Choose your own adventure

Given your previous experience with all the core disciplines in business, at Fuqua you’ll be able to diversify your experience with more advanced courses and electives right from the start. In the Accelerated Daytime MBA program you’ll take four core courses which build your capabilities in leadership and management for the world today, and then you’ll be able to tailor the rest of your curriculum to focus on the topics of most relevance to your career. Since Fuqua doesn’t specialize in one skill or industry, you’ll have access to insights across functions and industries to help you pursue your unique career focus.

Course highlights

Explore a small selection of the elective courses available to you.

Detecting Earnings Management Fraud

When companies report their financial performance, can you trust the numbers? Learn and practice the skills required to rigorously evaluate and understand corporate financial reporting. By identifying and studying the sections of financial reports that require the most managerial discretion, and understanding the role incentives play in influencing various market participants, you’ll assess when accounting numbers are being “managed.”

Managerial Accounting

Managerial Accounting emphasizes the use of accounting information for internal purposes. In this course, you’ll cover the design of management accounting systems for planning and controlling operations and for motivating personnel. You’ll integrate accounting with ideas from microeconomics, data analysis, decision analysis, finance, and operations management.

Data Analytics for Business

Through real examples--customer retention, social media analysis, network of systemic risk, real-time online advertisement, text mining, and data mining--this course demonstrates how data can directly impact business decisions. You’ll develop *data-analytic* thinking skills to evaluate when data can improve performance, identify opportunities, and assist with decision making. These skills will allow you to engage effectively with experts/consultants.

Decision Models

Successful management requires the ability to recognize a decision situation, understand its essential features, and make a choice. However, many such situations may be too difficult to grasp intuitively, or the stakes may be too high to learn by experience. In these cases, we may benefit from using decision models – simplified representations of these situations that allow you to consider the different possible scenarios (i.e., ask "what if") and learn more about the problem.

The World Economy

What drives sustained economic growth? Defining moments in history provide an understanding of the path that led countries to their current economic and political situations. You’ll see how financial crises have shaped the evolution of our global financial system, discover what forces shape the world today, and learn why emerging countries are often locked into systems that make it difficult to sustain growth over long periods of time.

Game Theory for Strategic Advantage

People rarely make decisions in a vacuum. The choices we make affect others, and their choices impact us. Such situations are known as “games,” and you will encounter them frequently in the business world. The goal of this course is to enhance your ability to think strategically in complex, interactive environments.

Energy, Markets, & Innovation

Explore how ongoing changes in energy supply, demand, and technology are affecting energy markets and the businesses that operate within them. The specific transformations that will be explored include shale gas and shale oil, renewable power generation, energy efficiency retrofits in buildings, and recent government environmental regulations/incentives.

Global Institutions & Environment

Learn how the same problem is solved, or at least addressed, by differing institutional arrangements around the world and the difficulties in applying an arrangement across jurisdictional boundaries.

Corporate Restructuring

Valuation, governance, the law, and strategic considerations are the corporate restructuring themes of a framework this course sets out to assess healthy company valuation and restructuring or distressed restructuring and reorganization. Use tools to analyze a variety of situations: mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, sales, leveraged buyouts, activist investors, bankruptcies, liquidations, reorganizations, and both in- and out-of-court negotiation.

Corporate Finance

This case-study-based course examines important issues in corporate finance from the perspective of financial managers who are responsible for making significant investment and financing decisions.

Impact Investing

Examine the developing marketplace of impact investing, or investing with the intent to generate environmental and social impacts in addition to financial returns. Case studies and guest speakers will explore challenges and lessons in creating successful fund and deal structures that align various blended value objectives for both entrepreneurs and investors.

Biotech and Pharma Strategy

Certain factors differentiate pharmaceuticals from other industries, and impact how they manage the R&D process, address the FDA regulatory process, implement a go-to-market strategy, and compete with generics, in addition to inter-firm alliances and acquisitions they make. You’ll get an overall international perspective, but the course emphasis is on current market and policy developments in the United States.

Health Policy & Management

Students travel to Washington, D.C., to visit federal institutions, advocacy groups, and non-governmental organizations that are critical to the development of health policy, technology, and the delivery of health care services.

Effective Advocacy

Advocate a point of view, then refine your ability to construct persuasive arguments, challenge other viewpoints and positions, anticipate questions, and manage challenges gracefully. You’ll develop skills to succeed when acting as a devil’s advocate, framing issues clearly and strategically, facilitating meetings, and adapting arguments to audiences’ needs in order to prevail in your organization.

Managerial Writing

Improve your skills in all phases of writing--from getting started to drafting, editing, and revising for style, content, and format. You’ll learn to analyze your readers and adapt to their needs, establish a dialogue with them, optimize the readability of your documents, overcome wordiness and awkward phrasing, and revise complex material efficiently. Writing tasks will include executive summaries, letters, memos, and email.

Ethics in Management

Increase your ability to sustain effective and ethical management and leadership in your organization. This course provides an opportunity to sharpen your “philosophy of business” and define your own purpose in business. Deepen your self-awareness as an ethical being and leader, and strengthen your moral courage using tools for “finding and speaking your voice” when you confront ethical challenges and lapses.

Negotiations

Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties, and this course will help you to understand the theory and processes of negotiation as it is practiced in a variety of settings.

Strategic Brand Management

Despite the value (or potential value) of an organization’s brand(s), marketing professionals often don’t manage them to avoid undercutting their potential success. Learn what it takes to successfully develop and manage strong brands, from strategies to build the right products or services to strategies for designing and implementing effective brand-building programs around your organization’s offerings.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy offers frameworks and tools for managing a company with the customer’s perspective as your north star. Using case studies aimed at developing and managing market-based assets, you’ll learn to create value for customers — and capture value for your company.

Operations Strategy

The focus of this course is on the strategic aspects of operations management. It is qualitative in nature, and based on case studies, class discussions, and lectures.

Supply Chain Management

Gain an understanding of the functional and strategic role of distribution in both the manufacturing and service industries. Learn to evaluate distribution strategies in terms of costs, service to customers, and competitive impact, and to analyze the costs and benefits of cooperation and coordination between different firms in a supply chain.

Advanced Corporate Strategy

Learn what to consider when making business decisions in the shadow of complex political and social issues. You’ll use contemporary case studies to discuss making choices that touch controversy--economic inequality, civil rights, public health, and consumer and environmental protection, among others, and understand the potential impact of current public policy issues on your corporate strategy.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

Do you hope to pursue start-up opportunities upon graduation, or at a later career stage? In this course, you’ll gain the information and tools you need to evaluate opportunities to starting a new firm. Topics include: how to choose markets for entry, when to enter, and what resources and capabilities it will take to provide a platform for future growth.

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Making the Most of Elective Classes

Fuqua Professor Christine Moorman teaching an elective
A student shares his method for choosing between 100+ course options.

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We're a STEM-designated Program!

International students whose jobs meet certain requirements may have a total of up to 36 months to gain work experience in the U.S.

Fuqua students pitch their ideas in the Duke Start-Up Challenge.
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Ideas Become Reality in the Duke Start-Up Challenge

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Daytime Accelerated MBA

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