Take a moment and picture within your volatile and muddled mind a certain scenario: You’re a freshman in Harpur College with an undecided major. You glance uninterestedly with your naive eyes at a variety of classes to see where that easy “A” may be obtained without use of your usually stellar work ethic. On BUSI (or BU Brain, I should say), you scroll past Basic Acting One and Principles of Microeconomics. Lo and behold, several courses catch your eye, Accounting 211 and Finance 311 to name a few.
You check out their schedules and see afternoon classes — perfect. Finally, you click “Register” and then: “Access Denied, course restricted to SOM majors only.” You sit confused for a second, before becoming quite annoyed. You stand up and go outside. You search for the nearest puppy, and give it a nice, firm kick. Only then do you feel better.
These aggressive outbursts are sadly quite common in trying to register for business courses. As it is regretfully known, SOM students are allowed free passage into the Harpur curriculum, while Harpur students attempting to take an SOM class in the hopes of seeing if they are truly interested in business are barred with an iron gate (equipped with small holes through which you may have a slight chance of slipping through).
One of the holes is to petition, which has a very probable 99 percent failure rate, meaning that those students who attempt to go through this hole usually end up firmly rebuked (me, for one).
Yet another way is to apply for the business-adjunct program, which offers six business courses for non-SOM residents. How kind of the administration to provide us probable business majors with six classes — but wait, there’s a catch: Your GPA must be at least 3.5 … ruling out enough of the Harpur student population.
So, the question is, if Harpur is the supposed liberal arts school where students with undecided majors apply, why are we restricted from taking specific business classes? Why are students in SOM allowed to take liberal arts courses, when they are already in a business school? If those students (who have already gleefully decided on what to do with their life) may take classes in our liberal arts school, then we Harpur students should have rightful passage into their course curriculum. Is that not the purpose of a liberal arts college? To give a “liberal arts” education? The act of restricting Harpur students from certain classes does not come anywhere even laughingly near the definition of liberal arts.
For those of you lads and ladies who wish to learn and work in the finance world but have no chance in hell of getting into SOM, there is a solution: Financial Economics! Not only do you get to take two (guaranteed, mind you) business classes, you also learn how to discreetly analyze and predict business cycles (i.e. you’re way cooler), whereas accounting majors just learn to check if a company can add correctly. So, to the business-inclined who are bitter about SOM, shoot me an e-mail for more desired information on majoring in Financial Econ.