FIN4535 Fixed Income and Structured Products

4 General CreditsThis advanced quantitative course is designed for students interested in the sales and trading of fixed income securities and their related structured products, as well as students interested in fixed income portfolio management. Topics covered include: (i) bond pricing and day count conventions; (ii) relative value and yield curve construction; (iii) duration and convexity; (iv) pricing and hedging of interest rate swaps; (v) Treasury bond futures, conversion factors, and the concepts of cheapest-to-deliver and implied repo; (vi) the repo (GC and special) market; (vii) credit risk and the pricing of high yield bonds and credit default swaps; and (viii) securitization, mortgage-backed securities, and collateralized mortgage obligations. Course enrollment will be limited to enable extensive in-class usage of Bloomberg and other Cutler Center resources.

Prerequisites: SME2021

CSP2090 Food and the African American Canon

(Formerly CVA2090)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThis 4 credit history and foodways course discusses food and space in restaurants, dining cars, street venders and wherever food is made and sold (by whom), and eaten (by whom) at the center. The course will include readings in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of a Colored Man, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Zora Hurston's Their Eyes Where Watching God, John Washington's The Chaneysville Incident, Paule Marshall's classic essay From The Poets in the Kitchen, and Richard Wright's Man of All Work. Readings on segregated restaurants come from James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and in No Name in the Street. A chapter on Ntzoake Shange's novel, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo and her novel Liliane.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

EPS9507 Food Entrepreneurship
3 Elective Credits

There is disruption everywhere in food! With challenges due to COVID, there are global food shortages, supply chain interruptions, and innovations in food science that affect how food entrepreneurs identify or create opportunities, launch and grow ventures. Once alternative foods are now mainstream, large food companies are struggling to reinvent themselves and consumers are driving significant change. There is a proliferation of start-ups, food science and technology innovations as well as rising awareness for food priorities, nutrition, education and health.

This experiential elective focuses on the food entrepreneur's journey from idea to launch. We begin with an exploration of your personal passions in the food industry, then examine global megatrends in food where needs, gaps and opportunities are identified. In teams, students will design a new initiative to meet this need/opportunity. Students will engage with food industry experts, consumers and other stakeholders to develop and explore their new initiative as a solution to a food related problem or opportunity. Students will obtain feedback on these initiatives, develop a prototype and experiment with the business model. Resource acquisition strategies and metrics for these new initiatives' food will be developed and investigated. New initiatives may be a program, non-profit, corporate venture or new venture, and can be in any sector related to food- including the following:

• growing (e.g. agriculture, production, nutrition)

• making (e.g. producing food in restaurants, beverages, consumer packaged goods)

• moving (e.g. food services, distribution, shipping, packaging, delivery)

• selling (e.g. wholesaling, marketing, retailing, ecommerce)

• serving (e.g. staffing, feeding, food health)

• disposing (e.g. food waste, packaging, composting)

In addition to working on your own initiatives, students will also co-create solutions to a real-world business problem facing food entrepreneurs who will visit the class. Further, using Babson's Entrepreneurial Thought & Action (ET&A) method, each student will consider the dynamics and interconnectedness of the food industry through a series of individual activities in each of the six food sectors, sharing their experiences and reflections. Be prepared to share family recipes, participate in a "chopped challenge" and measure your food waste. Bring your appetite for learning and food!

FME1000 Foundation of Management & Entrepreneurship

4 CreditsThis full-year, introductory course exposes students to key entrepreneurship, marketing, business management and organizational behavior concepts. Central to the course is a _learn by doing" approach in which students teams develop and implement an actual business that the College funds. Profits generated by the business activity are used to support a charitable project that the students also coordinate. Through these activities students will have a personal opportunity to explore the challenges and complexities of creating social as well as economic value. In the organizational behavior stream of this section of FME, students will explore their personal entrepreneurial leadership capabilities and how to work with and through others and effectively participate in their business organizations. This section of FME will meet Babson's undergraduate requirements for a semester long course in organizational behavior.

