Den Day - College of Business

So now is technically 6.

I'm texting Nick just to make sure.

Nick, if you can figure out whether or not any other students are actually logged in, that would be helpful.

If they have not even log in, do you still want to do it?

I'll see.

He says there is.

Somebody great alright?

Well it is.

6:00 o'clock maybe even 601, depending on if you're on Apple Time or Samsung time or whatever, but we will go ahead and start our conversation this evening if you are watching. I want to let you know that your way to interact with us is through the chat, so we have myself an the Dean of the College of Business Doctor Settlage here in front of you. We also have somebody who will be able to answer.

Chat, so if you're out there on the chat, if you would just put something and say hi and give us your name then that would help help us.

Know who you are and please feel free to jump in on the chat.

Anytime you have a question or if you want us to stop talking and answer that.

But other Nat we will go through a few things will do a bit of a question and answer time here and help you get a sense of the options and opportunities that are available at the in the College of Business at UA Fort Smith. So Doctor said she want to start. This is a really easy one, but tell us a little bit about yourself. Introduce yourself in like a really great way that I didn't do besides putting doctor in for your last name.

Well hello everybody. Doctor Latisha Settlage I am the interim Dean for the College of Business after having previously served as the Associate Dean for four years. So I've been here at uafs for awhile. I am a native of Arkansas, actually born and raised in the state and actually did my PhD work at the Purdue University, which is in the Midwest. So have lived all my life except for four years in Arkansas and that was a choice for me to come back to this great state that I think gave a lot to me.

I'm really excited about the opportunity to continue to give to the University of Arkansas Fort Smith. I am a first generation college graduate and I think that's what resonates so much with me is the opportunity to help students who follow a similar path.

I'm actually a nontraditional economist. That's my discipline, and so I teach on occasion when I get a chance to and actually have a background in agricultural economics, which allows me to apply economics and really explain it to students. I think in a way that sometimes doesn't always come across.

So I was an English major back in the day and so I don't know when you say you're a non traditional economist. Can you help somebody like me? Understand what's the difference? Maybe between a traditional and a non traditional absolutely so when you're in applied economist you have all of the same classes in theory, but you your education really goes beyond that in that you take many more classes in application and so whereas I have all of the economic theory.

Courses also have a lot of classes in research and programming. An application where you really learn how to apply economics to different situations and in my case, agriculture.

So this has nothing to do with. Maybe it has something to do with the College of Business, but during you know voting season and all this. So when they talk about the economy, you probably know what they're talking about for the most part, right? You probably know when they're either telling.

Stretching truth or not, but I listen, I just have to assume that sounds good, but you probably really know I do. I do have a pretty solid base and economics and economic theories and how they should work and how they do tend to work. And I think that's one of the great things about economics and really business in general is that regardless of what field you're interested in, most of us are going to end up either owning your own business or working for a business. And economics is one of those classes that really.

Helps you understand how business works. And yeah, so understanding supply and demand is pretty critical and understanding policy and knowing a little bit about taxes and inflation and unemployment and all those good things certainly helps. This time at time of year for sure. Alright, that's great. I'm just curious 'cause you know, it's that time that time of four years, alright? So let's talk a little more directly about College of Business and I'm going to start off with something that should be pretty easy, but might be hard because I'm.

What's the coolest part of your job? What's a visit being called Doctor or is there something even better than that? There is something better about being the Dean of the College of Business and that it really is helping students achieve success.

So I typically get to interact with most new students beginning today. Hopefully this is the beginning of your path to a degree for your degree at UAS, but if not, hopefully somewhere that makes you happy somewhere you fit in. So want to just encourage you know. Congratulations on making that decision. Education is life changing, its transformative. And in the College of Business we like to say that we're really preparing our students for their career. It's not enough for us to.

To just leave you to a degree, we really want to leave you to the career path that makes you happy. And so as as Dean of the College of Business, I've worked really hard with my colleagues in developing our what we call our freshman business experience course, which really gives students the first chance to think about what their career and academic goals are. Help students really connect to what our programs, what career path can lead them down and so then at the end, signing off on graduation applications and.

