PROGRAM PROFILE - FULL-TIME MBA (FTMBA)
Pacing: Full-Time
Program Length: 2 years
Format: In-Person
Class Schedule: Weekdays on campus.
Student Profile: Early-Career Professionals
STEM Designation: STEM Certified
Full-Time MBA (FTMBA)
Full-Time MBA
A full-time two-year MBA program for early career professionals to sharpen business fundamentals, learn to leverage technology for business and social impact, and empower leadership of diverse global teams. Opportunities for networking and specialization enable students to use the MBA to transform their career.
Marshall is located in one of the most vibrant global economies and is part of a large, diverse university ready to engage the world’s demanding challenges. The Trojan family, known for its strong network, includes more than 450,000 alumni, where 90,000+ are from the Marshall School. Our campus community includes a world-class faculty, high performing students and a dedicated professional staff.
PROGRAM PROFILE - FULL-TIME MBA (FTMBA)
Pacing: Full-Time
Program Length: 2 years
Format: In-Person
Class Schedule: Weekdays on campus.
Student Profile: Early-Career Professionals
STEM Designation: STEM Certified
FTMBA PROGRAM BENEFITS
Marshall employs a holistic academic-career program model. Marshall has tightly integrated and aligned the academic, programmatic and career development of the MBA Program. Academic courses at the start of the MBA Core such as Communication for Management, Foundations for Your Professional Value and Structured Analysis for Unstructured Problems that explore self-awareness, leadership, communication and value-creation help students identify their personal interests and value in the marketplace.
Engaging with Graduate Career Services ensures that you’re among the best-prepared candidates in the marketplace. You’ll partner with a career strategist on your career journey as you make connections to the organizations and industries that hire Marshall talent. Through one-on-one career coaching, self-reflection, involvement with career clubs, case competitions, career workshops, and recruiting events, you’ll come to a clear understanding of what you want, your differentiating skills and what’s important to you in your future career.
Marshall faculty devote a lot of effort designing core courses that build on and complement each other and the overall program learning goals. Marshall faculty are encouraged to engage in collaborative teaching, often partnering with each other to use common case studies to explore a common business problem from a variety of academic perspectives, providing students with a richer understanding of the circumstances, factors and issues of the case.
This inter-disciplinary teaching is enhanced by the incorporation of current events, career panels and forums, guest speakers and industry practitioners who support the academic content with real-world perspectives.
As of Spring 2020, Marshall's entire Full-Time MBA Program is STEM certified. Marshall is one of a small number of business schools with a STEM MBA Program which is designed to combine data-driven decision-making and analytics with the overall MBA program learning objectives of developing a global and entrepreneurial mindset, building a deep understanding of business fundamentals, and leading high-performing teams.
The STEM MBA is focused on preparing students to fulfill the increasing need to apply quantitative and scientific methods to business challenges. Additionally, international graduates are able to apply to extend their 12 month OPT by an additional 24 months, potentially expanding their employment opportunities within the U.S.
Los Angeles is perfectly situated to serve as the gateway to global business. PRIME is designed to put your collective classroom experience to use in an immersive experience abroad. After studying the cultural, economic, and political facets of a region, you will work with multi-national companies, domestic enterprises, and governmental institutions to develop recommendations and solutions for pressing economic and societal issues. You will have the opportunity to select one of six unique experiences in Southeast Asia and, where you will explore the history and culture of the region. Whether you visit the Great Wall or hike the Peruvian highlands, you'll have an unforgettable experience!
Developing strategies for lifelong career management and taking action on those strategies is the key to successfully managing one’s career and to exploring, identifying, and landing satisfying roles throughout a lifetime. To support our students in this effort, this course will deliver industry insight sessions to enable the student to improve industry awareness and gain a deeper understanding of the future of the business and industry.
One of the longest running programs of its kind at USC Marshall and brings MBA students and alumni together in a relationship designed to assist students in making informed career decisions. Our mentors are seasoned professionals from a variety of functions and industries and are typically USC alumni.
FULL-TIME MBA CURRICULUM
Academic Overview
Holistic Academic-Career Program:The program begins with MBA Core courses that explore self-awareness, leadership, communication and value creation in order to help students identify their personal interest and value in the market place. The curriculum is designed to be flexible and customizable to suit each individuals' career goals. The program offers 100 different electives and opportunities to take courses from other graduate schools at USC like the School of Cinematic Arts or Viterbi School of Engineering. The Core Curriculum is designed to provide students with the fundamental principles of business that every manager needs to know and is delivered over five terms within the first academic year.
In Term 4, student-teams participate in a consulting project with a Los Angeles-based company, developing solutions for real-life business problems, using fundamental business tools they have learned in the program. In Term 5, students also begin to explore global business through the Global Context of Business course followed by the PRIME overseas experience. USC Marshall’s signature PRIME overseas experience is an experiential opportunity that allows students to travel abroad to one of a select number of countries to gain first-hand knowledge of how business is done globally. During the 10-day PRIME trip, students visit domestic and multinational companies and governmental institutions, develop business insights and complete projects that take into consideration the cultural, financial, regulatory, political and other constraints and opportunities of the country.
Term 1
GSBA-511: Microeconomics for Management
In this course, you will learn about supply and demand analysis, game theory, and the causes and consequences of market failures.
GSBA-540: Contemporary Issues for 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.
GSBA-541: 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.
GSBA-542: 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.
Term 2
GSBA-510: 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.
GSBA-524: 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.
GSBA-527: 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.
GSBA-548: 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.
Term 3
GSBA-509: 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.
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
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.
GSBA-533: 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.