Prerequisites: None

FME1001 Foundation Management & Entrepreneurship (2 semesters)

4 CreditsThis full-year, introductory course exposes students to key management and information systems principles, vocabulary, and techniques. Central to the course is a _learn by doing_ approach and sensitivity toward social responsibility and ethical behavior. Students organize into groups of 30 and are responsible for developing and implementing an actual business that the College funds. Profits generated by the business activity are used to support a charitable project that the students must coordinate as well. Students are introduced to the central concepts of finance, accounting, management, operations, and human resource management. In addition, they learn how information systems are used to manage and control business organizations and how to use productivity tools such as spreadsheet and database programs to manage business organizations more effectively.

Prerequisites: FME1000 and ACC1000 (may be taken concurrently)

LTA2032 Foundations of Western Art

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThis course is designed to introduce students to painting, architecture, and sculpture from the
Renaissance to the early 20th century and to give students an understanding of the general principles governing the visual arts. Topics such as the role of the artist, the functions of art in society, and the nature of visual language, among others, will be discussed as major artists and their works are presented in this survey of Western art. Class lectures and discussions are based on the presentation of slides.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring or Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

EPS1000 Foundations of Entrepreneurial Management
(Formerly MOB1000)

The content of EPS1000 is equivalent to the material covered in FME 1000 and FME 1001. Students who are enrolled in FME therefore cannot enroll in this course.

Foundations of Entrepreneurial Management (FEM) introduces you to how to think and act entrepreneurially (ET&A). FEM will help you apply ET&A - a method of applying creative and predictive logic to achieve economic and social value creation -- to a variety of business situations you might encounter during your career, including: starting and leading a new for-profit, non-profit or social venture; joining the team of a growing enterprise; or infusing an established organization or family business with entrepreneurial vigor. In FEM you'll learn about Babson's method for entrepreneurial thought and action, giving you the foundation to move on to intermediate level coursework and pursue your own entrepreneurial dreams.

Prerequisites: None

AQM1000 Foundations of Business Analytics
4 Foundation Liberal Arts Credits

The course introduces the necessary quantitative methods that are prerequisites to follow-on courses in AQM and in Babson's integrated core business offerings. Statistical software and the use of spreadsheets are integrated throughout so that students better appreciate the importance of using modern technological tools for effective model building and decision-making. The initial third of the course focuses on basic frequentist statistical methods, their conceptual underpinning, such as variability and uncertainty, and their use in the real world. Topics include data visualization, data collection, descriptive statistics, elementary probability rules and distributions, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing. The remainder of the course is dedicated to decision-making problems in a managerial context using algebraic, spreadsheet, graphical, and statistical models. Topics include introductions to linear regression, time series analysis, and simulation. The course emphasizes the effective communication of quantitative results through written, visual, and oral means.

FCI1000 Foundations of Critical Inquiry
4 Credits

The Foundations of Critical Inquiry course, a theme-based course of study at the 1000 level, engages an interdisciplinary style of reasoning, interpreting, and understanding. As an introduction to the liberal arts, the course examines the processes by which individuals and societies create meaning. While there is a selection of themes through which this is explored, each course pays special attention to issues of identity and systems of power. This space for critical inquiry also allows students to reflect on their own agency. Currently, students may choose one of the following themes:

• Justice and Inequality

• Memory and Forgetting

• Nature and Environment

• Self in Context

Click Here for a more detailed description.

Prerequisites: None

EPS7556 Foundations of Family Entrepreneurship

3 CreditsThis course provided a broad overview of topics that are relevant to understanding the nature and dynamics of entrepreneurial families. The course will cover such topics as; defining family entrepreneurship versus family business, identifying the pervasiveness of family entrepreneurship and its economic and social contributions, governance and succession in entrepreneurial families, the management of change and transgenerational value creation, conflict management, and the development and allocation of financial and human assets.

For more information please view this video.

Prerequisites: None