Business majors thrive on success of Mendoza College
By SPENCER BEGGS
Scene Writer
Meet Brad. Brad is the kind of guy that every student at Notre Dame knows. He's the one guy that never seems to be doing anything when the rest of the campus is having a collective aneurysm over their the next paper, the next final, the next second of existence.
Most of Brad's time is divided between playing Playstation NHL Hockey and going to and from the Boat Club. As he curls up into bed at 11:30 a.m., passersbys on their way to write historical analysis papers or prepare their coming chemistry labs are known to curse the leisure that Brad, the business major, enjoys.
The business major is an interesting animal. However, his program of study is much more complex than the Boat Club and NHL Hockey. Welcome to the elusive course of study know as the Mendoza College of Business.
The Mendoza College of Business did not always bear the Mendoza name. In fact, the college was originally named the College of Foreign and Domestic Commerce in 1921 when it opened its doors to Notre Dame students.
In 1961, the college was renamed the College of Business Administration, a name it retained until March of 2000 when Tom and Kathy Mendoza (the former, a 1973 Notre Dame alumnus) gave the University a naming grant of $35 million, the largest donation in the school's history.
Tom Mendoza is the president of Network Appliance, a technology infrastructure company that currently handles the majority of the world's e-mail communication. His wife Kathy serves as the senior director of Worldwide Strategic Operations at NetApp and serves on the Advisory Board of the Mendoza College of Business.
The Mendoza grant serves the 1,947 undergraduate students — a whopping 24 percent of the Notre Dame student body — who are enrolled in the business school. Their programs of study include accountancy, finance and business economics, management, management information systems and marketing.
The study of business is half way between a science and an art. For example, while marketing majors must take number-crunching economics courses, they must also acquire a number of behavioral psychology credits.
But what is so great about the business college? Besides the extra amount of sleep, the college's track record speaks for itself.
Graduates of the Mendoza College of Business consistently report close to 100 percent employment by three months after their graduation, with an average salary of $42,801. It has also been ranked among the highest in alumni networking by numerous news magazines including Newsweek and Time.
But what about that extra sleep? Is it really true that business students have to do significantly less work than other majors?
"That stereotype is absolutely false," said Dan Sirkin, a sophomore accountancy major. "It's just that the standard of a business student is someone who can organize their time and get their work done efficiently. That's what being a business student is all about."
"I think all the different majors have a serious chip on their shoulders," said senior computer science major Mike Crowley. "They want to believe that they have it so much worse off than other majors. [But] all the majors have a heavy workload."
In fact, the Mendoza College of Business is widely recognized as one of the country's most challenging programs of business study.
Its faculty, like marketing instructor Kevin Bradford who received the American Marketing Association's "Best Paper Award" in 2000, has also been highly acclaimed by news journals and professional associations alike.
Like most business students, our subject Brad knows how good his college is. But now it's time for him to get some sleep. He has a 8:30 a.m. micro-economics class, and he needs to rest up for the evening at Boat Club anyway.
All Scene Stories for Monday, February 5, 2001
