Hands-on experience is unique to Stevens, and has helped propel Stevens to the Top 20 "Most Entrepreneurial Campuses" in the nation by the Princeton Review and Forbes.com.
Indeed, today's competitive and technology-oriented companies seek students who can provide comprehensive, multi-faceted solutions to complex problems. While most business programs offer just one capstone course to help students integrate and apply their course and classroom knowledge, Stevens offers six! The Practice Core focuses on how to apply what is learned in the program to well-established, big businesses, as well as to start-up entrepreneurial environments.
For three of the courses in the Practice core, students focus on developing a high-level understanding of business. Working in teams and guided by a professor who is a former CEO of publicly-traded companies, students follow and analyze the same company throughout four courses. As part of the studies, they perform rigorous due diligence, write strategic plan reports, and give presentations judged by a panel of professors and business leaders. In addition to fostering in-depth analytic skills, these courses help students learn how to think nimbly and proactively, and communicate effectively.
The remaining three courses in the Practice Core are highly experiential and entrepreneurial. Starting in the spring semester of junior year, students take a unique entrepreneurship course, which is focused on identifying business opportunities, particularly those that leverage the latest technology. This leads into the senior year, where students work on a particular project for both fall and spring semesters. Students are given the option of either developing their own business project, or working with a real organization in the New York metro area. For example, one past team worked on developing their own hedge fund leveraging twitter data; whereas another team helped MTV networks with a project that helped unify media content across 14 different networks.
This practical experience has been invaluable to many graduates. For example, Sarah Byrne – a 2012 business graduate – remarks “The Practice Core allowed me to bolster my resume with real experience that directly helped me land a job post-graduation that I really enjoy.”