Believe it or not, that sounds like a really mundane task, but to me it's always really exciting because I know that the process that we have said that we're going to help you with this worked. It means that we have, hopefully in four years or less. In many cases we've been able to deliver on that path and just hearing all the stories from my colleagues. And I talked to quite a few students myself, just hearing where that path is going to end up. All the success stories, and knowing that in many, many cases where delivering an education that is going to change lives.

Not only for the student themselves, but in many cases their families.

Yeah, when you've lived that experience being the 1st in your family, that's one of the things I love about. This University is so many of our students are the 1st in their family to come and then we have faculty like yourself and those are your colleagues who really care about helping them graduate. So one of the things that I figure after having done this for awhile, you must have a few students out there that you can think of that you're just really proud of. And you know, maybe their recent grads, but there's gotta be some out there that you just just kind of you love, right?

Curious, we can tell us one or two of those stories and what they're doing and what makes them special for you.

Well, I want to start by saying that we love all of our students, College of business, right? We love every single one of them. Everyone has such a unique story and it really makes up this intricate fabric. This weave that that makes US special as a College of business. But I will share a couple of success stories that really capture. I think the essence of what we're trying to develop amongst our students in the College of Business and.

I think they give you a couple of different pictures of where you might end up if you were to join us as a perspective business student, I'm going to start out with a student that actually aspired to be a certified public accountant, which is a very common pathway in business. CPA licensure is something that can be very rewarding both if you like a challenge. If you like numbers, it could also be very rewarding, financially speaking because accountants do very well in the market and it's one of the fastest growing.

Job pathways that's out there. That's been the case for as long as I've been in business, so we actually have a graduate about 15 years ago. Graduated, but he is already made partner at one of the Big Four accounting firms in the United States. Pricewaterhouse Cooper. He resides in Chicago. That is a huge accomplishment for our program. We have several other students who actually also work for some of the Big Four accounting firms. And is anyone who works in public accounting will tell you regardless of whether or not you maintain a career with one of those, or whether you just get a taste of it and you move on?

'cause you will work hard. Just having them on your resume is huge. There are some.

Accounting firms that won't even recruit at smaller regional institutions like are like ours, and so the fact that we have students that do have jobs at those companies is amazing. I'll take a little bit of a different turn and talk about a student. We have several students that go on to Graduate School and so they aspire to get a Masters, perhaps in business administration. Some of them go into more technical degrees like law, and we actually had a graduate at 2020 graduate who was accepted into Notre Dame Law School.

And as we know, that's that's a pretty prestigious pathway. So definitely a feather in our cap in the College of Business, we feel like that is a dead and outward demonstration of justice. How solid the critical thinking skills and the quantitative analysis that we're providing can be demonstrated through our graduates. So you mentioned something in with the first student that you know, sometimes we think that the only way you can maybe get a job at a big four firm is if you're at, you know, like flagship University.

But here we've done it. So what is it that makes the business College of Business and Business program at UA Fort Smith so good? I mean, I know you've done some changes and there's accreditation, but what is it that that makes our program that good?

So I think what makes it good is the commitment that our faculty have to really preparing students with the skills that they need to be successful in their job and to be recognized immediately once they start their career for advancement. Because that's it's a lot of times, not what you know how willing you are to learn, how easy it is for a firm to promote you upwards, because what we're talking about is a student that was able to go from.

Literally staff accountant to senior accountant to managing partner and so on and so forth in a very rapid period of time and so that takes again a student that was given a set of skills who can build on that. And that happens in the classroom. It also happens. It happens through relationship building, so caring faculty that take the time to build a relationship with their students and also expose them to the business community here in Fort Smith so that they understand how to network once they get to the community they want to ultimately live in.

Yeah, so you know, I'm really new as director of admissions, I came to 2 1/2 months ago and you know, I'm familiar from other jobs you know about business schools in the accreditation.

