OIM3509 Project Management
4 General Credits

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), there are nearly 250,000 open project management jobs each year across seven project-intensive industries: business services, construction, finance and insurance, information services, manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities. As more work becomes project-based, projects grow in complexity, and clients demand accountability and efficiency, graduates with project management skills will be in increasingly high demand. In this course, you will learn critical skills for leading cross functional teams using up-to-date PM best practices, methodologies, and tools. This course is applicable across career paths such as consulting, information technology, entrepreneurship, new product development and many others. Students will be exposed to both the technical and behavioral skills required to effectively lead project teams -- whether as an official "Project Manager" or an unofficial leader temporarily charged with leading a project implementation. The course will be taught primarily via case study discussion, with a significant "hands-on" component that includes the authoring of key project plan documents and a solid exposure to Microsoft Project. At the conclusion of this course, students will have satisfied PMI's educational requirements to apply for the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) exam. This course is an approved elective for the Operations Management concentration.

Prerequisites: (SME2001 or ACC2002) and (SME2002 or OIM2001) and (SME2011 or MKT2000) and SME2012 or OIM2000) or permission of the instructor.

OIM6601 Project Management Under Uncertainty
3 Credits (MSAEL Core)This course offers methods and frameworks for commercializing nascent technologies that offer potentially breakthrough value to the market and therefore, enormous reward for the firm, but whose value propositions and applications are highly uncertain at the outset. Aside from readings and cases, students' job will be to undertake a project either from their own organization or one provided by the faculty and, applying the tools and methods of the course, understand the technology, learn how to articulate it in terms of market opportunity, scope out the potential applications, and begin doing the hard work of evaluating the potential of the opportunity, incubating it and determining next steps.

Prerequisites: MOB6600 and EPS6600; OIM 6600

LAW3601 Public International Law and World Order
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Elective CreditsThis course considers public international law as a way of framing and understanding the larger world in which we live. We will consider foreign relations and the United Nations system, the implications of global interdependence, and an increasingly robust international judicial system. Does international law actually create global order, or does it merely reflect political order that exists in other settings? When should national sovereignty yield to the wider concerns of the global community? What role do non-state actors (multinational businesses, NGOs, advocacy groups) play in the global legal regime?

These questions (and many others) have been at the center of the quest to create order in a rapidly changing world where the pace of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and the increasingly free movement of people, capital, and ideas often far outpace the capacity of any legal regime (domestic or international) to keep up. We will study these issues and related themes throughout the semester. Special emphasis is placed on understanding international institutions, human rights (including the intersection of human rights with global business), refugee law, the regulation of warfare (including "humanitarian" intervention and responses to global terrorism), international environmental law, transnational dispute settlement, and business ethics in the global setting.

Prerequisites: Foundation Law course, (LAW1000)

QTM1000 Quantitative Methods for Business Analytics I
4 CreditsThe course introduces the necessary core quantitative methods that are prerequisites to follow-on courses in QTM and in Babson's integrated core business offerings. Statistical software and the use of spreadsheets are integrated throughout so that students better comprehend the importance of using modern technological tools for effective model building and decision-making. About two thirds of the course is data-oriented, exposing students to basic statistical methods, their conceptual underpinning, such as variability and uncertainty, and their use in the real world. Topics include data collection, descriptive statistics, elementary probability rules and distributions, sampling distributions, and basic inference. The last third of the course is dedicated to selected non-statistical quantitative techniques applied to business models. Topics include curve fitting, differential calculus applications to non-linear optimization, and introduction to the time value of money.

Prerequisites: None

QTM1010 Quantitative Methods for Business Analytics II
4 CreditsThis course explores decision-making problems in a managerial context using algebraic, spreadsheet, graphical, and statistical models. The focus is on understanding basic mathematical and modeling principles through the analysis of real data. The course emphasizes communicating in-context interpretations of the results of analysis in written, visual, and oral form. A foundation in introductory statistics and use of spreadsheets is essential because these concepts are extended and reinforced throughout the course. Topics include introductions to linear regression, time series analysis, linear programming, decision analysis and simulation. It emphasizes the use of appropriate software and the latest technological methods for accessing and analyzing data.

