(Photo: Chris Liverani, Unsplash)
SUNY Geneseo’s School of Business is now offering a finance major as well as new minors in entrepreneurship and human resource management. The degrees, open to current business students, will be available to incoming first-year students beginning Fall 2022.
“The finance major has a well-considered core that puts courses in sequence,” says Harry Howe, professor of accounting in the School of Business and area coordinator for accounting and finance. “It runs from an awareness of markets to corporate finance activities, which gives rise to cash flows that support the value of securities, which students then learn how to model given different states of the world.” Students acquire a combination of theoretical insights and practical modeling abilities that prepare them for entry-level positions in banking, investment services, personal financial planning, and corporate financial management.
Geneseo’s finance major has strengths that distinguish it from other colleges’ programs. Students can focus on the rapidly growing field of personal financial planning or explore a wide array of courses in programming languages relevant to finance practice. An active internship program—many of which provide academic credit—introduces students to alums in banking and investment as well as employers throughout Western New York and New York City. And the Student Managed Investment Fund provides students with hands-on wealth management experience. That integration of rigorous technical instruction with a broad liberal arts education sets Geneseo’s finance major apart, says Howe, as do the strong backgrounds of finance faculty members Robert Boyd, Chinmay Jain, Ken Pan, and Paul Yan.
The entrepreneurship minor offers students the opportunity to learn, experience, and then apply the entire entrepreneurship process. Students have the opportunity to identify and develop an actual new business, which they will pitch in the annual New York Business Plan Competition.
The minor emphasizes real-world, practical experience, says Steven Brookstein, VanArsdale Chair and lecturer in entrepreneurship. “Unlike most programs, students in the Geneseo entrepreneurial minor spend an entire semester identifying potential new business ideas in the course Commercial Ideation,” says Brookstein. “After identifying the ideas with the most potential, they spend the following semester developing business plans around their ideas and are in a position to seek interest and startup capital from investors.”
The human resource management minor, open to all Geneseo students, supports today’s business environment, when many organizations increasingly depend on their people or “human capital” to differentiate themselves from competitors. “Human resource managers now have a seat at the table when top management is making strategic decisions about responding to changes in the marketplace, adopting new technologies, achieving sustainability and diversity goals, containing costs, and maximizing productivity,” explains professor of management Avan Jassawalla.
Few colleges offer the combination of HR major or minor with a strong, award-winning Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) student chapter—Geneseo has both.
To learn more: check out the Business Excellence Program and the VentureWorks Entrepreneurship Program.