By John DeSpagna
Campus News
As you continue your way on to earning your college degree, you also have the opportunity to take electives within your degree program. The electives can help you fulfill your degree requirements and also allow you to enroll in courses that may be of an interest to you or help you when you graduate from college.
One of these courses that can help you after college is an Introduction to Business course. We are in an every changing and competitive global business environment. This course will cover concepts in business that you need to be knowledgeable in for your personal and career success. Instead of learning about these concepts later on in life, take advantage of this course now.
A number of students are not sure about what major to select as an undergraduate. There are so many choices to select from and you may not have figured out your career path yet. That is fine and you can start your path in college as a Liberal Arts major. This will include a core curriculum of courses to enroll in and the flexibility of many open elective courses.
An Introduction to Business course covers a wide variety of topics. As you learn about each one of these topics, they may spark an interest for you regarding selecting a major or career option. Let us take a look at some of the various topics and how they can relate to you.
As you make your way through your career, you will need to become knowledgeable about investing. You will have to develop an understanding of mutual funds, which are diversified pools of money managed by professionals. There are many types of mutual funds such as large cap, growth, value, international, bond and money market funds. These can all be woven together to create a diversified portfolio to help you reach your financial goals. If you do not have the expertise to so this yourself, you can have a manager do this for you.
Gaining an understanding of stocks and how the stock market works will be of value to you. You many want to start by purchasing a modest amount of a stock that you know of or use their product. Think long term and work with high quality stocks. You can research these stocks with a resource such as Value Line.
As you increase your investment knowledge, you may want to setup a retirement plan. Learning about an IRA or 401(k) at an early age can only help you reach your retirement goals. You can set up a 401(k) with your employer by making pre tax contributions and have the account grow tax deferred for you.
If you want to go out and start your own business someday, you can learn about this in the entrepreneurship chapter. There are many advantages of being your own boss such as being able to be independent and controlling your destiny. You will also learn about the benefits of owning a franchise and how they usually have high success rates.
As you grow and take on more responsibility in your career, you will need to learn how to manage people. You will have to learn how to reach the goals of the organization through people. There are many management theories to learn about along with using your resources efficiently and effectively. A manager also needs to be able to motivate their employees. This is an important topic to learn about along with the importance of human resources.
Learning about ethics, social responsibility, marketing, social media, accounting, economics and career options are additional topics in the course.
Try and broaden your horizons and make the best usage of the electives in your degree program. Learning about the world of business can help you on a personal and career level to lay down the foundation of your future success.
John DeSpagna is Chair of the Accounting and Business Administration Department at Nassau Community College.
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