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ClassAction: GDBA/GCBA 

Taking Care of Business

By Karen Herland

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A basic business program to supplement study in a specific field, from digital arts to urban planning, makes a lot of sense.

“We offer the fundamentals of business at the graduate level,” says Alan Hochstein, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at the JMSB and responsible for the newly launched Graduate Diploma and Graduate Certificate in Business Administration (GDBA/GCBA). “The program helps students understand how business people think and the terms they use.”

The genesis of the GDBA/GCBA Program was developed through discussions between Dean Sanjay Sharma and Hochstein in 2007. The aim of the program is to offer business education to non-business graduate students.

The inaugural year of the program, offering courses in everything from Finance and Accounting to Organizational Behaviour and Marketing in late afternoon/early evening classes, has been highly successful. Some 70 students were culled from 250 initial applicants. Since the program offers rolling admissions and space is limited, some excellent students who applied late were unable to be admitted. “We were refusing students with 4.0 GPAs,” said assistant director Javier Lee. “That’s unheard of.”

In view of the surprising popularity of the program, Hochstein aims to double registration and the number of spaces available for next year. About a dozen applications are already in from students who could not get a spot last year.

Miguel Burnier, Director of Clinical Research at the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute and professor of pathology, opthamology and oncology, is enthusiastic about the program. After discussions with Sharma, he referred nine of his own PhD students to study in the GCBA Program this year and is expecting to recruit 20 more next year. Through his work, he saw a growing need for graduate students in the health field to know the business of science.

“More and more, academia and industry are working together,” Burnier said. “Researchers need an understanding of patents and intellectual property that they never learned because they were so busy with the science.”

“You need to know this material if you’re going to run a lab and handle personnel and budgets,” said Patrick Logan, PhD candidate at McGill in pathology, at a luncheon organized by Hochstein’s team to gather feedback on the program.

Logan and four other McGill students, who had been referred by Burnier, attended the luncheon to discuss their experiences and were enthusiastic about the GCBA program.

“I know so many people looking for this. You really need to market it at McGill,” said Rabia Khan, who is working on her PhD in human genetics.

See the program site.