SMG project gives students a glimpse into the business world

College is full of learning experiences.

And none of those experiences may be as important to a student’s future success as the chance preview the real world or to become acclimated in various aspects of a job, two opportunities offered over the course of the academic year by the School of Management.

“Our objective was to provide students of Management with a broad introduction to the various elements of business management,” said Peter Arnold, director of the SMG Operations Management department.

The SM 122 project was developed in the early 1990s. It aims to not only to develop the functional learning skills of SMG students, but also to help them become familiar with themes developed through the four-year curriculum, such as team learning, communication, cross-functional thinking, ethics and data-driven decision making.

This course runs two semesters. SM 122 is a continuation of SM 121 in the fall. “We can and do pack in a lot of stuff,” Arnold said. Each semester also requires a large project.

For example, Arnold said, in the fall semester students are placed into teams and manage a small portfolio of stocks and the students report the performance of the stocks and the team’s overall decisions.

“The project requires the student teams to apply many aspects of the accounting, finance and general knowledge of the stock market to the decision making,” said Arnold.

Then, in the spring, the students are again assigned into teams and they must compare two firms in the same industry. For example, SMG freshman Andres Valencia’s team is currently comparing furniture companies, Lazy-Boy and Ethan Allen.

“The teams are made up of four to six people and we meet three to four times a week,” Valencia said. She explained the team compared the websites of the companies to learn how they market to customers in addition to performing outside research including a survey to gain feedback from a variety of Ethan Allen and Lazy-Boy customers.

The teams spend the semester attending workshops on Fridays. “The workshops are intended to keep teams on track by having teams prepare a presentation and a particular element of the project,” Arnold said.

The spring project is divided into four components: a presentation comparing the Internet’s role in the two firms, a written report, a 10-minute video presentation and a final summary.

“The video presentation is both fun and stressful for the teams. The object is to both convey information and entertain sufficiently to ‘help make the medicine go down,’” Arnold said.

The videos have become “more MTV than SMG,” according to Arnold, who indicated the four best videos, judged by the students, will have the opportunity to present their films before a panel of judges from General Electric Corp., and the winning team will receive a trophy.

“The videos are generally high energy and provide the students with an opportunity to present data in an alternative medium,” Arnold said.

Valencia’s team chose to stay within BU when selecting an editor for their video, hiring a student from the College of Communication. Many of the other teams, however, produce on a grander scale.

“Most other teams actually look for professional companies that specialize in editing videos; we chose to go with this particular COM student because we thought he gave us a great offer on the editing job, and he sounded reliable and professional,” Valencia said.

The students need the editors to cut down the raw footage down to an eight to 10 minute show and need them to add lettering and special effects to make the video more interesting.

For this project, students are not allowed to spend more than $150.

“I think the expenses aren’t that bad at all, it keeps everyone in control so no one spends hundreds of dollars on expensive equipment and on hiring professionals to make the video for them,” Valencia said. “In past years, when a cap wasn’t placed on the expenses, people hired professional actors to act on their video — it was ludicrous.”