Wisconsin MBA Experience (orientation)
All entering students attend a two-week orientation program called the Wisconsin MBA Experience. You will have the chance to meet your classmates at a variety of social events and team-building exercises. The Wisconsin MBA Experience aims to sharpen your skills in important areas such as business communication, strategy, and teamwork prior to the start of classes. Optional sessions on mathematics are highly valued by those wishing to strengthen their quantitative skills.
As important as the learning opportunities during the Wisconsin MBA Experience are, many students recall it most as the starting point of strong friendships with classmates that last long past graduation. It is also the beginning of building your network with our vast alumni who are eager to welcome you to the Wisconsin School of Business community.
The curriculum for the Wisconsin MBA in risk management and insurance is flexible and applied. The intention is to provide opportunities for students to develop the skills and knowledge most appropriate for their intended career, whether it be insurance company operations, consulting, risk management, or other related opportunities. Towards that end, the curriculum incorporates courses focused on successful decision making, insurance company strategy, issues related to property and liability exposures for firms, employee benefits management, and related financial and accounting skills.
Year One
The first year of the Wisconsin MBA is focused primarily on core business functional areas of accounting, finance, marketing, and operations. To pull together these functional areas into a coordinated organizational whole, we also provide course work in economics and data analysis and decision-making. These core courses are rounded out with material on ethical leadership, a critical component of success for any MBA. These courses are taken together as a cohort by all of our MBA students, with teams comprised of students from the varied specializations working together on common business issues.
Along with this common experience, the first year incorporates courses specific to the risk management and insurance specialization, beginning with an outstanding introductory course on risk management in the first semester. This introductory course lays the foundation for successful decision making in the face of uncertainty, offers a foundational understanding of enterprise risk management, and begins the process of moving into the more specific areas associated with insurance and management of potentially large losses from catastrophic liability, property, or other events.
Internship
All students find internships related to the risk management and insurance field, some in insurance company operations, other in risk management, and still others in a variety of brokerage, regulatory, consulting opportunities. These internships are intended to build upon the course work taken in the first year and launch students into a truly applied program in their second year.
Year Two
The second year of the Wisconsin MBA is intended to provide students an unmatched depth of knowledge in their specialized field. In risk management and insurance, that involves conducting an applied project, and learning in more depth about both effective organizational risk management as well as the specifics of the insurance mechanism. Our course on sustainability risk management is the pioneer in the field, and students leave our program having interacted with industry leaders in all of the major functional areas of risk management and insurance.
In addition to the courses in risk management and insurance, students have opportunities to take courses in finance, negotiations, change management, strategic innovation, and a host of other top-quality programs.