By Hannah Gordon
News Editor
The School of Business will implement an industrial management major beginning fall 2015. Industrial management will be a Bachelor of Science degree, the first of its kind to be offered in the school of business.
The new major will focus heavily on science, said Pierre Balthazard, dean of the school of business.
“The idea is to give students a background in science, engineering and business,” Balthazard said. “It’s the application of engineering to business and business to engineering.”
Balthazard said adding a new major has the potential to increase enrollment in the school of business.
“A (potential) student would start a conversation, ‘Do you have engineering at St. Bonaventure?’ The answer was ‘Well, no we don’t,’ but we’ve changed it to, ‘Well, we don’t, but we have an applied engineering degree called industrial management,” Balthazard said. “If you’re interested in working with engineers and working on the business prospective of engineering, well then we’ve got a degree for you. We believe that there will be a lot of students that will be interested.”
The expectation is to add 20-25 students to the School of Business solely for industrial management. The major is targeted at attracting students that wouldn’t normally look at Bonaventure as a school choice. Instead of splitting business students into different concentrations, like the school of business does now with accounting and finance majors, Industrial Management would keep the group of students together on a strict curriculum, according to Balthazard.
“There isn’t really room for electives,” Balthazard said. “These students will still do Clare College courses, but they’ll be doing science classes as opposed to taking three electives.”
According to the requirements of the industrial management major, 11 new classes will be added, which translates to new faculty.
“We will be able to hire, as adjunct faculty, qualified professionals from the industry,” Balthazard said. “For example, we will be able to hire engineers to come teach technical courses to people who will manage the process.”
Some classes will be refocused to fit the major requirements, according to Balthazard, and some current business professors will teach classes in the new major. Zahid Khairullah, Carl Case, Terry Moran and Balthazard, all of whom were hands-on in the development and three other business professors that developed the new major, are confirmed to teach classes in it as well.
“These four individuals, during their career, have done some form of engineering, either as a masters degree, or as a minor in the Ph.D. program,” Balthazard said. “We’ve got four faculty that understand engineering pretty well, and in some cases, industrial engineering very, very well.”
Currently, Khairullah is on sabbatical in preparation to implement the new major, according to Balthazard.
“He’s dusting off knowledge that he hasn’t used in 20 years, so he’s basically taking six months or so off to visit industrial settings,” Balthazard said. “He’s going to travel the world and take a look at what’s happening, what’s state of the art and bring that back to the program.”
Business professors that do not have engineering backgrounds will have a chance to expand their knowledge during an upcoming visit from Rajiv B., an engineer from Pune, India. Rajiv will be on campus from Sept. 20-Oct. 7 to work with faculty on developing skills needed to teach classes in industrial management.
“We have a strategic relationship with the college of engineering in Pune, India,” Balthazard said. “They’re interested in business, and we’re interested in engineering. We’re also interested in the globalization of industries. We plan on developing relationships with some of the engineering schools in the North-East. So, in the future, if some of our students want to go to a grad school, we have a place to guide them to.”
Balthazard said this year will be focused on finalizing the industrial management major and readying it for students.
“We’ve got a program on paper,” Balthazard said. “By next year, we have to have a real program with real outcomes. So we’re preparing for that.”