Prerequisites: QTM1000 or AQM1000

QTM3605 Quantitative Analysis of Structural Injustice
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides a survey of current quantitative methods for analyzing structural disparities. Using philosophies from interdisciplinary fields, we follow examples from education, housing, and other topics to document the direction and size of social and economic disparities. The course begins with a discussion on the philosophies of major data issues. We then learn to analyze disparities using a wide range of data types - spatial, panel, experimental, and observational - through the use of raw, real-world data sets. Discussions will center on biases resulting from data, models, and algorithms. The course uses R and QGIS. Prior to enrolling, students should have a foundation in regression analysis

Prerequisites: AQM2000

QTM3635 Quantitative Methods for Machine Learning
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThe ease of data collection coupled with plummeting data storage costs over the last decades have resulted in massive amounts of data that many business organizations have at their fingertips. Effective analysis of those data followed by sound decision-making is what makes a company an analytical competitor. This course is dedicated to learning and applying advanced quantitative tools for solving complex machine learning problems. The course will build on analytical tools learned during AQM 2000 (Predictive Business Analytics) course, introducing modern advanced tools ranging from random forests to support vector machines and artificial neural networks. Each topic covered in this course will be discussed in the context of wide-ranging real-world applications such as email spam prediction; handwritten digit recognition; topic modeling/text mining; etc. The implementation of the introduced topics will be carried out in R/RStudio.

Prerequisites: AQM2000

HIS4620 Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

What did it mean to be _Black_ or _Indian_ or _White_ in Latin America? What is mestizaje and indigenismo? What did it mean to be of mixed descent? What does these mean today? Is _race_ a means to political empowerment, or the source of discrimination? This seminar explores these issues and ideas in the context of colonial and postcolonial Latin American history. In answering these questions, we will look at a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches to _race._ Armed with the history of these changing ideas, we will then consider a variety of case studies from throughout Latin America.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ART4615 Racing Towards the Future: Early 20th Century Art
(Formerly VSA4615)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsBetween 1900 -1938, young artists grappled with enormous political, scientific, technological, and social disruptions that threw them headlong into the modern world. Styles such as Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressivism, Dada and Surrealism were their responses to changes in established ways of thinking and being that marked the beginning of the 20th century. Visits to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Davies Museum of Wellesley College and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, which have very strong collections from this period, will offer students the opportunity to directly experience this art.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

CSP2033 Radical Politics: Thought, Action, and Culture

(Formerly CVA2033)

4 Credits

This Intermediate Liberal Arts course examines the theory, actions, claims, and artistic and cultural representations of radical political movements historically and in our time. Radical political movements seek major transformations in the way we live together. Radical movements tend to work outside and even at odds with the mainstream political process that involves political parties and elections. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this course will look at the history and contemporary forms of radical politics, read theoretical and historical works that help us understand different ways to conceptualize a "radical" approach, and assess the radical potential of artistic work. In past courses, we have examined the Alt-Right and Antifa, the Movement for Black Lives, and such Indigenous political struggles as the Standing Rock/#NoDAPL movement in the US context and the #IdleNoMore movement in the Canadian context. Movements such as these - and others such as the 2022 uprising in Iran - will likely be part of the course in Fall 2022, and I adapt course materials to allow us to analyze forms of radical politics that may well be emerging just prior to and during our semester. Other possible movements we might examine include those concerning the environment/climate change, queer struggles, radical feminism, those for and against human migration, and neo-nazi formations. Students will be encouraged to work on projects that examine historical or contemporary radical movements that are in their interest, and in the forms through which they best communicate (written, visual, audio etc). The course will focus on the North American context, but student projects and our discussions do not need to be limited to that context. The materials for this class will include historical and political scholarly analyses, journalism, documentaries, film, literature, music, podcasts, public commentary, and the narratives of activists themselves.

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