The Business Department has long been a staple of the ever-growing college for students interested in a multitude of fields relating to the business side of professions. The primary degree attainable through the major is the Bachelor of Business Administration. Dr. Timothy Hatten, a professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at Mesa, who also served as the Head of Mesa’s Business Department from 1995 to 2001, said that it helps to give students a wider range of career choices.

“There’s always some confusion,” Hatten said. “You hear some students say that they are (Economics) majors or they’re finance majors, but really the degree is in Business Administration. We have concentrations in, I believe, 13 different areas. It really seems like a technicality, but it isn’t. We don’t have degrees in Finance, Human Resource, etc. What the B.B.A. provides is so much broader.”

Students just starting out in the Business Department or looking to join can expect a good balance of both theoretical and practical business techniques. Balancing the two is something that has been maintained despite the large growth at CMU.

“We’ve still maintained a really solid core approach in business,” Hatten said. “We’ve done a lot of work with the business community and so we’re not just sitting in classes listening to the theories, it’s now how do we take that and put it into practice. We are still, even with the growth, in that sweet spot of being big enough to provide a wide range of skills and interest, but we still know who you are, and that’s not the case in a lot of business schools.”

Megan Lane is a senior majoring in Business with concentrations in both Marketing and Management and views the classes as a great way for students to understand how to work with others.

“We have a lot of group projects, so you learn the concepts of working with other students,” Lane said. “There’s a lot of application, I think, and learning how to work as a team. There are a lot of professionals that come in and talk, and a lot of entrepreneurs to share their experiences.”

Among the examples of practical experience is the idea of taking students into the global marketplace of business. Dr. Hatten will be taking a group of students in May through numerous countries in Europe, including Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Krakow, and back to Copenhagen where he taught in the fall semester, to let them witness and experience the international side of business.

Lane will be one of the students and thinks that it will be a great opportunity for all those who are going to be involved.

“It’ll be really cool getting to tour different countries, and observe the way they do business over in Europe,” Lane said.

The department appears to be more in touch with the world than ever before, extending its creativity to not only the surrounding community but to other countries as well.