Starting Fall 2024, all incoming BCom students will be required to complete a minimum 3-credit experiential learning course to graduate with a BCom degree. Students may fulfill this requirement at any point during the BCom program. For more information, including specific program requirements, please consult the BCom Degree Requirements in the eCalendar.
Courses that fulfil the Experiential Learning Degree Requirement are indicated in the course repository below.
Desautels Experiential Course Repository:
The following courses may be taken to fulfill the Experiential Learning Degree Requirement for incoming BCom students, starting in Fall 2024.
Integrated Management Student Fellowship听(BUSA 451D1/BUSA 451D2 or BUSA 432D1/BUSA 432D2)
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025The Integrated Management Student Fellowship (IMSF) is an experiential leadership development program at Desautels. The Fellowship spans both Fall and Winter semesters and is composed of a faculty research project and a community impact initiative project ( BUSA 451 D1/D2) or a community impact initiative without the research component ( BUSA 434 D1/D2). Faculty research projects are an opportunity to experience academic research and partnership development in a participatory manner under the guidance of an accomplished academic. The community impact initiative projects entail working in small groups to research a challenge within the framework of the UN 17 SDGs, design a solution to this challenge, and implement the solution within the boundaries of the program's assigned hours.
To learn more please visit:听About the IMSF
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BUSA 497 Internship in International Business
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
The internship will consist of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks at an approved host institution. The institution should be located either overseas or have an international focus.
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FINE 440 Honours Investment Management Research Project 1
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Students are exposed to all areas of the investment management business, including thesis development, valuation, economic analysis, sustainability, risk management, compliance, marketing, client communications, and fundraising.
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FINE 450 Honours Investment Management Research Project 2
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Continuation of research work on company, industry, risk management, strategy and macro research reports, contemporary issues in finance presented by market practitioners.
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FINE 464 Pension Funds and Retirement Systems
Winter 2025
Students spend the semester working towards writing a case that will be used in a case competition the following Fall. Students spend time researching topics around pension funds, presenting ideas, and receiving feedback from peers as the class decides what to focus the case on. Students then work in groups doing research and writing parts of the case.
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& FINE 541N1 Applied Investments
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students work in teams to manage real money. They receive 鈥渃lients鈥� who are real people who have been anonymized, and work in teams to create portfolios for their clients. The teams then develop an active portfolio strategy and have nine months to make trades on behalf of their 鈥渃lient鈥�. The class also collaborates with Desautels Capital Management, where the students in FINE 541 act as the 鈥渃lients鈥� for DCM.
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INDR 294 Introduction to Labour-Management Relations
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students are involved in a 6.5-hour simulation. Prior to the simulation the students are coached by industry leaders, they subsequently prepare a bargaining book and re-negotiate a collective agreement.
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INSY 333 Systems Analysis and Modeling
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students work with a small organization to analyze the business processes and information systems of the "client" organizations. The project involves interviewing key persons, examining business documents, analyzing the current information systems, and making recommendations for new business processes and systems design.
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INSY 339 IT Consulting
Winter 2025
Students go through the various steps of consulting (scoping, contracting, collecting, and analyzing data, presenting, etc.), which they then adapt and apply to a real company or project.
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MGPO 364 Entrepreneurship in Practice
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students go through the steps required to launch a business in a hands-on and experiential way. The course places particular emphasis on teamwork and fieldwork and is following the human-centred, iterative Design Thinking approach.
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Winter 2025
The course focuses on three key theories of National Competitiveness and includes a visit to a number of different countries. Students draw from material taught in other areas of Management to apply ideas to the different organizations visited.
Travel study
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MGPO 430 Practicum in Not-for-Profit Consulting
Winter 2025
This course is designed around a pro bono consulting experience and is intended for students to develop real-world skills through action-based learning. It is meant to connect students to both the NGO community as well as the consulting world.