Hang with us. We've got there. It's not Thunder. It's trash cans are rolling across downstairs, but you know, I'm familiar. Most schools will have like a major and then a minor, but you guys started you have something brand new. It's concentrations. Is that right? Can you tell me a little bit about how? Tell us a little bit about that. Sure, so we recently transformed our curriculum in the College of Business. We were.

Up

primarily in major space curriculum and rolling out this fall, we have now a concentrations based curriculum and so all students major in business and they choose one of a variety of concentrations and actually they choose not only one, but they choose two and in some cases could work in a third. And what concentrations are there really 12 hour packets of specialized content? And so I mentioned accounting if you're very serious about accounting, you can choose two concentrations in accounting taking up to 8.

8 classes in upper level accounting courses are program actually will prepare you to sit for the CPA. A CPA exam in the state of Arkansas and in most other states across the country as well. You can do the same thing with finance. You can do that in international management, so on and so forth, but.

I think more intriguing. You can actually mix and match and so that creates the opportunity to really tailor and customize a program that's just right for you, so maybe you're interested in keeping the doors open in both management and marketing.

And so we have a concentration in digital marketing, which is really the forward thinking way to specialize in marketing these days. And you also are interested in investment securities. You compare those together and really end up with a rather unique set of skills for today's marketplace.

Even more peculiar, I think about our program and really nothing like it in the state. I haven't seen this anywhere else in the country either. Is that each of those concentration pathways lead you down the opportunity to earn additional credential actually too, depending on what concentrations you choose, those additional credentials are known as certificates of proficiency, and So what those are are outward demonstrations to employers that say I have the skills to do digital marketing.

As with our previous example, so I know how to do search engine optimization, I know how to do social media management, so we have those skills actually defined and employers will know exactly what you're capable of doing.

So let's say you know there's somebody out there that they are interested in in business, but they're not sure, but they are also interested in being an English major like I was are could it be that they choose a major to major in English, or they choose to major in graphic design, but they know that they might want to know some marketing or know some business. Could they pick up a concentration and a different major? Or how does that work? They can actually do a minor in business administration.

And as part of that minor, they'll get not only a foundational base of knowledge in business, but they can also pick up one of those certificates that we just talked about. OK, so again, it's not only the foundational knowledge in business, not quite as intense as if you were a business major, but enough to give you solid decision making skills get you recognized out there in the marketplace to enhance, really, probably commercialize what you're trying to do. If you are setting graphic design, or if you're studying music or theater.

But then also I think the certificate is very nice because that is an outward demonstration of exactly what you bring to the market.

I'm going to. I'm going to pause and just make sure that if you know you're out there, you're watching this, you know, feel free to jump on the chat and type up a question for us. We don't have a hand raised button, so your your way to jump in the conversation here is to jump on that chat and type in your question, we have Doctor Settlage with us here for a few more minutes which is pretty great. For those of you that are watching that you have opportunity to ask a question of the Dean. She's she's wonderful and has a great passion for students.

But also really busy. So she's taking time out of a busy schedule to share with us. So thank you again for doing this. Absolutely all. I think I'll roll with the question and will watch the chat and see if anything comes up, but what are?

What are some neat things that you see happening in the College of Business between faculty and students? There's probably a bunch of examples, but what are one or two ways that you see right now? Faculty and students either doing research or working on internships. Or you know those types of things that would help the student kind of progress and get a leg up to a relationship with faculty? Sure, so we do both of those things so faculty do research with students in the College of Business we actually had last year we had four different faculty doing research projects with students.

Some of those are more focused on building again a resume that prepares you for Graduate School, but some of those are just quite simply students that are interested in just getting their feet wet and learning more about what we do is academic tions. I think one of my favorite research stories to share is a student that wanted to do research with a couple of faculty, and that research ended up it's used right now in helping our decision making processes at the University level. So this was really a research project.

That addressed why or why do our students not succeed and so looking at doing a lot of analytical skills really building out a model that that addresses? What are some of the factors that that we can identify to help understand what can we do better in the realm of student success and retention and so that is, that is an interesting research project that not every student gets access to and here really in the College of Business it's do you have interests? And if you do, let's pair you up with somebody.

