Graduate's Opinion

Alan Paterson
GST Manager
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Sydney, Australia

"I came to WUT BS to study for an IMBA on a career break from PricewaterhouseCoopers in the UK. An MBA at WUT BS allows you to get many different perspectives on business. The academic staff both from Poland and overseas have a very broad business experience and I also drew on a lot on the experiences of others in my class. We also got the opportunity to go out and talk to businesses about the challenges they are experiencing in a changing world. On graduating from WUT BS I embarked on a new challenge in my professional life, moving to Sydney, Australia."

Programme blocs

Economics, Accounting, Organization and Human Resources Management, Finance, Operations Management, Management Control and Information Systems, Marketing, Strategy and International Management, Legal Aspects of Business Activity and Business Project

Complementary Subjects

Preparatory Course in Business English and Mathematics,  ethics and business etiquette.

Subjects	Number of hours
Semester 1
Team Building session (HRM)	10
Economics	96
Accounting	96
Semester 2 Finance	96
Marketing	80
Semester 3 Strategy and International Management	64
Organization and Human Resources Management	86
Semester 4 Operations Management	64
Management Control and Information Systems	64
Legal Aspects of Business Activity	32
Business Project	64
Total	752

Block 0
Preparatory Course in Business English and Mathematics
The purpose of this module is to go over key phrases in the English language relating to the free market economy and business and to familiarize the students with mathematical and statistical terms used in MBA courses.

Team-building session
The course -due to a range of elements (integrative games, team progress tracking, analysing team roles)- prepares the students to work effectively in groups.

BLOCK 1
Economics
The course is divided into three sections, the first one dealing with the analysis of the firm in the market environment, the second with the macroeconomic environment and the third with the international environment. Through their involvement in the school, the course teachers have developed their teaching material in the light of Polish experience.

BLOCK 2
Accounting
Often referred to as "the language of business", accounting is a registration, measurement and communication discipline. The course concentrates on two areas of accounting: financial accounting and managerial (cost) accounting.

BLOCK 3
Finance
The course is an introduction to financial decision-making. The first part of the course is concerned mainly with making decisions on what assets to buy, and the second part is concerned with the ways to pay for the assets. Other subjects include equity portfolio management, mergers and acquisitions, international financial management, and financial institutions.

BLOCK 4
Marketing
The course is designed to give an introduction to strategic marketing covering the identification and definition of the market space in which competition takes place, selection and change of competitive actions over time, and adjustment of competitive action from segment to segment. Weight will be given to the evaluation and design of managerial processes in marketing concerned with diagnosing, planning and implementing change ahead of competition, as well as methods for forecasting patterns of reaction of the market-place and within the marketing organization.

BLOCK 5
Organization and Human Resources Management
In the course are presented and discussed models that help in designing formal structures and relevant management systems as well as help in choosing the appropńate basis and degree of differentiation and the appropńate mechanism of integration within the corporate culture. Issues such as human motivation, individual and group behaviour and negotiation will also be covered. Personal Development Programme.

BLOCK 6
Strategy and International Management
Examining strategies through environment and industry analyses, the course builds on the concepts of value chains and business systems and explores potential generic strategies such as cost leadership and differentiation. At the corporate level the problems under review are: Does a company have to concentrate on one industry or manage a portfolio of diverse businesses? Should it operate regionally, nationally or internationally? Does it have to develop its activities alone or enter a strategic alliance?

BLOCK 7
Operations Management
The objectives of this course are to enable the student to understand how operations management contńbutes to the way a firm competes in the market place and achieves commercial results. Business operations are understood as the levels of activity connecting daily operations to business investments. Topics treated in the course are: production and project management, logistics, quality assurance and the economics of variety.

BLOCK 8
Management Control and Information Systems
The topics covered in this course are: cybernetic view of control systems, management control (from the functional and the value chain perspective), improvement of management control through information systems examining corporate and divisional reporting systems, changes in planning and forecasting systems, and the ability to perform ad hock analysis, as well as the significance of managerial behaviour in the design of management control systems.

BLOCK 9
Legal Aspects of Business Activity
The subject encompasses the most important, i.e. from the point of view of the functioning of a market company, basic legal aspects. Special attention is placed to issues connected with contracts and the companies law. The specific features of the Polish law and of the law of the European Union is considered as well.

BLOCK 10
Business Project
Final projects function as an expertise solving a manager's problem in a chosen company. They are conducted in groups of a few people. The choice of the subject and the company belong to the students. Upon some consultations with the project mentor, professor Alastair Nicholson and the drawing-up of the project, it is officially defended, which forms an opportunity to present a method of solving the problem and to discuss that with council members.


EXTRACURRICULAR COURSE

Business ethics / Business culture
A brief introduction to ethics and description of adequate corporate behaviour (based on companies, which apply internal codes of corporate conduct) help understand how to shield the company against unethical conduct occurring in the world of business today.