How Expanded Electives Within the Michigan Ross Weekend MBA Program Are Enhancing the Student Learning Experience

Students in their second year have the opportunity for increased personalization within the comprehensive lockstep WMBA curriculum, exploring electives that align with their current educational goals and future career plans. They are able to leverage these electives to gain exposure to new disciplines, diversify their knowledge and skills — which they can apply immediately in their positions — and elevate their value to prospective companies.

To gain further insight, we asked six WMBA students about how they customized their learning experience and to share their favorite electives.  

Jazo Moises

Grad year: WMBA ’24
Hometown: Vallejo, Calif. (currently living in Ann Arbor, Mich.)
Current Position/Company: Senior communications strategist at Wieden+Kennedy
Internship: MBA marketing intern at PepsiCo Chicago

What WMBA themed electives have you taken?
I took the operations track (supply chain management and applied analytics) as well as the Strategic Marketing Planning elective. I was also able to personalize my electives, taking courses outside of the WMBA Program in marketing, accounting, business economics, and management and organizations.

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search?
Coming out of my summer brand management internship at PepsiCo, I wanted to use my second year of my MBA to fill a few blind spots. After a summer of working with large sets of data and talking with cross-functional partners in supply chain and sales, I knew that an understanding of operations and analytics was key. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to take all of these classes in one elective track, applying skills from one course to another, and beginning to think about how I might use these skills in my job as a consumer packaged goods brand manager.

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives?
The program allows you to swap up to nine credits for courses offered outside of the WMBA program. I’ve leveraged this as an opportunity to “connect the dots'' across what I’ve learned in the MBA core, my experience as a brand manager over the summer, and the topics I’ve found interesting at Ross. From breaking down a 10-K report with Professor Lindsay Gallo in Corporate Financial Reporting, to interrogating the meaning of brands with Professor Marcus Collins in Strategic Brand Management, to conversations about maintaining and building status and reputation with Professor Michael Jensen in The Power of Prestige, I’ve been able to interact with topics in a deeper way, and find connections to my future role as a brand-side marketer. Additionally, I’ve enjoyed learning from my classmates who have worked in a broad range of functions and industries.

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why?
I really enjoyed Professor Greg Miller’s Financial Communications and Investor Relations course. I was excited to walk into lectures every Tuesday and Thursday morning and start diving into the case of the day — from a casino merger to a winery’s initial public offering to investor expectations for a movie studio. Coming from communications with a consumer perspective, it was interesting to find commonalities between my time as an advertising strategist and the questions management thinks about from a shareholder and investor perspective. It was also a great way to apply concepts from my strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing courses in the core.

 Joshua Eckert 

Grad year: WMBA ’24
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
Current Position/Company: Full-time student and parent (joining Boston Consulting Group after graduation) 

What WMBA themed electives have you taken? 
I elected to take strategy and finance electives. I've always had a deep interest in strategy, and I felt finance electives would help round out my work experience in operations.

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search? While I'm learning a lot through class, the program's real value has come from being able to apply the learnings to my own career. With my experience in operations, I was trained to look at processes and find the biggest opportunities to improve flow and quality. However, I found that as I built competency in finance, I was looking at the process and the problems within a broader context. I began to see how small improvements in certain parts of the process could have levered effects on the bottom line. It meant pursuing a 1% improvement at point A over an 80% improvement at point B because point A had a 400x lever due to the managerial accounting principles.

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives? 
An MBA is such a powerful tool, and personalizing it helped me leverage the experience to make it mine. One of my goals coming into the program was to expand my perspective through education and my network. The flexibility in the program allowed me to pick up some additional electives in entrepreneurship, like Entrepreneurship via Acquisitions and Building Healthy Business.

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why? 
Looking back at the classes I've taken, I loved Strategies for Growth with Professor Aneel Karnani. It was challenging because he questioned our every conclusion and made us defend each point. I appreciated his efforts to rip away the fluff and focus on the core issues at hand. Lastly, the final project was a great opportunity to analyze a real-world strategic growth decision thoroughly. For our project, we selected ExxonMobil's decision to get involved with direct lithium extraction. This capstone allowed us to move past retroactive analysis and put ourselves in the seats of an organization's most senior executives.

Rohit Manavalan

Grad year: WMBA ’24
Hometown: Ann Arbor, Mich. 
Current Role: Technical Program Lead at Magna Electronics

What WMBA themed electives have you taken?
I aligned most of my electives toward strategy, leadership, and finance themes. These were my key areas of interest, and I wanted to expand further on those fronts.

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search? 
The leadership electives were supportive in helping me discover my leadership style and work on the toolkits I needed to develop/improve upon. I have developed a lot as a leader and see positive results as I’ve led my team and organization over the last several months. The growth in my grasp of business-led leadership and strategy has also helped me broaden my horizons in terms of the work I do and has helped me pivot into management/strategy consulting as my next step.

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives?
The best part of the program has been the ability to personalize my development with the electives. It helps each of us find courses that matter to us. No one trajectory works for anyone, as we are all in different walks of life and trying to achieve individualized experiences from our MBA. The option to tailor my electives has helped me focus on the topics and ideas that I wanted to improve on or had an interest in. 

