Tailor Your BSM Degree with an Advanced Specialization

Whether you’re interested in a company known for its entrepreneurial culture, plan to create your own business, or pursuing an analytical career it’s crucial to have the skills necessary to bring new ideas and data-driven solutions to the marketplace.  Pepperdine Graziadio’s Advanced Specializations in Entrepreneurship and Business Analytics are available exclusively to BSM students interested in gaining the critical skills and knowledge to excel.

How the Advanced Specialization Works: Exchanging Six Units

The BSM curriculum includes twelve 4-unit courses and six 2-unit courses. Instead of three of the 2-unit courses, students will complete 6 units of entrepreneurial or business analytics-focused classes as outlined in the table below. Students need to declare their pursuit of the advanced specialization at the start of the program as it will affect the course schedule, and sequence of courses, in the program.

By adjusting the required courses, students choose the certificate path or the suite of existing courses without exceeding the total units of the program.

Advanced Specialization in Entrepreneurship Course Descriptions

ENTR 461 | The Entrepreneur’s Journey: Innovation 

Students examine the entrepreneur’s mindset through discovering tools, strategies, tactics, and practices, using creativity, innovation, and problem-solving thinking concepts. Students meet as a combined course using lectures, case studies, hands-on tools, and practice exercises to understand, contextualize, demonstrate and apply successful best practice concept rules and applications.

By generating an innovative mind and skillset, students will more effectively solve problems and transform ideas into applications preparing students with insights to successfully leading worldwide and local entrepreneurial ventures.

ENTR 462 | The Entrepreneur’s Journey: Development

This is a survey course focusing on the journey of an individual entrepreneur from the generation of an innovative business idea through validating that idea and pitching it to a potential investor.

Students will experience “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” by generating and determining the feasibility of an innovative consumer product for potential adoption by a consumer brands company.

ENTR 463 | The Entrepreneur’s Journey: Practicum: Education to Community (E2C)

This is a practicum course designed to provide students with an opportunity to apply principles derived from their coursework and use their new skills in Entrepreneurial venturing to serve a social purpose.

(For example, students might create a business model for a venture that helps low-income individuals learn how to access capital and mobility to increase their living standards through their entrepreneurial journey.)

Other journeys might align with non-profit organizations to help create new revenue streams to advance fundraising. Students in this course articulate milestones for their ventures and work with faculty to meet those milestones. This is a practicum, and much of the learning is application-oriented and focuses directly on the startup or the startup team.

Advanced Specialization in Business Analytics Course Descriptions

DESC 461 | Python for Business Analytics
Python is a standard tool for the analysis and visualization of business data, in large part due to its scalability and ease of use. This course introduces students with no coding experience to the syntax and versatility of using Python to apply mathematical and statistical methods to contemporary business problems. Several python environments are introduced with an emphasis on showing how this interpretive programing environment compliments spreadsheet-modeling tools. Prerequisite: DESC 471 Statistical Methods for Business.

ISTM 462 | Modern Database Principles and Applications
Solving business problems using high quality data is essential to enterprises making evidence-based decisions. Students will be introduced to concepts and techniques used to manage and manipulate structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Relational database concepts and Structured Query Language (SQL) will be emphasized and introductions to unstructured data and frameworks for handling Big Data will be included in the course. The course will place particular emphasis on digital ethics. Prerequisite: ISTM 476 Information Systems for Business and Management.

ISTM 463 | Data Visualization and Advanced Spreadsheet Methods
This course will introduce students to data visualization using visualization software to communicate data insights in a meaningful way. This course will also expose students to advanced modeling techniques and capabilities in spreadsheets, including simulation, sensitivity analysis, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) , among others.  Students will finish the class with applied knowledge in these areas that can be brought to the workplace immediately. Prerequisite: DESC 471 Statistical Methods for Business.