Pitt Business Core Courses

In this course, you will: learn the technical aspects (academic and experiential attributes) pertaining to the majors offered in CBA, and how they relate to your next step; explore global opportunities, such as global experiences and the International Internship Program; develop networking skills, and establish your personal and professional network; create a resume that has been reviewed by a Professional Development Consultant; and establish a CBA Connect account on which you may post your resume, schedule appointments with CBA Career Services staff, register for events, view internship/job opportunities, and access secure documents. The text for BUS 0010 is Bloomberg Businessweek.

Students who take this course are not required to take BUS 0020 Your Career Success.

In this course, you will: learn and practice a variety of tools used in the exploration of career paths (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment, Strong Inventory, informational interviewing, and job shadowing); explore your skills, abilities, and preferred roles and environments; develop and implement a personal strategy for career goal setting and planning; learn the internship and job search processes; learn and practice communication tools necessary throughout the job application process (such as resume, cover letter, unsolicited letter, letter of regret, networking, interviewing, and accepting job offers).

Students who take this course are not required to take BUS 0010: Your Academic and Career Success.

*Required for first-year students entering Fall 2022 and beyond.

This course introduces data programming to undergraduate business students and focuses on automation of data collection, data cleaning, and data wrangling tasks. Students will learn to use the Python programming language along with Structured Query Language (SQL), Excel, and Tableau for completing data preprocessing and exploratory analysis tasks. Through hands-on exercises and projects, students will develop and execute programming scripts for examining a variety of structured and unstructured business data.

*Required for students entering January 2023 and beyond.

This course builds on the Programming Essentials course and introduces foundational topics underlying modern business analytics to undergraduate business students. The course focuses on providing a solid basis in the necessary probability and statistics to understand and apply data-driven methods. Students will learn elementary probability, descriptive statistics, data visualization, hypothesis testing, and analysis of variance, and how to apply these techniques on real-world business datasets using Python and Tableau. Emphasis will be placed on how the fundamentals of probability and statistics equip students to reason about and make decisions using business data, powered by modern data science technologies. Towards the end of the semester, students will learn applied statistical tools that are useful for handling high-dimensional data (e.g., clustering and factor analysis); and, using Python, they will be introduced to some of the challenges of handling Big Data.

*Required for students entering January 2023 and beyond.

BA II builds on the previous two courses to focus on predictive analytics. The first half of the course covers two foundational techniques: linear (for continuous variables) and logistic (for categorical variables) regression. In addition to understanding the statistical approaches and assumptions behind them, particular emphasis is placed on (i) how to select and create new independent variables (including using data visualization); and (ii) how to avoid overfitting and evaluate model performance on out-of-sample observations. In the second half of the course, students will move beyond statistical and regression analyses and be introduced to some of the most popular machine learning algorithms. Examples include Classification and Regression Trees (CART); recommendation systems, using Association Rules; Social Network Analysis; and Natural Language Processing (e.g., for Sentiment Analysis). This list of topics will be frequently updated to ensure that students are exposed to techniques that are currently valued in business environments.

MCE is one of the first business course for CBA students (freshman and also transfer students during the first term in CBA).  Its  objectives are to provide the concepts, vocabulary, tools, skills, and experiences germane to business as a field of study; to prepare you for later business courses; and to assist your choice of majors and career areas. There are no formal prerequisites.

This 3-credit course introduces students to managing large firms in complex and rapidly changing environments. Students examine what managers do when faced with incomplete, noisy, and often inconsistent information about competitive forces, given (a) the firm’s resources, capabilities, and constraints; (b) the effects of law, regulation, culture, and ethics; (c) the claims of various stakeholder constituencies, (d) industry structure and competition, (e) firm-level governance, and (f) market forces. This requires attention to the basic concepts, vocabulary, tools, and techniques of business and to the complex interrelations among the multiple dimensions of firm performance.

Managing in Complex Environments is to be completed by first-year's or by transfer students upon their first term as a business student.

Helps students become informed users of firms’ external financial reports. The basic structure and contents of such reports and the process by which they are prepared will be studied. Discussion topics will include what items are included in the reports, how such items are measured, and how various economic events affect them. An understanding of what can be inferred from the reports about past performance, present position, and future prospects of the firm will be developed.

