Brandeis International Business School

Video Transcript

Ahmad Namini, Professor of the Practice of Business Analytics: Field projects pair teams of students with real-world companies to solve real-world business problems.

The whole point of field projects in general is that students learn how corporate America works.

Career Strategies Director Julie Miller: In field projects, the students work with a variety of organizations, everything from startups to established organizations across industries.

In addition to the academic skills they are applying, they are also learning how to work together as a team, how to communicate with company management and how to address challenges that inevitably come up along the way.

Namini: The students find that it’s a great experience just to interact with people in a non-classroom type environment.

The onus is on them to come up with the ideas, come up with the plan, come up with different solutions.

Jaden Menzer, MA’23: Our field project experience was very enlightening.

We partnered with a renewable energy battery storage startup located here in Waltham and we helped them discover policies that are going to help them grow their business.

Djounia Saint-Fleurant, MBA’24: The field project, the way it is structured, it gave us the opportunity to learn while we are working with a real company.

In my experience so far, it’s the best thing that could happen to me in order to get ready to start a career.

Namini: When corporations want to hire, if they have people that only have a classroom background, an academic background, it’s great. There’s no question about it.

But when you can show that you have done projects or that you’ve worked with companies, then you are kind of beyond what the classroom can offer.

The whole premise of a field project is to take what you learned in the classroom and apply it in a real-world setting. And that’s what companies want.