Collegiate Times

Business-savvy students outside of the Pamplin College of Business can now take more business classes than previous years.

Pamplin, like other colleges within Virginia Tech, gives preference to its students when resources are scarce.

“Opening classes to non-majors really is an issue of supply and demand,” said Candice Clemenz, associate dean of undergraduates.

For many years there were around 3,000 undergraduates in Pamplin, but numbers recently ballooned to more than 4,200.

Large freshmen classes kept increasing while resources stayed the same, and preference went to business majors so they could take the courses necessary for graduation.

Pamplin had little control over how many students were accepted to the college as freshmen but now works with the admissions department to keep the incoming freshman class at a more manageable level. Around 4,000 are now business majors.

“We’ve always allowed a lot of our classes to be taken for non-business students with the preference being for business students,” said Richard Sorensen, dean of Pamplin. “Part of our goal was to allow students outside of the business school to benefit from our curriculum.”

Sorensen feels strongly about allowing non-business majors benefit from Pamplin’s programs because of his own background.

He was an electrical engineer from Polytechnic University, and he realized had excellent analytical and practical skills for business.

“I went for an MBA because I felt a lack of those courses (finance, marketing and management),” Sorensen said. “We don’t want that to happen to students in other courses.”

Students can sign up for any class during open registration, space and prerequisite permitting, or add a business administration minor, a program exclusively for students outside of Pamplin.

For a more unique experience, students within the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences are now able to conduct undergraduate research with Pamplin students, part of a new collaboration between the colleges.

“Liberal arts and human science students really do go into the field of business oftentimes, and they need to have the background in this area,” said Diana Ridgwell, director of student development for CLAHS and a pioneer of the partnership.

CLAHS and Pamplin students may sign up for Marketing 4994, an undergraduate research course that works with small businesses and nonprofits in the region to identify problems they face and formulate solutions.

“It’s not something you see every day,” Ridgwell said. “We know in today’s world you can’t solve problems from one perspective or another, you need to have people thinking about it in very different ways.”

A version of this article appeared in the Nov 5 issue of the Collegiate Times.