Graduate Business Elective Courses

For MBA, Accounting

ACCT 800 Financial Accounting I: Theory of accounting, accounting standards, and concepts. Preparation of financial statements. Intensive study of the theory, measurement, and presentation of assets, income, and current liabilities.

ACCT 801 Financial Accounting II: Accounting for investments, liabilities, stockholders' equity, pensions, leases, income taxes, earnings per share, and cash flow.

ACCT 802 Strategic Management Accounting: Use of cost data in management decision making as it relates to planning, cost control, and performance evaluation. Relevant management tools as they relate to cost management. Role of qualitative factors relevant to the managerial decision making process.

ACCT 803 Auditing Principles and Practice: Application of auditing principles while examining financial statements. Review of internal control systems, sampling techniques, and report writing. Operational auditing, professional ethics, and auditors' liability.

ACCT 804 Legal and Professional Responsibilities in Accounting: Legal rules and principles that apply to business transactions, including contracts, property, the debtor-creditor relationship, the formation of business organizations, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the regulation of business conduct. Professional responsibilities of CPAs, government regulation of securities markets, and corporate financial reporting.

ACCT 807 Seminar in Accounting Information Systems and Cybersecurity Reporting:  Understanding the cybersecurity reporting issues and the development of accounting information systems for managerial control. Topics include major concepts, terminologies, and problems associated with the methods to collect, evaluate, and report accounting information and cybersecurity issues relevant to various disclosure needs.

ACCT 808 International Accounting: A survey of problems relating to accounting for multinational corporations doing business in a global environment and attempts to solve them.

ACCT 811 Introduction to Federal Tax: An in-depth introduction to federal tax problems: income, deductions, credits, exemptions, and property transactions.

ACCT 812 Advanced Federal Taxation: Focus on advanced topics applicable to individuals, partnerships, corporations, estates, and trusts. Extensive coverage of the tax consequences of property transactions and alternative minimum tax. Corporate tax topics include formation, operation, non-liquidating distributions, and liquidating. Federal estate and gift taxation and income taxation of trusts and estates.

ACCT 814 Seminar in Accounting Data Analytics: Exploration of how to draw insights from financial statement data and to solve complex data analytic and visualization problems.

ACCT 818 Accounting Ethics: Advanced topics in accounting ethics including the application of professional ethics and responsibilities in the accounting and business environment and an analysis of the underlying ethical reasoning.

ACCT 831 Financial Statement Analysis: Financial statement analysis and recent developments in financial accounting, ethics, and regulation. Relevant to CPAs, CMAs, and financial managers.

ACCT 835 Corporate Governance and the Design and Testing of Internal Controls: Examination of corporate governance structures and the design and testing of internal controls related to financial reporting.

ACCT 851 Advanced Financial Reporting: Examination of the complexities of recording and reporting for business combinations, multinational operations, partnerships, and foreign currency transactions, and in-depth study of the consolidated financial statements. (Plus-minus letter grade only)

See all Accounting Courses on the SFSU Bulletin.

Learn about the Graduate Certificate in Accounting.

Faculty Advisor: If students have questions about Accounting courses and the graduate certificate program, please contact the Accounting Department Graduate Program Faculty Coordinator, Professor Jung Hoon Kim at jhkim@sfsu.edu.

For MBA, Decision Sciences/Operations Research

Students learn to apply analytical methods and computer-based tools to problems in a wide variety of settings. 

800-level Decision Sciences elective courses include the following: 

DS 816: Seminar in Business Forecasting (To be announced) - Theory and practice of short, medium, and long-range forecasting within business environments. Quantitative and qualitative forecasting methods. Mathematical methods covered include time series models, decomposition models, linear and multiple regression models, and may include ARIMA and data mining. 

DS 852: Managerial Decision-Making (offered every Fall and Spring) – Business decision-making through data driven analysis in the spreadsheet environment. 

DS 853: Seminar in Data Analysis (offered every Fall and Spring) – Sampling techniques and exploratory methods of data analysis; methods of multivariate data analysis applied to business problems. 

DS 855: Supply Chain Management (Spring 2025, also tbd) – Concepts of competitive strategy and sustainability; aggregate planning and managing the marketing/operations interface; inventory management and procurement strategy; design of supply chain networks; and the role of IT. 

