Dean's Message
The School of Business Administration (SBA) is well known in the MENA region for the exceptional quality of its Bachelor of Science in Business Administration program, which features six majors and eight minors. We also offer two applied business education programs at the graduate level: a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Science in Accounting as well as a series of executive education seminars and workshops. We hope to launch additional graduate programs in the near future.
These programs are delivered by our diverse faculty, most of which have earned their PhDs from esteemed US academic institutions. Their accomplishments have been recognized internationally and with many members being recipients of international awards and recommendations for their research and textbook publications.
It is not the high quality of our academic degree programs alone that sets us apart from our competition. At SBA, we understand that interaction with the business community is vital for our success. Only if the academic experience is simultaneously enriched by first-hand business knowledge will students be truly equipped to master the post-graduate challenges that await them.
Every semester, we invite corporate leaders and distinguished academics as guest speakers to inform and encourage our students. We recently hosted our second Nobel Prize Laureate at SBA to give students the opportunity to interact with and be inspired by one of the world’s greatest minds. We frequently ask alumni to share their “real-life” anecdotes and provide helpful hints to the next generation of business students. We conduct business idea challenges with company mangers as judges and run interactive mentoring sessions with HR professionals. Student groups analyze actual companies focusing on particular financial or managerial aspects and even write case studies. With our Interactive Trading Floor, a technologically advanced 27-seat learning environment designed to be the exact duplicate of a trading floor found in typical Wall Street or global investment firms, including the same live data feeds, industry software and analytical tools, our students can apply theory to practice and gain an invaluable understanding of the intricacies of global financial markets.
A milestone of every business student’s education is the three-month internship where senior students get a first taste of the corporate world in their fields of study. While students apply their theoretical knowledge to find solutions to hands-on problems, companies evaluate them yielding, more often than not, in job offers upon graduation. Our career placement and internship services are designed to match student ability and aspiration with employer needs and preferences.
Building this mutually beneficial relationship, we are grateful to our friends and partners in the business community and government.
As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of our institution, we are proud to have already become the leading business school in the Arab region (US News, 2016), and this is only the beginning.
Jörg Bley, PhD, CFA, Dean