We typically do about 60 internships for credit per year, so in the College of Business, regardless of what pathway you take, you can do an internship for credit. You can actually do that twice, so you can do 2 three hour electives in your internship area. That is real world business experience. There's a wide range of internship opportunities. Students could be a staff accountant practicing practice for maybe say a company local company like Art Best. So one of our.

So it's this past year was actually an accountant intern managing one of the subsidiaries for our best. That's a lot of responsibility that is essentially given that student the same level of responsibility as one of their very own staff accounts. So literally closing the books, creating the financial statements, doing all of the time transactions, all of that. That's really amazing. One other thing, I would say we have a few very active student organizations, so they then.

Recognized multiple times on campus for their projects and also just being very active and.

Those organizations work closely with faculty in order to find the networking opportunities that they need to really get plugged in in the community so.

Any questions or well I you brought? You know you brought up Park best and so I'm pretty new to Fort Smith, but moving here I realized there are a lot of really big companies and businesses, and so I'm curious what interaction the College of Business has with, you know, some pretty high level business people right in our community are there? Are there some that come and interact with students in certain ways or do they teach classes? Or you could just a little bit more about the interaction with some of the really.

Hard scale businesses right here, right? So in the College of Business, and like many of our colleges on campus, we do have an Advisory Council and I keep mentioning our fest that's that is a big company headquarter right here in Fort Smith, AR. There others. We have people that serve multiple people. Actually with that company, about 50% of their employees are actually uafs graduates, which is amazing. But they serve on our Advisory Council. So we talked previously about our changing curriculum.

Those individuals were instrumental in really telling us what we needed to do to make sure our curriculum remained relevant and to make sure our students could get jobs after they graduate with that new curriculum. So we count on our Advisory Council to tell us what we need to do to remain relevant. We also do engage business professionals on faculty so that half actually of our.

Faculty have some.

Tie into the business community in terms of either they are working with the business community to stay current in their field, or some of them actually continue to work here. Locali example uses our community leadership class, which is part of our management concentration. Community Leadership is a class that's taught by someone who has lived and worked right here in Fort Smith, so their connections allow them to bring even more business professionals in to really talk about.

What are some of the needs of the Fort Smith community? What are some projects that could improve life for all of us and what that then does is allow students to think of fresh ideas as to what project they want to take on in the group framework and build on that?

Some other things that we do. Our students actually host their own seminar annually where they they use their connections to bring in business speakers. So we're just all over the place when it comes to bring people in and connecting students to the business community. We really want our students to graduate with not just one or two names that they can call upon if they need a reference for a job, but really, giving them the confidence that they can reach out to anyone.

One last thing I'll mention is the Bab Center for Student Professional development.

So a few years ago now we had the opportunity to begin a what we call soft skills development center here on campus and the College of Business was the first really to make use of that. We're still the heaviest users of that program. This is a program that helps students get ready for their careers by taking advantage of interview skills, workshops, resume building, workshops, an actual mixers where the business community comes on campus to meet students.

Many students receive internship offers after going through that program. The placement rate for students who actually complete the program. So it's kind of a certificate based, not credit, but rather noncredit program students who graduate from the program, have 100% placement, which is phenomenal. There's a lot of directions we're taking with that, because the placement rate is so great. We have looked for opportunities to tie that into our curriculum, and that in business and we actually now have.

Students in business taking the preliminary steps to get that noncredit certification as part of business communications in the college.

Alright, if you're out there watching, we had a couple more minutes, so there's probably a chance for for one. One question on the chat, but if not I of course always have more questions 'cause I enjoy learning, but I'm trying to think, you know, if I were so I have a son, but he's only in the 5th grade, but someday he'll be looking at colleges. Probably sooner than I'm ready for, but someday you will and I know there's this common thought. Well if you go to a public school the size of UA. Fort Smith.

You might or might not have real, not real faculty, but you know, PhD faculty teaching classes, or maybe at first it's it's other students. But tell me a little bit about what what will students experience in the classroom in the College of Business here at UA Fort Smith? What's the interaction from early on and how does it fit the stereotype of huge classes and good luck with actually getting to know a professor, right? So one thing I can promise you is that UA Fort Smith.

