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Last May, the soon-to-be chair of the Business department presented his plan of revamping the major to an Auditorium filled with BUS students and faculty. Six months later, some of the major changes mentioned by Julio Pontes have already been implemented. AUBG's biggest department is now divided into four decision units (DU's), each headed by a different business faculty member. Pontes, who initiated the new structure, is confident it will help reorganize the major's curriculum, attract new professors, and make BUS adapt to a changing market reality. One major task given to the newly-formed DU’s is the preparation of a staffing plan to determine the number of professors that need to be hired in the upcoming spring semester. “The sub-units have no real authority. They just make communication easier,” said Lucia Miree, head of the Human Resource Management DU. Head of the Accounting/Finance DU Miroslav Mateev, who works together with business professors Gougoumanova and Fedhila, said that the department needs at least one full-time professor in Finance until Alf Eastergard returns from sabbatical. The department also seeks a person to teach both Accounting and Finance “so that the core faculty could have the chance to teach more electives.” Electives are “the dream of every professor,” Mateev said, and it will be impossible to have a real concentration in the BUS major unless there are more than two or three elective courses. That dream is unachievable for now, as the department is still working on providing its basic, introductory courses. The flow of instructors into the BUS department is currently very high. Out of the seven newly hired professors, five teach business: DeAnna DeRosa, Robert White, Boyan Lomev, Donald Brady (Head of Marketing Management DU) and Zlatina Gougoumanova . Next semester the department will rely on its current faculty members, minus Miree, who is taking a Sabbatical. Changes in the business department are necessary not only in terms of faculty. Miroslav Mateev said that the whole Accounting/Finance DU should be restructured to meet the “new and changing market demands.” The main concern should be the better incorporation of finance topics in the accounting-heavy sub-department. According to Pontes, who is also chair of the Operations and Supply Management DU, “the attitude of students towards [Fundamentals of Information Systems (FIS)]” is shifting as well. He explained that students no longer perceive it as “an insignificant, additional course,” as it has become a prerequisite for most of the 200/300- level BUS courses. A new business department policy is the ban on student course waiving. Waiving is defined as taking a course and its prerequisites in the same semester. Exceptions might be possible, Pontes said, but only for senior students, unable to otherwise graduate, and not in all cases. In addition to its new structure, faculty and ideas, the BUS department has acquired new paraphernalia as well. This year, it attained standardized name plates for each professor, featuring the “new logo of business” at AUBG. The logo is a 3-D image of three chain links. Taken separately, they symbolize the notions of integrity, knowledge and responsibility. The intersection between them is where quality forms. The idea behind the new logo belongs to Pontes. “I focus on quality,” he said.
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Good job,guys!
