A multidisciplinary approach is essential for success. The mastery of subjects outside of one’s declared major sets students apart when seeking employment opportunities and enables them to come up with more creative solutions for business issues.

However, current Zicklin School of Business majors are limited in opportunities to adopt this into their business education. While students in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences are able to create their own ad hoc major, Zicklin and Marxe School of Public and International Affairs students are not able to. 

With so many prerequisites required for Zicklin majors and some even required for minors, students are often left with electives alone as avenues to pursue off-track topics that can be extremely valuable to their holistic education. Electives and additional courses can be difficult to fit into a four-year, “on-time” class schedule when so much time must be devoted to pursuing their major courses.

For this reason, it makes sense for students wishing to gain knowledge in a wide variety of areas to incorporate a wide variety of coursework into their major rather than relegate classes not necessarily major-specific to minors or electives.

Due to limitations in the ad hoc program, such consolidations cannot be completed.

In addition to hindering the ability to pursue a truly holistic curriculum, the inability for Zicklin students to create ad hoc majors also obstructs their ability to pursue a highly focused one. A student who wishes to study the business side of a specific field should be able to study that field with greater intensity than a minor can offer.

By better balancing business coursework with potential industry coursework, Zicklin and SPIA students can become familiar with that area in ways other students can’t.

The current conditions for Weissman students pursuing an ad hoc major do not allow for them to balance a business curriculum and a liberal arts curriculum since Weissman ad hoc students can take only nine credits worth of Zicklin courses. In addition, the Zicklin courses ad hoc students can take are a very limited selection of the Zicklin courses available at Baruch.

To enable a more creative approach and to retain Baruch’s status as a forward-thinking institution preparing students for the future, Zicklin and SPIA should create an ad hoc program of their own.