Prerequisite: ECON 0100 or 0110

Introduces students to the basic terminology and concepts of cost accounting, and provides an introductory coverage of product costing, cost allocation, budgetary control, responsibility accounting, and the use of cost information in resource allocation and other managerial decisions. Textbook material and real-world examples are used to engage students in extensive problem-solving.

Prerequisite: BUSACC0030

Provides the foundations for two basic business disciplines: optimization and simulation. Various modeling concepts that have origins in and have found wide applications in functional areas such as finance, marketing, and operations will be studied in depth. The topics studied include linear programming; models of “go/no go” decisions and location decisions; “what if” analysis; decision analysis and multiple criteria decision-making models; and queuing models and statistical foundations to simulate business systems—input/output analysis.

Prerequisite: STAT 1100

Examines the social, political, and legal interfaces between the business institution (especially the corporation) and the environment. Topics typically considered include ethical and value issues in business, the social responsibilities of business, business-government relations, and the management of stakeholder relationships and corporate social policy.

Prerequisite: one social science course.

Provides an overview of topics and concepts in the field of Organizational Behavior (OB). Emphasis is on developing a theoretical grasp of issues and problems and an understanding of practical implications of various theories of human behavior at work. Specific topics include leadership, motivation, teamwork, career issues, work roles, job enrichment, employee participation, and work and non-work integration.

Provides conceptual foundations and training in key communication skills essential for a business professional’s effectiveness. Develops skills in oral presentation, interpersonal communication, and communication in teams as applied in business settings.

This course must be completed in the freshman or sophomore year, or during the first term upon transfer into Pitt Business.

The core course in finance focuses on how companies make sound investment and financing decisions, much of which is also relevant for individual decision making. With regard to the investment decision, the time-value of money, security valuation, capital budgeting, and the tradeoff between risk and expected return are studied. With regard to the financing decision, the cost of capital, financial leverage, and capital structure policies are studied.

Prerequisite: BUSACC 0030, STAT 1100

Provides an understanding of the roles of marketing in the economy and the firm, and develops a rationale for a marketing perspective as a guide to organizational and individual actions. Topics covered are the marketing environment, strategic planning, market segmentation, product development, pricing, distribution, promotion, consumer decision making, control, and marketing management.

Provides foundations for managing operations technology—manufacturing and service. The management of operations of the conversion process will be discussed. The field is centered on the fundamental problem of any manager—taking inputs (raw materials) and transforming them efficiently and effectively into products resulting in a satisfied customer. Topics include: bottleneck and capacity analysis, and capacity expansion issues; decoupling the workstations—buffers versus internal and external variability; economies of scale in material handling and distribution—EOQ, MRP; reorder point computations; distribution and logistics management; scheduling of products, workforce, and other resources; and GT, JIT, CIM, and FMS.

Prerequisite: BUSQOM 0050

Focuses on corporate and divisional policy formulation and implementation. The knowledge and techniques learned in earlier courses will be applied in an integrated fashion to the process of strategic decision making and organizational change. Among the topics considered in the course will be the relationships of organizations to their environments, the hierarchy of organizational objectives, structured as well as informal approaches to strategic planning, the integration of business functions, organizational structure, and policy implementation and evaluation. A significant aspect of the course is devoted to assessing the competitive dynamics of firms.

Prerequisite: 90 earned credits and completion of nearly all of the Pitt Business core courses

Primarily an applied microeconomics analysis, although some applied macroeconomic analysis of relevance to the business firm may also be treated. Emphasizes the development of economic tools and concepts that can be used in the firm’s management decision-making process. Builds upon the standard economic analysis of the firm that integrates a company’s revenue, cost, output, and pricing decisions. Marginal and incremental reasoning is stressed as an important decision-making principle.

Prerequisite: MATH 0120, ECON 0100 and ECON 0110) Students who have already completed ECON 1100 Intermediate Microeconomics are exempt from BUSECN 1010 Business Economics.

Students who take this course are not required to take BUSBIS 1060: Introduction to Information Systems

Information technology (IT) is a key component and enabler of business transformation. Focuses on how business processes can be (re)designed and business decisions can be supported with emphasis on the IT perspective. Business cases involving IT-driven and IT-enabled decision situations and business transformations are used.

Students who take this course are not required to take BUSECN 1010: Business Economics.