In in our college, and I think this is probably true. Campuswide the classes that you take will be taught by faculty. They will not be taught by teaching assistance because we don't have them here. Our faculty are very committed to student learning and not only they committed student learning, but they are very committed to applications oriented, practice oriented instruction and so that means that the discussions that are faculty lead are full of examples there full of scenarios there full of discussion.

Opportunities, lots of chances for you to ask questions to really, you know, develop as a thinker in business. That's our goal. We want you to understand the strategy and business, how to do it when you graduate. Many of our classes employ what are called simulations, where you actually get to practice doing things. One of the neat things that I've heard about this semester with respect to our marketing faculty, we actually have someone teaching a class in social media and they're using a social media simulation.

So the students are actually implementing some social media strategies and kind of the computer game is taking those strategies and showing the students what happens behind the scenes with the analytics, which is really phenomenal in our strategic management class. We also employ a simulation and our students actually compete with other students, other business students across the nation and globe, and they've had some real success with that. So they place in the top 10.

And that's amazing. And for those of you who aren't familiar.

Strategic management is actually making decisions that really span the all disciplines that relate in a business firm. And so you're making financial decisions. You might be making decisions about human resources. You might be making short term versus long term.

Visions about operations. So just decisions that cover a wide range of business concepts. We talked before about projects that students might do as part of their Co curricular development that sometimes happens in a class framework. In so sometimes your grading will actually be the result of a student doing a class project with a local business. So as part of our marketing research class, students have actually taken a.

A piece of the Fort Smith Regional Economy and developed a market research pitch. This is what you could do to change the direction for how this entity is marketed and these are the results that you might expect and that has had tremendous impact.

Do you have any questions? I think we do have one. We do have a question.

The question is, has the college adjusted well to online classes? That is a great question the whole.

Covid situation, how have you seen your business, college faculty and students adjust to the new?

Because the new normal I hope not, but it is. Who knows if it's the new normal. I will say that yes, we did make an adjustment for Covin 19. We had a quick pivot, the College of Business already offered a full online option for business administration before we had to do the quick pivot where everything had to be on line in the spring. And this fall. Most of our classes are online and so most of our faculty were prepared. It wasn't.

Or into them, and so we're very lucky. For those of you who were having discussions with other colleges around the state and world, you know that some people were up against the challenge of having faculty that really had never taught online, and that wasn't true for us. Most of our faculty were somewhat prepared. There's only about 25% of our faculty that had never taught an online class before, so we're very lucky. And So what that means is that, really?

Our focus turned to how do we engage students better online and we will continue to work on that until we are able to get back in the classroom and roll bar sleeves and be physically present with one another because I think that in the long run this is something that a challenge that everyone is going to face.

Gaging online it is so difficult. I mean, just when the question popped up, it would be so much better if I could see the reaction on your face to time. Responding to this question, then to just know that the only response I can get is you saying all good, or, you know, giving me a thumbs up with the emoji capability or whatever. There's no substitute for being able to interact with.

Students and faculty in a face to face format, and so yes, we've adjusted many of our faculty are doing sessions like this.

And those are working pretty good.

And you know, again, we're learning from one another. In fact, we actually have done that in our college. We're doing the peer sessions where different faculty are sharing what they're doing that you can imagine there's a lot of different platforms to do synchronous online sessions, and so we're learning from one another to figure out what works best.

Yeah, it's been a real challenge, but I know you guys are doing the best you can, so thank you for the question and I think it came at a great time. We are right at the end of our half hour. Thank you for joining us. Absolutely. You've almost almost convinced me to go back to get a second undergrad degree in business.

Sounds very interesting, but I guess I'm busy enough. Then I'll probably stick with my job, but thank you. Really appreciate it. Absolutely and good luck to you with your decision. We hope that we've given you good information to decide whether UFS College of Business is for you, but regardless, the luck on the future, and we hope to see you soon. Thank you. Goodnight everybody.