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why?
The most interesting course for me has been C-Level Thinking. This has helped me engage my own goals and develop as I pursue my future in a C-suite directive. The hands-on, low-stakes, trial-and-error approach to the class, using real-life stylized cases, is super fun and helps us assess and learn how to take stakeholders and manage crises. Fun class overall!

Trent Kroeger

Grad year:  WMBA ’24
Hometown: Delphos, Ohio
Current Position/Company: Senior corporate development manager

What WMBA themed electives have you taken?
   Strategic Brand Management
   Strategies for Growth
   Strategic Marketing Planning
   Strategic Cost Management
   Capital Markets & Investment Strategy

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search? 
What I've found particularly enlightening is the way the curriculum systematically enhances our capacity to swiftly analyze markets, companies, and other relevant factors. Whether we're applying Porter's Five Forces to scrutinize an industry or utilizing one of Dr. John Branch's frameworks to pinpoint a company's core competency, the ample practice opportunities provided enable us to develop a keen ability to assess and make decisions with efficiency. I'm looking forward to building on these learnings in the future.

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives?
The electives have been instrumental in enabling us to explore topics that align closely with our interests. While the structured framework of the program provides a solid foundation, the flexibility offered in the second year is an invaluable asset, empowering us to delve even deeper into subjects that are of interest to us.

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why?
Last summer, I had the privilege to take an Innovation Residency in Italy. In the first few weeks of the course, we dove deep into the innovation process, learning how to empathize with users and drive the creative process. In our teams, we developed our own business idea using these concepts. We spent a week in Northern Italy touring innovative companies like a racer car manufacturer, a 240-year-old distillery, and various museums. At the end of the week, we presented our companies to the group and illustrated our design development. The course broke down the innovation process and really spent time digging into each piece. The Italian experience, combined with the exceptional people I got to work with along the way, made it an unforgettable course.

Lydia Miller

Grad year: WMBA ’24
Hometown: Kalamazoo, Mich. 
Current Position/Company: Independent software process consultant

What WMBA themed electives have you taken?
In my second year, I took the strategy track over the summer, the finance track in the fall, and the mergers and acquisitions track in the winter. I'm also taking the global strategy residency in Santiago, Chile this semester, which is an elective.

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search? 
My casing was so much better because of my deeper understanding and fluency of strategy and finance, and my ability to apply tools, frameworks, and financial analyses on the spot. I got a great job offer during the recruiting cycle, and I believe the strategy and finance tracks played a big role in that. This semester, the international residency will allow me to practice some of those same concepts in a hands-on way in Chile. Electives like this one that mix together students from other programs also allow for more connection and networking outside of the WMBA program. 

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives?
Many of us in the WMBA program have clear career goals and are intrinsically motivated to learn things that we can apply directly to the next five years in our careers. For me, operations isn't going to feature heavily in my career, but finance definitely will, so the ability to pick and choose helped the program be a lot more tailored to my specific goals. For me, it was the perfect amount of customization.

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why?
I loved Aneel Karnani's Strategies for Growth course. He challenged us in that course to discuss and debate passionately during class, forcing us to back up our views and make nuanced, intelligent arguments. That way, we were learning the topics more deeply, but we were also learning how to be creative, think quickly in a debate, and present structured arguments in front of an audience. I haven't left for my Chile trip yet [for the international residency], but I have a distinct feeling that that one will also be a favorite elective because of the great location, the collaborations with the University of Santiago, and the applied nature of the course.

Lindsay Hall

Grad year: WMBA ’2024
Hometown: Cape Town, South Africa
Current Position/Company: Global program manager, Amazon Inc.

What WMBA themed electives have you taken?
I've enrolled in the themed elective classes within the entrepreneurship, operations management, and strategic marketing planning WMBA tracks.

How have you applied what you've learned to your current position or career search? 
Given the entrepreneurial culture at Amazon, a lot of what I've learned in the elective tracks that I've selected has been applicable to my day-to-day work. For example, I've applied entrepreneurial thinking from the Entrepreneurship elective to create innovative solutions that meet "unmet" customer needs and drafted subsequent business-planning-type documents to advocate for their adoption. From the Operations Management elective, I've streamlined processes, enhancing efficiency and reducing expenses on my team. Lastly, the Strategic Marketing Planning elective has helped me refine my approach to marketing, ensuring it's more aligned with customer preferences and Amazon's customer-centric ethos.

What are the benefits of being able to personalize your WMBA electives?
Being able to customize my electives has allowed me to align my academic growth with my professional objectives, making my learning experience directly relevant and immediately applicable to my role.

What is your favorite WMBA or non-WMBA elective and why?
My favorite WMBA elective has been Entrepreneurship. Understanding the fundamentals of starting and growing a business has empowered me to contribute effectively to my team and the broader Amazon ecosystem. This course helped me develop a mindset and gave me the tools to think like an owner, encouraging me to take initiative, innovate, and focus on long-term value creation.