By VANESSA SKILDUM

In January, Beloit College will launch two new schools in order to provide more opportunities for students. The School of Business, Economics, and Entrepreneurship (BEE) and The School of Health Sciences (SHS) are meant to help make it clear to students what opportunities are available and incorporate what they need into the curriculum at the college. 

With the addition of BEE, there will be more majors and minors offered. The majors are business management and organizational leadership. New minors are already available which include finance, market research, and entrepreneurship. Sports management, actuarial science, and marketing are in the process of getting approved. In the future, the school is looking at possibly developing majors in finance and marketing. 

BEE is directed by Diep Phan, a Professor of Economics and Business as well as the Chair of the Data Science & Data Analytics Program. When asked about what BEE can do for students she said, “we try to make the business curriculum accessible to even students who don’t major in business. That’s why we have business minors. So you can be a creative writing major and then minor in entrepreneurship because maybe you want to have a publishing company of your own one day. Or you can be an anthropology major and maybe do a market research minor. These minors are created to complement a lot of the traditional liberal arts majors… and make students more marketable to future employers.”

SHS focuses more on building skills and certifications. It makes it clearer to students what options and resources are available to students within the health program. These resources include classes, certifications, and partnerships with other colleges. 

The school helps to highlight partnerships that the health program has had for a while. Examples include their partnership with Johns Hopkins where Beloit has had a steady stream of graduates continue their education there for a degree in nursing. The Pharmacy Doctorate Degree is a brand new partnership with the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee which is a 3-3 or 4-3 program where you do three or four years at Beloit and then complete a doctorate degree in Pharmacy in three years at the Medical College. They are investigating more partnerships like that with the University of Wisconsin Madison for a Doctorate of Physical Therapy and more. 

Rachel Bergstrom, the Department Chair of Biology, is the director for SHS and she said that the goal of the school is to, “make it recognizable for all students that if you are interested in something that’s health professions, you don’t have to know somebody who knows somebody who gets you on the H-pack mailing list. You now can see that there is a School of Health Sciences, and it connects you to all of these opportunities… now if a student comes to me if they need shadowing experience I no longer have to reach out to my networks. We are building those networks into the school.”

The creation of schools is the natural development of Impact Beloit’s Career Channels which were made to help students connect their coursework to careers. The goal of schools is to take that to the next step and incorporate career readiness into the classroom. 

Tim Leslie is the executive director of Impact Beloit. In his presentation about Impact Beloit he said, “through schools, students benefit from more career focus and develop specialized knowledge and technical skills on top of their creative problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and intellectual agility skills.”

Leslie says that more schools are in the works. These include The School of Media, Arts and Production, which will be directed by Shawn Gillen, and The School of Environment and Sustainability, directed by Jay Zambito.