Stevens MBA (Master of Business Administration) - STEM Designated Concentration
Program Details
Degree
Master of Business Administration (MBA)Department
School of Business Graduate ProgramAvailable
On campusThe Stevens MBA prepares you to lead conversations about how technology creates strategic advantage for the business.
Few MBA programs consider how rapidly the data revolution has changed the ways managers recognize opportunities and identify trends. This innovated MBA is taught by faculty who understand the traditional managerial toolkit — marketing, strategy and finance — must be complemented by skills in technology and analytics to create success.
Your MBA courses will feature applied exercises that prepare you to be a leader who is capable of making fast, data-supported decisions. MBA coursework emphasizes collaboration through group projects and presentations and develops your creativity and critical thinking skills through the incorporation of new analytical tools and the latest research insights.
The MBA is available on campus or fully online. Visit the link below to learn more and apply to the online program.
The design of the Stevens MBA is structured to ensure your studies are closely aligned to your professional aspirations. In addition to a blend of tech-centric management courses that prepare you for the challenges of leadership, you will choose four courses directly focused on your career interests — either as part of a structured concentration or as free electives that let you explore different disciplines.
Foundational Courses
This course provides students with a rigorous introduction to the fundamental principles of finance. The primary concepts covered include the time value of money, principles of valuation and risk. Specific applications include the valuation of debt and equity securities as well as capital budgeting analysis, financial manager’s functions, liquidity vs profitability, financial planning, capital budgeting, management of long term funds, money and capital markets, debt and equity, management of assets, cash and accounts receivable, inventory and fixed assets. Additional topics include derivative markets.
This course will provide the student with the principles and techniques of financial and managerial accounting for technical organizations. The emphasis will be on the use of financial data for decision making. The basics of accounting will briefly be covered, with the major amount of time spent on ways to understand, analyze and use the data for decision making. Budgeting and analysis of performance, as well as, recognizing fixed and variable expenses are other key areas of financial management. Issues of valuation, time value of money, uncertainty and risk will be integrated in the material. The one-term course will make extensive use of the text by Weygandt et al (see below), supplemented by cases, exercises, homework and examinations. Emphasis will be on real-world, practical application of the tools of finance to management decision making.
This course introduces managers to the essence of business economics – the theories, concepts and ideas that form the economist’s tool kit encompassing both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environments. Microeconomic topics include demand and supply, elasticity, consumer choice, production, cost, profit maximization, market structure, and game theory while the Macroeconomic topics will be GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand, aggregate supply, fiscal and monetary policies, and exchange rates. In addition, basic concepts in international trade and finance will be discussed.
Language of business
Courses in this block provide fundamental skills in marketing, operations management and strategy — three crucial areas that give students mastery of topics central to every business unit in every industry.
The study of marketing principles from the conceptual, analytical, and managerial points of view. Topics include: strategic planning, market segmentation, product life-cycle, new product development, advertising and selling, pricing, distribution, governmental, and other environmental influences as these factors relate to markets and the business structure.
An interdisciplinary course which examines the elements of, and the framework for, developing and implementing organizational strategy and policy in competitive environments. The course analyzes management problems both from a technical-economic perspective and from a behavioral perspective. Topics treated include: assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; sources of competitive advantage; organizational structure and strategic planning; and leadership, organizational development, and total quality management. The case method of instruction is used extensively in this course.
This course covers the general area of management of operations, both manufacturing and non-manufacturing. The focus of the course is on productivity and total quality management. Topics include quality control and quality management, systems of inventory control, work and materials scheduling, and process management.
Leadership and innovation
The three courses in this block will challenge you to think differently about leadership — how to manage resources, inspire teams and foster innovation. You'll get a better sense of your personal leadership style while developing the confidence and capability needed to fearlessly attack missions and drive change.
Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.
In this course, students will evaluate and create their own prospective business strategies. They will develop an understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in starting and growing a business venture. Students will be given an opportunity to actually start their own business or create a business in their company by learning how to take advantage of the new order of business opportunities of the information age. This course’s main objective is to show students how to identify these opportunities, be able to formulate and evaluate both qualitatively and quantitatively whether the opportunity is worth pursuing, and, of course, how it may be pursued. Actual case studies and experiences will be intertwined with the course content.