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MGPO 475 Strategies for Developing Countries
Fall 2024
Real World Challenge Group Project: Students work on designing a solution to a real-world problem faced by experts in industry and in various sectors that affect developing countries. Each team will participate in one challenge, proposed by a guest expert. Students will incorporate class concepts in their innovative solutions, which they will then present to guest experts.
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MGPO 485 Emerging Technologies: Organizing and Societal Stakes
Fall 2024
Students are tasked with combining ideas and frameworks related to technology, innovation, and organizing to offer consulting advice to a real organization. This organization, which changes each year, is faced with choices and challenges in deploying new technologies in a real-world environment.
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MGSC 483 Analytics-Based Community Project听(Costa Rica Study Trip)
Summer 2024
This interdisciplinary experiential-learning course will partner students with an NGO to draw on that organization鈥檚 knowledge in sustainability or analytics. During these projects, students will implement AI and analytical tools to, for example, study the health of bee colonies, track microplastics in the ocean, help micro-farming initiatives, or develop compost optimization.
Travel study
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MRKT 355 Services Marketing
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students identify and critique the services marketing strategies of an organization of their own choosing against concepts, models and frameworks covered in the course. Students conduct primary and secondary research and analyses to understand the issues and the market. They subsequently prepare and present a services marketing plan to aid the organisation to develop and position a superior value proposition to their targeted audiences and resolve the firm's most critical issues.
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MRKT 438 Brand Management
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Student teams must select a brand and conduct a brand audit. Each team conducts a deep dive examination of the brand to assess its underlying sources of brand equity and recommend ways to improve and leverage it.
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MSUS 400 Independent Studies in Sustainability
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students are required to do research or a field project under the academic supervision of a Desautels professor. Projects are to be arranged individually with professors. A detailed student proposal must be submitted to and approved by the Academic Supervisor, Managing for Sustainability Mentor and the Associate Dean Student Affairs, BCom Program.
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MSUS 401 Sustainability Consulting
Winter 2025
Designed around a pro bono consulting engagement, this course provides real-world experience in applying management consulting theories and tools to plan and implement projects that move organizations towards sustainability.
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MSUS 402 Systems Thinking and Sustainability
Fall 2024
Student groups will conduct an in-depth analysis of complex real-world problems and design action plans to build sustainable systems. Additionally, students will explore a variety of systems thinking tools and engage with relevant outside organizations.
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MSUS 497 Internship in Sustainability
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Internship of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks, at an approved host institution, with a focus on sustainability.
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ORGB 380/BUSA 356听Brazil Study Abroad Program
Summer 2025This program includes two courses that relate international business concepts directly to the Brazilian context and to the Latin American business environment more generally. The program includes regular lectures, guest speakers, and visits to business in Montreal, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
Travel study
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ORGB 423 Human Resources Management
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students will conduct interviews and research to thoroughly analyze an HR function (e.g., HRM planning, recruitment and selection) in a real organization. Students will examine their practices and use the theories covered in class to make recommendations for improvement.
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ORGB 434 & FINE 434 Comparing Startup Ecosystems of Israel and Canada
Summer 2024
In a course run like a start-up, students visit, observe, and interrogate organizations in both Canada and Israel involved in start-up ecosystems, work in collaboration with student partners from an Israeli university to develop and present a proposal to make improvements in one country's (either Canada or Israel) start-up ecosystem based on lessons and experiences from the other. These proposals are presented in a competitive context at the end of the course.
Travel study
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RETL 407 Retail Management Project
Winter 2025
Students undertake a real-life 鈥渃onsulting鈥� project related to retail management. This involves defining actual problems and recommending solutions to global companies. Throughout the project, students are exposed to a variety of real-life strategic and operational issues in retail management. Each project is multidisciplinary or multi-functional in nature and will have significant impact on one or more operational/competitive capabilities of the company. Students are expected to participate fully in developing and delivering core aspects of the project to the client.
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RETL 410 Sustainable Retail and Entrepreneurship
Fall 2024
Students are taken through the stages of developing a business concept in sustainability and retail. The experiential learning component culminates in a competition where student teams will pitch their business ideas to a panel of external business experts.
