EOC Newsletter

by Dr. Mikhail Gershovich, Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute

Corporate recruiters and employers cite effective oral and written communication skills as the most important job qualification for recent college graduates. In the annual National Association of Colleges and Employers’ (NACE) Job Outlook survey of over 200 top corporate employers, oral and written communication proficiency are consistently the most sought after skills in prospective employees, and rank above analytical skills, the ability to work as a member of a team, technical skills, and a strong work ethic.

Because of a unique, intensive emphasis on public speaking and writing within Baruch’s curriculum and co-curriculum, our graduates tend to be well prepared for the rigors of the job search and for writing and speaking in professional settings regardless of their chosen career path. This was, however, not always the case.

In the mid 1990s, a number of successful Baruch alumni who played active roles in recruitment and hiring at their respective firms (several of them would later be active in the EOC program), noted that many Baruch graduates tended to be remarkably focused, smart, creative, and hard working, but lacked essential oral and written communication skills. While capable and qualified in every other way, Baruch graduates tended to be less proficient in writing and public speaking than their counterparts graduating from other area business programs, and therefore had a difficult time competing with them on the job market.

Charged by then Baruch President, Matthew Goldstein, to determine why this was the case and what might be done about it, a small group of faculty members and administrators looked carefully at Baruch’s current curriculum and academic support programs. They concluded that greater opportunities for students to practice writing within the curriculum as well as intensive faculty development and curricular support held the key to aiding Baruch students in developing as confident, purposeful speakers and writers. Based on the recommendations of that committee and thanks to the generous support of alumnus Bernard L. Schwartz (’48), the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute was founded in 1997 to infuse communication-intensive activities into the curriculum and co-curriculum at the College and to help align curricular priorities with the demands of communicating in the business world.

Working with the College’s academic departments and curriculum committees, the Schwartz Institute developed Communication-Intensive Courses (CICs) in which students have ample opportunities to speak and write as practitioners in their fields of study as accountants, marketing executives, economists, historians, managers, statisticians, and so on. Currently, more than 30 individual courses are designated as CICs. There is at least one CIC in each of the Zicklin School’s majors. Our fellows, all advanced graduate students in a variety of fields, work closely with CIC faculty to develop and support innovative writing and oral communication-intensive curricula. They likewise work with students in preparing oral presentations and writing assignments. The Institute also sponsors innovative, nationally recognized faculty development programs that include small workshops, seminars, and individual consulting all focused on communication-intensive pedagogy. Over the last several years, we have begun to focus more and more on instructional technology and now oversee and develop two of Baruch’s most innovative initiatives, Bogs@Baruch and the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VOCAT). Blogs@Baruch was initially developed as a platform for student writing across the curriculum and has since grown well beyond our expectations with more than 7,000 users and more than 1,000 sites on the system. VOCAT is an assessment tool for public speaking which is used in several key courses at the College and is slowly being adopted by other Institutions both within and outside of CUNY.

The Schwartz Institute has always enjoyed a close working relationship with the Executives on Campus program. As noted above, several alums instrumental to the founding of the Institute went on to leadership roles in the EOC. Many members of our Business Advisory Council are also active in the EOC (in fact, we look to the EOC first when recruiting new members). EOC members are also frequent participants in our Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, which brings together business professionals and educators for a dialogue on communication in the academy and the business world. We have also invited EOC members to speak in CICs about what it means to communicate effectively in the world of business. We are always interested in continuing and deepening our ties to the EOC as we recognize members’ rich and varied business experience and unparalleled dedication to Baruch College and our students..

If you are interested in becoming involved with the Schwartz Institute or have ideas you’d like to share with us about teaching oral and written communication or about how we might include members of the EOC in our future initiatives, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]. If you’d like to know more about us, our history, philosophy and activities at Baruch, please see this article by Fara Warner in the December 2008 issue of Carnegie Foundation’s Change Magazine.

by Anna Vander Broek, MBA Candidate, Class of 2012, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College

It is the third day of my internship at Dell in Austin, Texas. I’m walking with my manager Karsten to a monthly team meeting with his boss, Rob. As we approach the conference room, Karsten casually asks, “You’re good to present what we’re working on, right?”

I stop in my tracks. “Uh, yes?”

I had spent the previous day revising another Dell team’s PowerPoint deck to more closely reflect my team’s goals. Karsten had looked it over and changed a few things, so I assumed he was taking the lead. I was wrong. Within minutes, I would be winging a presentation to a Dell executive.

I was recruited by Dell during the Baruch Career Fair in March. This was the first year that Dell visited Baruch, and two of us in the MBA program received internship offers to work with their marketing department for the summer. I am working for the Global Content team in the eDell division. My team is responsible for all of the text a customer sees on Dell.com. I have a background in publishing and online media, so my internship perfectly combines my past work experience with my future work ambitions.

As we walk into the meeting I think back to the dozens of impromptu presentations I gave over the past year of my MBA program. Surprisingly, I’m not that nervous. Rather, I’m flattered that Karsten has enough trust in the brand-spanking-new intern to let her be the voice of the team.

Karsten’s trust is justified: I surprise myself with my quick understanding of subject matter I was only introduced to days before. My PowerPoint slides are clearly organized and image-heavy-two attributes, I learn afterwards, Rob most values in presentations.

Leaving the meeting, I am thrilled to have experienced a direct pay-off of all the long hours I spent during the previous year on my MBA coursework. And I am even more excited to be interning at a company that is willing to let me demonstrate that training.

The ability to quickly grasp a situation and formulate and present a coherent response is an important skill I gained during my first year at Zicklin. And there are other important skills and experiences I acquired at Zicklin that I find myself immediately putting to use such as the networking.

Dell values the ability to be a vigorous and savvy networker. Dell is a company of over 100,000 employees globally. One of the first things we interns at Dell are told is that there is no organizational chart. Employees are encouraged to try new tasks, and many employees move jobs internally every 12 months. I met one young woman who has held nine different marketing positions at Dell in six years; she is now a Vice President and only two people removed from Michael Dell himself.

I am also putting to good use in my internship the quantitative skills I learned from my Zicklin courses. Measurement is essential at Dell. Like many large corporations, Dell is metric-driven. Most PowerPoint decks must have “back-up” slides which explain, in numbers, where assumptions are coming from. Whether a team is asking for an increased budget or a manager is seeking a promotion, Dell’s executive team looks at the numbers to tell the story.

Although I have only been at Dell for three weeks, I know this will be a valuable experience. It is stimulating for me to see how my education at Baruch is helping to prepare me for moving into a competitive, fast-paced world of business. And, after a long New York City winter, the 100-degree weather of Austin isn’t so bad, either.