DS 856: Seminar in Project Management (To be announced) – The full range of issues faced by project managers including the project life cycle; technical, human, and organizational issues; planning, scheduling, and controlling the timing, resources, and costs of a project. 

DS 861: Data Mining and Advanced Statistical Methods for Business Analysts (offered every Fall and Spring) – Concepts of modeling and understanding of complex datasets based on advanced statistical methods with various supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. 

DS 862: Machine Learning for Business Analysts (offered every Fall and Spring) – Focus on advanced machine learning methods including supervised and unsupervised learning techniques used to extract valuable information from quantitative and text data. 

Faculty Advisors: Professors Bollapragada, Cholette, and Roeder 

For MBA, Finance

Three Guiding Financial Principles Imparted in the MBA Finance Specialization: Acquiring Capital, Risk Management and Investment

Acquiring Capital (debt or equity)
Corporations and other entities:

• Borrowing (raise debt)
• Selling assets (equity, IPO or seasoned offering & venture capital)

Topics include:

• Financial statement analysis
• Debt and stock valuation
• Project analysis
• Trade-off between debt and equity

Risk Management

• Once you have money, you may be concerned about losing it, because of unexpected changes in the political environment, macro economy, and the financial markets (e.g., stock & commodity prices, interest rates, debt credit rating, etc.)
• Risk management introduces methods and techniques to protect value of assets.

Investment (managing your capital)

• Now that you've acquired and protected your money, you should grow itby investing it in
  • Real Assets: Plant & Equipment, R&D, Intellectual Property, etc.
  • Financial Assets: stock of public traded firms; debt of public traded firms, Fed. Gov., States, & Cities; commodities, etc.

The Finance Department offers courses covering each of the above three principles:

FIN 785: Financial Management

FIN 819: Financial Analysis and Management

FIN 820: Seminar in Financial Risk Management

FIN 825: Seminar in Investments

FIN 828: Seminar: Financial Markets and Institutions

FIN 836: Seminar in International Finance

Learn about the Graduate Certificate in Finance.

For MBA, Hospitality and Tourism Management

HTM 860: Strategic Human Resources Management TBD

Every business requires people to operate. Our people, or human capital, are even more essential to service-based businesses as they help create the products being provided. This course is designed to help the business professional determine how to measure and leverage human capital in service businesses. This is an online course that will use case studies and people analytic tools to maximize the employees in an organization.

Professor Susan Roe has experience in human resources in large scale casino resort operations where she was responsible for organizational development. She has held roles including Director of Organizational Development for Wynn Resorts and Director of Development for Boyd Gaming.

Prerequisites: Graduate student standing

Instructor: Professor Susan Roe; email:  susanroe@sfsu.edu

Last Offered: Fall 2020, Spring 2018
 

HTM 831: Service Operations Management Summer R3 2021

Almost every part of our economy is either a service, or relies heavily on providing a service. Professions such as Accounting, Banking/Finance, Consulting, Information Technology and entire industries such as hospitality, tourism, retail, entertainment….are all services. Have you ever wondered how eBay was able to grow its auction services so quickly? What the real reason is behind why FedEx offers a delivery guarantee? Or what strategic focus led Google down a path that was so different than the one that Yahoo stumbled down? Service problems like those exhibited by United Airlines and Comcast are manifest from strategic choices made deep within an organization. HTM831 is the course that will help you better understand how to create and evaluate service strategies.

This course is designed to help business professionals build, diagnose, implement, measure and improve services -across industries and business functions. This is a completely case-based course that utilizes Harvard Business School cases and current events from real companies across all industries. Discussions will challenge your ability to integrate and apply what you have learned from industry and from other courses. We use real businesses to demonstrate how service strategy enabled corporate growth and decline; success and failure; and even market dominance. 

