attempting to earn a Master of Business Administration degree.
In many schools, it is a comprehensive project designed to examine all aspects of a student’s mind for business.
The MBA candidates are asked to apply their newly acquired skills in accounting, management, law, ethics, finance and strategic marketing. They’re given a practical example and asked to analyze the operation from top to bottom. The finished product is a set of recommendations designed to chart the organization’s pathway to success.
In many MBA programs, these projects are purely theoretical. The organization is fictional. Its needs are drawn from pages of a textbook.
But students in the MBA program at Union University’s Germantown campus focus on real-life organizations, many of which could not begin to afford the consulting fees for such a detailed, expert business analysis.
Union faculty members in Germantown say the real-world approach not only distinguishes the university from other MBA programs in the Memphis market — it fits perfectly with Union’s mission.
“If we are Christ-centered, these are projects that have value,” said C. Steve Arendall, professor of management in Germantown.
Consider a few West Tennessee organizations MBA students in Germantown have analyzed and partnered within the past few years: Youth Visions, Inc., Union’s own Center for Excellence in Health Care Practice, S.O.S. Industries, Pink Palace in Memphis, United Cerebral Palsy of Memphis and many others.
Teresa Bailey was among a team of students that analyzed Youth Visions, Inc., a Frayser non-profit that serves at-risk teenagers in the inner city.
“We tried to look at their operations and their budget and assess their environment,” Bailey said. “What’s going on internally? Externally? Who was their customer? And what could we do to help them? From a Christian perspective, as Union tries to teach you, that is the right thing to do.”
Scott Bendure, another Germantown MBA student, said no part of the operation was “off limits.”
“It’s very granular. We are looking for everything,” Bendure said. “We asked every question that we thought would be applicable to this project. It is real world.”
Most of the MBA students at Union also have jobs in the business field while taking classes.
“(The students) get to see the integrative nature of the various functional areas in practice, since they tend to come from discipline-specific backgrounds,” Arendall said. “In addition, it may give them a greater appreciation for the concept of strategy and looking long-term at organizational success. Perhaps more than anything they get an appreciation for the work of these nonprofits.”