That means, if you want to specialize in accounting, you have to maintain a B-average in accounting courses.īut that left an outstanding issue – what about the business students who didn’t maintain the B average in their specialty? Well, enter Gilkeson, who was given the mandate to create the new program in 2015, with it launching in the spring of 2016. Rather than continuing this trend, UCF now requires business students who want to specialize in a specific area to maintain a strong GPA in courses in that specialty. For example, if a business student specialized in accounting but did poorly in accounting courses, they were unsurprisingly unlikely to graduate in four years and then get a job as an accountant.
How the program started – a new offering for at-risk students.īefore 2016, UCF was consistently seeing business students who struggled in their specialization also struggle to graduate on time and find a job after school. Why has it been so successful? Because, according to Gilkeson, the goal of the Integrated Business Program is not to create “22-year-old experts.” Instead, it’s to arm students with foundational skills that span across any business, like critical thinking, presenting and leadership – so graduates come out of it ready for the working world. “That skepticism has pretty much all gone away.” “When we launched this, it was met with a healthy amount of skepticism,” said Jim Gilkeson, the man who has led the program since its inception. In 2020, it had more than 1,300 students – making it the most popular business major at UCF, the second-largest public university in the US – largely because it has the second-best placement rate of any business major at UCF, only behind accounting. In the four years of the Integrated Business Program’s existence, it’s grown in popularity each year.
Online resources, watched before classes, not during.Solo assignments with specific instructions.A professor lecturing to the whole class for more than 15 minutes.Here’s a few things you won’t see in any class that’s part of the University of Central Florida’s Integrated Business Program, which launched in 2016 –
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