When it comes to etiquette, some things are common knowledge – cover your mouth when you sneeze, put your napkin on your lap and do not speak with your mouth full. But the rules of etiquette can be important when interviewing for a job – a fact that Boston University’s School of Management recognizes as “business etiquette,” making sure its students are at the top of their etiquette game.

According to Feld Career Center Recruiting and Operations Manager Kendra Trask, the Center’s main objective is to “provide outstanding career services to the BU School of Management’s students, alumni and recruiters.”

About a year ago, SMG added a half-credit class, Charting Your Career Path, to the graduation requirements for SMG students, Trask said. Before that, it was an elective that proved popular among students. The course covers writing a rèsumè, assembling a cover letter and preparing for interviews, among other features. Students are also put through mock interviews as an assessment of what they have learned.

Business etiquette is clamant, Trask said, because there are often different norms within cultures.

“You have to be prepared for what is expected,” she said. “In an interview, [an applicant] could get knocked off for something like misspelling errors in a rèsumè.”

Undergraduate Career Councilor and SMG Charting Your Career Path instructor Amanda Peters said business etiquette is important for one main reason: “It makes a good impression.”

“Employers are looking for ethics, integrity and honesty,” she said. “They rank integrity as the second most important thing after communication skills these days.”

Though Peters said her students usually have a good understanding of basic etiquette, some things the class teaches are new to them, including how to turn down a job offer. Peters said it helps to be reminded of the small details, including not ordering a messy chicken parmesan meal on a lunch or dinner interview.

Peters said the course’s discussion of the proper way to write a formal business email is very helpful to students in today’s cyber world, where instant messaging lingo sometimes oversteps its boundaries.

“People are so used to email and instant messenger that it becomes very easy to revert to that kind of writing in a professional circumstance,” she said.

One of the biggest advantages of this course for young people, Peters said, is getting help with rèsumès, which can potentially be employees’ strongest marketing tool. With help from the Center, students are able to bring forward their best side and market their top traits, “which are sometimes difficult [for students] to find on their own.”

Former Charting Your Career Path student Lauren O’Toole said one of the most important things she took away from the class was interviewing skills.

“Learning about eye contact in an interview and actually getting to use it in the mock interviews was one of the most important things,” the SMG sophomore said.

O’Toole said business etiquette is important because it “shows your character and makes you stand out in an interview.”

Trask said the purpose of the course is to produce well-rounded SMG students who are prepared for corporate world expectations.

The Feld Career Center collaborated earlier this year with the BU Career Center for Career Week, which provided information sessions on different topics and a crash course on business dinner etiquette.

According to O’Toole, other SMG courses place importance on business etiquette as well. In entry classes SMG 299 and 121, students are asked to write four different memos, including one addressing a boss about an employer and one delivering bad news to an employee. These memos are usually given in the form of a quiz, and students have a class period to write the memo using proper formatting and etiquette.

O’Toole said the class also provides instruction on preparing for an interview that some interviewees do not always consider, including doing research about the company, writing “thank you” letters after the interview and asking for a business card to ensure proper name spelling in those letters.