GSBA-552: Problem Solving and Decision Making: An Integrated Approach Electives
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.
Term 5
GSBA-503: 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.
GSBA-580: The Global Context of Business: PRIME Electives
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.
Elective courses allow students to explore their areas of interest and develop deep competencies that align with their career goals.
MBA students may select 7.5 units of elective classes during the Spring semester of their first year. This provides students the opportunity to take classes that they feel will prepare them to be successful in their summer internship. Students may choose to take additional elective classes during the summer in lieu of an internship.
The second-year of the MBA program is intended to be customized to suit student’s interests and career goals. The 30 remaining elective units can be earned by:
- Taking elective coursework – Marshall offers close to 100 elective courses for MBA students in any given year;
- Designing an individualized program of study that cuts across several functional areas*;
- Completing an independent study project*; and/or
- Selecting courses from other graduate schools within the university*- students may take up to nine elective units at another USC graduate school
*Available to second year MBA students who have completed all core curriculum and are in good standing (minimum 3.0 GPA)
Please note course offerings are not guaranteed and students should consult the Schedule of Classes for courses offered during any given term.
Featured Elective Courses
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.
Graduate Student Investment Fund (SIF) Course
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:
MBA Society and Business Fellowship Program
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:
Marshall Leadership Fellows Program (MLFP)
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.
Independent Projects
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.
APPLYING TO THE FTMBA PROGRAM
APPLICATION DEADLINES
Deadline | Decision By | ||
---|---|---|---|
Round 1 | October 15, 2023 | December 31, 2023 | |
Round 2 | January 5, 2024 | March 31, 2024 | |
Round 3 | March 1, 2024 | May 15, 2024 | |
Round 4 | April 15, 2024 | June 15, 2024 | |
Round 5 | Applications submitted after April 15, 2024 will be considered on a space-available basis. |
PARTNER EVENTS
Meet a USC Marshall MBA Admissions representative near you! Explore the FULL LIST OF PARTNER EVENTS we will be attending.
CHAT WITH AN AMBASSADOR
Connect with a current Full-Time MBA student ambassador. START A CHAT.
FTMBA STUDENT LIFE
USC Marshall has 40 graduate student organizations. Ranging from community outreach, diversity and affinity groups, career clubs, and social and athletic organizations, students are able to expand their network to other USC Marshall MBA graduate programs and corporate contacts. Club activities take place during the day, evenings and weekends, and can include networking opportunities, social events and company visits.
Challenge for Charity (C4C) is a 37-year-old nonprofit 501(c)(3) that puts teams from eight elite West Coast MBA programs against each other in a year-long effort to demonstrate their commitment to community outreach and social responsibility.
Despite Covid-19 challenges, Marshall MBAs have remained involved in supporting C4C core charities through service and fundraising. USC’s C4C chapters have raised over 2 million dollars and volunteered over 60,000 hours for our core charities.
Throughout the year, USC Marshall students volunteer and raise money for three charities, including:
SPECIAL OLYMPICS: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BRANCH
The MARSHALL BUSINESS COMPETITION PROGRAM (MBCP) seeks to provide MBA students with the opportunity to enhance critical business and leadership skills, connect with potential employers, and put classroom learning in to practice. Each year Marshall is invited to compete in case competitions hosted by MBA programs around the country and world. In the 2015-2016 academic year, Marshall students competed in 18 case competitions, resulting in six first place and two second place finishes.
WHY MARSHALL — Full-Time MBA
Career Pathways
Marshall graduate students are actively sought by the world's leading companies Amazon, Google, Salesforce, BCG and Goldman Sachs. Benefitting from Marshall's deep industry ties, they are leaders in a range of industries from Technology, Entertainment and Interactive Gaming to Healthcare, Consulting and Financial Services.
Trojan Network
The Marshall Trojan network links students and business leaders around the globe. Over 90,000 Marshall alumni worldwide create a proactive pay-it-forward culture that drives powerful career outcomes. There is simply no other alumni network quite like it.
Real-World Learning
Every Marshall graduate student has opportunities to integrate and apply what they learn in the classroom to real challenges outside the classroom. Learning by doing trains leaders to be visionary and resilient.
Faculty Expertise
USC Marshall faculty come from a wide array of backgrounds and disciplines. They engage in collaborative and inter-disciplinary teaching to explore business challenges and opportunities from a variety of viewpoints. They incorporate case studies, current events, career panels, and industry speakers to support academic content with real-world perspectives.
Global School in the Heart of LA
Located in the heart of Los Angeles, USC Marshall is embedded in one of the most vibrant global economies and part of a large, diverse university community committed to a culture of inclusion, collegiality, cooperation, and team work. Our students, faculty and alumni play leading roles in the industries that have built and continue to drive L.A. forward - from real-estate and accounting, to marketing and finance, to entertainment and tech.
FTMBA NEWS + EVENTS
Welcome Back to Marshall
Marshall and Leventhal deans welcome incoming and returning students as the 2023-2024 academic year begins.
Alum’s Clean Makeup Brand Keeps Growing
Amy Liu MBA ’04 credits entrepreneurship courses and mentorship for her success.
USC Marshall Honors Kevin Curry as the 2023 Food Industry Executive of the Year
The USC Marshall Food Industry Management (FIM) program will honor Kevin Curry as its 2023 Executive of the Year.
An Early Network
USC Marshall was the first West Coast business school to join the Consortium. It still plays a role in creating a diverse full-time MBA cohort.
Skateboard Diplomacy
First-year Full-Time MBA student Miles Jackson brings skills and a global mindset to Cuban youth through skateboarding.
STAY CONNECTED