Prerequisites: Graduate student standing

Instructor: Professor Sybil S. Yang; email:  sybil@sfsu.edu  

Last Offered: R3 & EMBA Summer 2020

For MBA, Information Systems

ISYS 812: Programming and Applications for Data Analytics* (Language used- Python)

ISYS 814: Information Systems for Strategic Advantage

ISYS 850: Seminar in Business Intelligence (SAP)*

ISYS 856: Enterprise Mobile Applications (SAP)

ISYS 864: Data Management for Analytics* (Language used- SQL)

ISYS 869: Business Process Management (SAP)

Graduate students in LFCoB can receive two certificates by taking IS courses:

• Graduate Certificate in Enterprise Information Systems:  This certificate is designed to familiarize individuals from other backgrounds than IT with the application of business IT solutions and the skills to begin or enhance a career in IT. In order to receive the Graduate Certificate in Enterprise Information Systems, students need to take ISYS 814 plus ISYS 856 and ISYS 869.
• Additionally, the IS Department is a partner with SAP®, one of the largest global software firms, to offer courses leading to an SAP-sponsored Recognition Award certificate. This certificate shows that the awardee has taken advanced academic courses leading to specialized knowledge of both business and SAP software. Students who successfully complete all three of SAP integrated courses – ISYS 850, ISYS 856 and ISYS 869 – will receive an SAP Recognition Award certificate. Please visit the SAP Recognition Award Program page for further information about the SAP Recognition Award certificate.

Footnote:  * These are required courses in the Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) degree.

Graduate Certificate in International Business & Global Leadership 

The Graduate Certificate in International Business and Global Leadership prepares individuals for leadership roles in internationally operating organizations.  The certificate provides students with skills and qualifications for an internationally-oriented managerial career by focusing on three key elements of modern global organizations:  Strategies/Competencies for Operating an International Business, Cross-Cultural Negotiating, and Creativity and Innovation Skills for Global Managers. 

For in depth information, see the Graduate Certificate in International Business and Global Leadership program.

If you have questions about the program, please contact Department Chair and Professor Leyla Ozsen at lozsen@sfsu.edu.

For MBA, Management

BUS 857: Business Management, Ecology, and Environmental Leadership

This course is designed to provide a broad - but rigorous - overview of sustainable business concepts and practice. Business leaders, academic institutions, governments, and non-governmental organizations across the globe increasingly recognize the need to incorporate environmental and social justice issues into their management strategy, decisions, and practice.

This course tackles these issues by incorporating applied learning and activities designed to catalyze change beyond the classroom. The class examines drivers of environmental-business interactions, explores the impacts that our traditional business practices have created in the ecological and social realms, and presents strategies, case studies, and new models and tools for forging a different path for the future.

MGMT 857: Leadership in Action

This highly-regarded course is designed to provide business graduate students with an opportunity to blend management and leadership theories with the real-world concerns of working executives. Students will have numerous opportunities to listen to various executives speaking about their career paths, management philosophies and styles, leadership challenges, issues and learnings.

Through papers and class discussions, the students will integrate the learnings presented by guest executives with leadership concepts/thoughts discussed in the course to identify different and effective styles of management and decision-making.

MGMT 858: Innovation for Sustainability

How can business leaders position themselves to be positive change makers in their firms or entrepreneurial pursuits? In this graduate seminar course, we will address some of the most pressing modern issues on the frontier of innovation at the nexus of business, natural systems, and human well-being.

At the firm level, sustainable business refers to competitively advantageous strategies and practices that firms adopt to grow revenues, reduce costs, improve market share, and enhance brands. Viewing environmental challenges from the perspective of the business decision-maker, students in this course will explore a variety of relevant case studies, current academic and popular literature, and other innovative learning materials.

Course objectives are to:

1. Explore and comprehend some of the most “wicked” problems of our time
2. Examine examples of innovators implementing successful green solutions
3. Become practitioners of sustainable business through the application of relevant concepts, frameworks, and tools.

Instructor: Ian M. Dunham, Ph.D.
Email: iandunham@sfsu.edu

For MBA, Marketing

MKTG 787: Marketing Management

MKTG 864: Marketing Research

MKTG 875: Brand Management

MKTG 820: Digital Marketing

MKTG 886: Marketing Analytics

MKTG 885: Marketing of High-Technology Products and Services

Graduate Certificate in Marketing in the Digital Economy

MBA students who complete the three-course sequence of MKTG 820 Digital Marketing, MKTG 885 Marketing of High-Technology Products and Services, and MKTG 886 Marketing Analytics can apply for this certificate, which provides evidence of specialization on the academic transcript. To learn more about this program, visit the Graduate Certificate in Marketing in the Digital Economy webpage or contact one of the faculty advisors listed below. 

To learn more about any of the graduate Marketing courses listed above, visit the SFSU Bulletin or contact one of the faculty advisors below.

Graduate Marketing Advisors: Professors Bhat, Jang, Sinapuelas, and Tumbat