Student Support

Your future success is our business

Together we'll get you ready

We see the big picture

It starts with our business living-learning community — the dedicated residence hall for first-year business students. It continues with a year of exploring business studies and the signature microbusinesses launched and operated by these new students. It expands throughout the coursework of Blueprint, our national award-winning financial literacy, leadership and professional development programming across all four years of study.

And each step of the way, it — your future success — is supported by the team and services within the Career Success Center. We have no other yardstick to measure ourselves than by what you accomplish in your life after graduation. We've carefully developed a plan of services and opportunities that'll give you every tool a young professional needs. Together, we'll get you — the whole you — ready.

First-year College of Business students gathering at convocation
The steps to "adulting"

Blueprint

Every student at our college learns about career success and how to achieve it. That is our Blueprint. Blueprint is twelve courses, one each term over four years of study. Our Blueprint has won national awards, and now serves as a national model for other universities to follow to supports a students' professional development tailored to today's workforce needs.

We know you're churning through classes, homework and finals. It may seem like you have light years of time before your first professional job, but we get you ready for this big step incrementally. Each year, we hit important milestones — like landing an internship or finding a role model or setting career expectations. That's the blueprint.

Becoming a professional in your future career field does not happen overnight. Exploration, engagement and strategic vision are essential parts of the mix, and this is not as overwhelming as it may sound. You have access to resources and experiences — software, teachers, mentors, road trips, your fellow students — that'll help you get ready to thrive in your future career field. The preparation starts now, and you have a blueprint.

 

1st Year: Learn by doing

We offer a rock-star all-encompassing first-year experience, probably the best first-year experience of any college, anywhere. You learn the practical skills to succeed in college: goal setting, time management, engaging with peers and professors, teamwork and collaborative decision-making, all while practicing the fundamentals of business through the launch of your own microbusinesses. By the end of the first year, you know your college, your community — and you understand how to navigate your remaining years of college.

2nd Year: Leverage your strengths

This is a year to build your professional confidence and begin leveraging your personal strengths. You draft a career blueprint that aligns your talents with your future career goals. You learn the basics of personal finance and financial planning. You become more familiar with the extensive career services the college offer, and you connect with networking and mentoring support that fuels an ambitious career mindset. You've learned about creativity and diversity in the workplace, and you've given some thought to study abroad.

3rd Year: Communicate like a pro

In the third year, you build a solid core of professional communications skills. You practice your written and oral business communications skills, increase your professional confidence and finesse your professional image. A feature event is the college-wide Orange & Black Case Competition, where you'll showcase your public speaking skills critical to success in the business world. Your updated résumé is posted in LinkedIn and in Handshake, our jobs database, and you're lining up a summer internship.

4th Year: Life after graduation

In preparing for life after graduation you focus on long-term career, life and financial planning. You learn money management, risk management, budgeting for major purchases and negotiation strategies. You learn what comes after an entry-level job and how to negotiate a raise. You graduate with sound judgement and sophisticated decision-making skills for your early-career and longer-term goals. When you graduate feeling prepared for life outside of college, your job satisfaction skyrockets. You still have a blueprint.

Discover your blueprint

Explore Careers

Your undergraduate degree is a step toward launching your career. Below are some links to College of Business degrees you may be considering. Associated with each degree are a variety of jobs, places of employment, and opportunities. Click on the degree links below to review some brief information on typical career paths.

Today's accountants are tech-savvy problem-solvers, insightful planners and strategic thinkers. Many of the “number-crunching” tasks formerly thought to be part of an accountant's world have long ago been replaced by sophisticated software. Instead, you can expect a satisfying and challenging professional career as an accountant, with lucrative and stable employment in a respected profession.

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Creative, driven and a design trailblazer? Turn your passion into a career with a degree in apparel design. Apparel design harnesses creativity and artistic skill with cutting-edge technology, process and design thinking. We're the No. 1 apparel design program in Oregon, and ranked 14th in the nation.

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Our business administration degree provides you with broad business skills in accounting and quantitative methods, an understanding of the legal and social environment of business, and a background in management and organizational behavior, marketing, finance, and operations management.

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Business analytics is a rapidly growing and highly in-demand skill. You'll graduate not only with strong technical skills and proficiency in various data analytics tools, but also the ability to identify opportunities for data-driven solutions. You'll also understand the financial and operational implications of data-driven solutions you've discovered.

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As businesses continue to improve their competitive advantage, Information systems such as databases, web services and business applications are supplying strategic and operational opportunities for business leadership and decision making. You'll learn to harness technology to help organizations gain the right insights, improve operations, make the right predictions and achieve a competitive advantage in today's rapidly changing environment.

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Our design and innovation management degree focuses on the intersection of design and business, bringing together analytic and creative problem-solving skills. You'll focus on how design can be integrated into an organization from a management and strategic perspective and learn the value that design and innovation can bring to an organization.

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Finance is harnessing the power of money to make things happen. Effective financing enables life-saving research, ground-breaking engineering, and building of infrastructure on which communities and nations depend. On a more personal scale, financial planning and markets enable homeownership, entrepreneurial successes, and comfortable retirements.

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The hospitality management degree is designed to equip you with skills in service, operations management, hospitality technology, food and beverage operations, as well as solid business fundamentals in marketing and accounting. With a focus on the jobs of the future, this specialized degree path will make you well-positioned to go directly into management and be on the fast track to executive leadership or ownership positions in this rapidly changing field.

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Our innovation management double degree is for non-business majors, and we focus on teaching you to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities within business ventures. This degree program gets you ready to be a leader in the innovation economy, which is applicable across all industries. You'll learn about technology and innovation management, commercialization, managing ethics and corporate social responsibility, and venture financing.

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Our interior design program explores how spaces look, feel, and function. Using a human-centered approach, students learn how the design of the built environment impacts our productivity, health, and emotions. We prepare critical thinkers who can work both independently and as effective members of design teams.

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Your degree will prepare you for management in both goods-producing and service enterprises for fluency in the management of systems, personnel and/or quality. The job sector is expanding faster than many other occupations, and it is a competitive job market. You’ll gain the strategic communication and leadership tools to run teams, divisions and entire companies.

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The heart of marketing is creating value in a complex, advanced economy. Marketing consists of a sequence of activities: identifying customer needs, developing goods and services to satisfy those needs, communicating information about products to potential customers, and distributing the products to customers.

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You’ll graduate with a solid business foundation in merchandising topics including global sourcing, consumer behavior, retail merchandise planning and others. And, you're learning with the best — our program is ranked No. 12 in the nation, and No. 1 on the west coast for fashion merchandising by fashion-schools.org.

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