Innovision Spring 2020

SPRING 2020 | 11 During the fall 2019 Semester, Dr. CJ Rhoads engaged her twoMBA classes and two ungraduated classes in a community project with a non-profit organization called Health, Prosperity and Leadership Institute (HPL). The goals of this organization are to provide opportunities for people and groups to connect all over the world so they can improve their own opportunities for health, prosperity and leadership. One of HPL’s projects is to enable integrative healthcare practitioners (those who teach or do tai chi, yoga, pilates, massage, nutrition, exercise, etc.) to connect with people who need their health services within the medical community. As a board member of HPL, Dr. Rhoads was able to link all of her classes up with HPL in one big experiential project. Several members of the HPL Board of Directors came and listened to the students present their ideas for helping the organization. The project involved contacting stakeholders—health workers who would be impacted by patients utilizing integrative health practices, especially those with chronic health problems.Teams were created and broken up by geographical areas; each were assigned to conduct focus groups and surveys on all the hospitals, health practitioners and health networks in those geographic areas. Together, the teams contacted 128 hospitals, doctors, nurses and integrative health practitioners. Students had the opportunity to engage in roles that pertained to the course they were in. Graduate students in the Project Management course were the “programmanagers” who helped the undergraduate project management teams complete their portion of the project. Graduate students in theManaging Enterprise InformationTechnology course became the technical liaisons who provided “consulting help” on the development of the system that the teams were working on. At the end, the students again presented to the Board of Directors what they were able to accomplish on the project. HPL obtained truly useful information about what features they would appreciate the most in the network system. Although Dr. Rhoads typically has a real-life project for all her MBA classes, this is the first time that she combined all her classes. She said, “I had everyone working on different aspects of the same project. It was quite a learning experience.” Despite the learning curve, this experience benefitted many students. They got the experience of presenting a real project to a real board of directors; at the same time, they experienced both the thrill of success and the misery of rejection just as they would in real life. Also, they had to learn how to talk with people they didn’t know, work together in a large team, deal with conflicts and differing learning styles and other real-life issues that are typically ignored in simulations and imitation projects. Not only does the MBA program at Kutztown University provide real-life experiential projects, it offers theoretical knowledge necessary for good decision-making and leadership in the real world. Dr. Rhoads advises: “As business majors get higher on the rungs in their [field], they are going to need extra skills and talents to help them steer groups, departments, divisions and companies in a very competitive world. One of the best ways to develop those talents and hone those skills is to get an MBA.” Kutztown’s MBA is hybrid, which gives students the flexibility of remote learning and face-to-face instruction. Also, all faculty are experienced so they can provide a rich assortment of activities and lessons to MBA students. MBA PROGRAM FLEXIBLE – AACSB – ACCREDITED