Executives make decisions every day in the face of uncertainty. The objective of this course is to help students understand how decisions are made, why they are often less than optimal, and how decision-making can be improved. This course will contrast how managers do make decisions with how they should make decisions, by thinking about how “rational” decision makers should act, by conducting in-class exercises and examining empirical evidence of how individuals do act (often erroneously) in managerial situations. The course will include statistical tools for decision-making, as well as treatment of the psychological factors involved in making decisions.
Analytical Thinking
Courses in this block emphasize highly advanced analytics techniques that will teach you the ways successful managers look at and use data in understanding how markets work and making better recommendations to guide the enterprise.
This course explores data-driven methods that are used to analyze and solve complex business problems. Students will acquire analytical skills in building, applying and evaluating various models with hands-on computer applications. Topics include descriptive statistics, time-series analysis, regression models, decision analysis, Monte Carlo simulation and optimization models.
This course is intended to integrate all previously taken courses in the program by presenting a set of increasingly complex business problems. These problems can be solved through analytic skills taught in this and previous courses. In particular, the course is intended to reinforce the understanding of analysis as a way to build models that can focus attention on parts of the system that can be improved through intervention. The early part of the course uses synthetic data and empirical data readily available for analysis. The second part of the course encourages students to state and solve their own problem, gathering their own data as a part of the analytic process.
Concentrations
The Stevens MBA curriculum includes four elective courses, giving you the flexibility to explore a discipline in depth or further round out your studies. If you seek more structure, you can use your elective courses to pursue one of the below concentrations, each of which is aligned with a distinct area of need in industry.
BIA 672 Marketing Analytics
BIA 674 Supply Chain Analytics
BIA 658 Social Network Analytics
BIA 670 Risk Management Methods and Applications
FIN 526 Private Equity & Venture Capital
FIN 627 Investment Management
FIN 628 Derivatives
FIN 638 Corporate Finance
FE 511 Introduction to Bloomberg & Thomson Reuters (1-credit lab)
FE 515 Introduction to R (1-credit lab)
FE 520 Intro to Python for Financial Applications (1-credit lab)
FA 582 Foundations of Financial Data Science (2-credit lab)
FE 513 Practical Aspects of Database Design (1-credit lab)
FA 595 Financial Technology
FA 550 Data Visualization Applications
FE 543 Introduction to Stochastic Calculus for Finance
FE 610 Stochastic Calculus for Financial Engineers
FE 535 Introduction to Financial Risk Management
FE 621 Computational Methods in Finance
FE 630 Portfolio Theory and Applications
FE 620 Pricing and Hedging
The fintech concentration is designed to introduce MBA students to think critically about the challenges and opportunities from technology-driven changes in finance to bring about organizational success.
Courses
FA 582 - Foundations of Financial Data Science
FE 513 - Lab: Practical Aspects of Database Design (1 credit)
FA 595 - Financial Technology (FinTech)
FA 591 - Blockchain Technologies & Decentralized Finance
FA 596 - Digital Payment Technologies and Trends
More information on the fintech concentration
MIS 699 Digital Innovation
MIS 710 Process Innovation and Management
MIS 714 Service Innovation
MIS 730 Integration Information Systems Technologies
TM 501 Principles of Applied Telecommunications Technology
TM 510 Business Information Networks
TM 612 Regulation and Policy in the Telecommunications Industry
Students also choose one of the following to complete this concentration:
TM 615 Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
TM 630 Broadband Networking Services and Technology
TM 650 Software-Defined Networking & Network Function Virtualization
MGT 609 Project Management Fundamentals
MGT 610 Strategic Perspectives on Project Management
MGT 611 Advanced Project Management
MGT 619 Leading Across Projects
SM 510 Perspectives in Environmental Management
SM 530 Sustainable Business Strategies
SM 587 Environmental Law and Management
SM 531 Sustainable Development
Capstone
After completing the rest of the curriculum, students must take the MGT 809 Industry Capstone Program.
This three-credit course trains graduate students in the application of tools and methods used by management consultants to provide advisory services to clients. Students will work on an industry project with a team of their peers. They will scope and plan the underlying project, develop a statement of work, and design and deliver status update presentations. Students will learn how to facilitate meetings with different groups of stakeholders over the course of the project, manage client expectations, and apply their disciplinary and technical knowledge to the project.