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

OIM3508 Foundations of Project Management
(Formerly MOB3508)
2 Advanced Management Credits

**Students who took this as MOB3508 cannot register for this course**

This course is an approved elective for the Operations Management concentration. Students taking this foundational course may not also register for MOB 3509, given course content overlap.

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 foundational 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.

Foundations of Project Management focuses on what is often referred to as the traditional or "waterfall" approach to project management. Taught primarily via case study discussion, course content is consistent with PMP (Project Management Professional) certification principles. CIO magazine ranked the PMP as the top project management certification, as it demonstrates candidates have the specific skills and experience employers seek. This course satisfies 22 of the 23 educational hours required by PMI to apply for the junior-level PMP certification exam (known as the CAPM); the other hour was satisfied by the PM-related content in the SME prerequisites (below).

Foundations of Project Management makes an attractive future pairing with the "Foundations of Agile" course offering.

Prerequisites: SME2001 and SME2002 and SME2011 and SME2012

FRN4615 French Cinema and Conversation

(Formerly Social Justice in France)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course is designed as a conversation class, with a strong cultural component. The major course materials are contemporary French & Francophone language films and short readings. Through the lens of ethical questions and concerns that surface in these films, students will study issues relevant to the history, culture, and politics of the French-Speaking World. Films and readings serve as the basis for debate, discussion, and written analysis. This course aims to ease the path towards greater fluency through improvements in accuracy and more spontaneous communication.

Open to students with an Intermediate level of French, or higher.

Prerequisites: FRN4620, or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a placement test.

Placement test: https://www.babson.edu/academics/academic-divisions/arts-and-humanities/languages-and-global-cultures/language-placement-test/

FRN4610 French II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsFRN4610 French II is a fast-paced course that builds on the knowledge gained in FRN2200 French I. Students will continue to expand their vocabulary and communication skills as they gain confidence in their abilities to communicate in spoken and written French. Conversation and listening activities in class will be supplemented by a variety of readings and written assignments. In addition, discussions of authentic texts, short films, and cultural experiences will help students gain a deeper appreciation for French and Francophone people and cultures.

Not open to native speakers

Prerequisites: FRN2200 French I, or similar proficiency as indicated by a placement test

FRN4620 French III
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

FRN 4620 is an intermediate language and culture course aimed at improving students' comprehension and expression in French. We will continue to reinforce language skills acquired at the beginning levels (French I and II) and work towards building fluency in the language. Students will learn about topics such as immigration, the French school system, the auto industry, and globalization through short texts, films, debates, presentations, and news articles from contemporary French and Francophone sources. A project-based class, students will develop business skills in French related to negotiating, persuading, advising, and forecasting.

Prerequisites: FRN2200 and/or FRN4610 or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a placement test or by instructor's permission. Not open to fluent speakers of French.

HUM4602 Future Studies: Theories of the World to Come

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides a captivating looking glass into the most fascinating debates surrounding the future. We will trace those radical transformations and cutting-edge paradigms that are emerging to forever alter our experience of time and space, body and mind, objects and images, reality and illusion, human and machine. To achieve this task, our course will follow an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multimedia approach that explores provocative new dimensions in the areas of literature, philosophy, society, culture, politics, media, architecture, design, biogenetics, ecology, film, art, and technology. Together, these speculative fragments will come together to offer crucial insight into our era's experiments with speed, virtuality, artificiality, and utopia, allowing us to test the outer boundaries of the unknown worlds to come.

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

EPS3504 Future Trends and Entrepreneurial Ventures
4 General CreditsThis course is designed to provide a strategic decision-making, future-oriented perspective in Entrepreneurship for undergraduate students interested in Entrepreneurial Thought & Action methods used by start-up, early-stage ventures, and corporations that practice innovation. We explore Entrepreneurial Thought & Action techniques for looking at the future including scenario planning, key-trend impact analysis, systems thinking, and experiencing the gestalt of the future. Students will develop an understanding of the future that applies to her/his own entrepreneurial leadership vision, identify Key Future Factors (KFF) that allow entrepreneurial leaders to address customer needs currently unmet, identify trends and systems key to developing opportunities scalable into large markets, and develop an action approach to scale an opportunity with an assessment of future trends and markets.

Prerequisites: None

HUM4603 Future Worlds: Revolutions of the Humans and Post-Humans

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides radical exposure to the most astonishing trends of the next age as students interface with leading futuristic thinkers from around the world. Students will have the rare occasion to engage with fifteen renowned professors, reading their writings closely a, as we move across multiple intellectual surfaces to ask the most provocative questions facing our time and beyond. Each scholarly figure will present a series of speculative theories and visionary examples from the fields of sociology, architecture, economy, design, political science, cultural studies, media studies, literature, philosophy, film, medical science, virtual reality, visual art, artificial intelligence, and environmental studies. Moreover, students themselves will not only directly encounter this network of vital futurist scholars in their weekly sessions but will also have the occasion to undertake strikingly original research that tracks obscure, secretive, post-human, and unfathomable innovations transpiring in every arena of human experience. In this way, the seminar will trace a sequence of worlds not yet arrived, interpreting horizons of global and even extra-planetary scope as they test out riddles for the coming centuries.

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

ENV4602 Gender and Environment
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

The objective of this course is to understand, explore, and analyze the linkages between gender and the environment. Using multiple case studies (fashion, food, waste, illegal wildlife trade, climate change etc.), the course will focus on three core themes: 1) foundational concepts and theories of gender as they relate to the environment 2) the inequities and power dynamics associated with environmental challenges 3) knowledge and tools to mainstream gender and create effective change. By thinking critically about these concepts, we will challenge our current understanding about complex, global environmental challenges, the meaning of gender, and why it matters today and in the future.

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