Full-Time MBA (FTMBA)

Term 1
 - GSBA-511: Microeconomics for Management
 - GSBA-540: Contemporary Issues for Competitive Strategy
 - GSBA-541: Foundations of Your Professional Value
 - GSBA-542: Communication for Management

Term 2
 - GSBA-510: Accounting Concepts and Financial Reporting
 - GSBA-524: Data Science for Business
 - GSBA-527: Structured Analysis for Unstructured Problems
 - GSBA-548: Corporate Finance

Term 3
 - GSBA-509: Marketing Management
 - GSBA-510: Accounting Concepts and Financial Reporting (Cont’d)
 - GSBA-524: Data Science for Business (Cont’d)
 - GSBA-548: Corporate Finance (Cont’d)

Term 4
 - GSBA-504a: Operations Management
 - GSBA-533: Organizational Behavior and Leadership
 - GSBA-552: Problem Solving and Decision Making: An Integrated Approach Electives

Term 5
 - GSBA-503: Contemporary Issues in Competitive Global Strategy
 - GSBA-580: The Global Context of Business: PRIME Electives

The Global Context of Business: PRIME

In this course, you will put the material you learned in your core classes to the test in a week-long immersive experience abroad. You will analyze the influence of emerging business models and technologies that have the potential to significantly alter the industry landscape and society. After studying the cultural, economic, and political characteristics of your selected region, you will work with multi-national companies, domestic enterprises, and governmental institutions to develop recommendations for pressing economic and societal issues they aim to solve.

Problem Solving & Decision Making: An Integrative Approach

This immersive course will give you experience and exposure to actual unstructured business problems faced by various companies, ranging from startups to multinational organizations. You will apply classroom knowledge and your professional experience as you partner with local companies and help develop recommendations to solve business issues in this team-based consultancy project.

Communication for Management

This communication and leadership course is designed to jumpstart your development as a true leader in your respective field by enhancing your core leadership skills, professional communication style, and self-awareness through clinical research in leadership and communication theory.

Foundations of Your Professional Value

What drives you? This course is designed to help you put into place the foundational knowledge to discover, identify, and leverage your personal strengths to serve as catalysts in your career development.

Organizational Behavior and Leadership

Leading, managing, and working collaboratively with others is essential to being effective in the workplace. By recognizing the motivations and behaviors of stakeholders inside and outside organizations, you will have a heightened ability to apply ethical principles and professional standards in the corporate world.

Contemporary Issues in Competitive Strategy

Fundamental strategic business decisions can only be made effectively by viewing a firm holistically. This integrative course takes a broad view of the overall environment, including companies, customers, and competitors, to create a body of analytical tools to aid in strategic decision-making.

Contemporary Issues in Competitive Global Strategy

In the quest to enter foreign markets, firms must look at the overall strategy to become multinational. In this course, you will learn several aspects of corporate and global strategy designed to help you understand and analyze significant business opportunities around the world.

Structured Analysis for Unstructured Problems

In this course, you will learn how to grapple with how to frame problems and make decisions with incomplete information that is typical in the business world through problem-framing, analogical reasoning, hypothesis evaluation, and counterfactual thinking.

Data Science for Business

This course offers a deep dive into probability, statistics, and advanced analytics critical to managerial decision making. You will learn modern statistical techniques like neural networks, data mining, and clustering analysis through multiple applications, including R programming language.

Operations Management

You will learn about the fundamentals of design, operations, and production systems of a firm's business practices critical to meeting consumer demands for goods and services.

Accounting Concepts and Financial Reporting

Learn the language, rules, and conventions used in preparing financial statements to critically assess companies and make decisions based on financial data. The course provides foundational financial reporting knowledge for business managers.

Corporate Finance

Familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of finance in this course designed to provide an introductory framework for understanding how financiers break down the components of a financial problem and make decisions as investors in capital markets.

Marketing Management

Marketing concepts are at the core of every business. After this course, you will be able to understand marketing strategy, determine market opportunities, and apply both qualitative and quantitative frameworks from a managerial perspective.

Microeconomics for Management

In this course, you will learn about supply and demand analysis, game theory, and the causes and consequences of market failures.

Negotiation and Deal Making
The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation as it is practiced in a variety of settings. The course is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of negotiation problems that managers face. Considerable emphasis is placed on simulations, role-playing and case studies.

Strategy and Operations through CFO Lens
This class addresses the strategic and operational issues that companies face in multiple industries, and the responses of chief financial officers who are responsible for the accounting and financial planning and decision making. The class includes guest speakers, CFOs who present how they view the business as a whole and measure performance effectively.

The Student Investment Fund (SIF) Program is a one-year experiential course consisting of two 3-unit finance electives in “Applied Portfolio Management” (i.e., FBE 553a & FBE553b). It is designed to give students rigorous exposure to contemporary investment and portfolio theory and practice. Each year interested Marshall graduate students apply to be part of the course and 16 students are selected to manage approximately $8.0 million of USC’s endowment fund in four equity and one fixed-income portfolio, each with a unique investment discipline. Analytical tools for the valuation of stocks, bonds, and options are presented. The course also covers risk management and portfolio optimization, behavioral finance, and performance attribution. Students will demonstrate and refine their ability to apply analytical concepts and techniques through the following:

• Fund management
• Sector reports
• Company research reports
• Investment research reports
• Security pitches

Sponsored by the USC Marshall Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab (BSEL), the MBA Society and Business Fellowship Program is a highly selective, year-long opportunity for the small cadre of MBA and MBA.PM students who are seeking a business degree in order to pursue careers in poverty alleviation, including homelessness, education, and global health.

As a Society and Business Fellow, students receive:

• Monthly cohort meetings with like-minded students and professional networking relationships with alumni who share values.
• Personal mentoring from the Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab (BSEL) staff.
• Targeted guidance and counseling for summer internships and full-time employment.
• Professional development tailored to non-traditional business careers.
• Priority registration for BAEP 566/567, 571, 591.
• Exclusive opportunities to meet with industry leaders and exposure to best practices in social entrepreneurship.
• Funding toward professional development.
• Priority consideration for a subsidy (up to $2,500) to complete a summer internship at an eligible nonprofit organization.

MLFP offers a unique leadership development course combining classroom and experiential learning opportunities where second year MBA students dedicated to personal and professional leadership development provide coaching to first year Core teams. This program includes two semester academic experience, totaling 3.0 units of elective coursework (MOR-574a and MOR-574b). In this program second year student coaches hone their leadership skills, gain practical experience, and learn to provide structured feedback using concepts, mechanism, and management best practices while guided by the Business Communications and Organizational Behavior Core Faculty. At the same time, through this coaching, first year core teams become more high-functioning and collaborative while each team member becomes more high-performing, flexible and open to complexity.

Upon completion of the core curriculum, second year MBA students in good standing may apply to complete an independent research project. The independent project option allows students to pursue research in specific areas of interest that may not be covered in other course offerings. Independent projects include Field Research in Business, Independent Research in Business, Research Practicum in Business and Consulting Project in Business. Students working on independent projects work one-on-one with their supervising faculty member to design and execute their research plan.