OXFORD,
Miss. – For a handful of students enrolled in the Professional Master
of Business Administration program at the University of Mississippi,
the winter break included a five-day trip to Panama that served as the
site for the last step in their final PMBA class.
Tony Ammeter,
associate dean of UM’s School of Business Admistration, traveled with
the four students to study the expansion of the Panama Canal as part of
the students’ online project analysis class, which he teaches. The
expansion project calls for a series of new locks and approach channels
to facilitate a growing number of ships – a major project that racks up
a tab of more than $5 billion. The project is expected to be finished
in 2014.
The trip enabled the students to complete different
parts of their final project as they considered details of the canal’s
expansion to determine if they thought the project was properly planned.
“It’s
a very interesting project, and it is very important for North America”
Ammeter said. “Whenever you can ship something by road, air or ship,
the ship is always cheapest and uses less energy. (The canal) is going
to be 50 percent deeper and 50 percent wider.”
The trip was a bit of an experiment for the online program, but both Ammeter and his students felt it was a nice capstone to the program and could be a good change for the current curriculum.
The PMBA offers a flexible online cohort of coursework. Students take one to three classes a semester and usually complete the program in from two to six years. The emphasis is on setting a pace that works for the individual student.
For student Tami Busby, who runs her own human resources consulting firm in Tupelo, the greatest value of the trip came from actually seeing how the canal worked.
“You can see and study the canal in a book, but you don’t really realize how magnificent it is until you are there,” Busby said. “To see the size of the vessels going in and out and to watch the water level go up and down is awe-inspiring. You realize it is going to take hours instead of days for the ship to reach the other side and you realize how big a deal that is.”
While the classroom may have been taken out of the online course offering, there is a classroom mentality among the students. It is not required, but students who enroll in the cohort usually meet a couple times a semester and frequently communicate via phone and e-mail on projects – though the students may be in different states or countries at the time.
In my two years in the program, I never had any trouble getting in touch with my professors,” Busby said. “I hadn’t taken statistics in 10 years, but I called my professor, drove to Oxford, and we sat down and worked on it until I was caught up. I wouldn’t have been able to finish had it not been for that.”
To Ammeter, who has taught both online and on-campus MBA seminars, the classroom variable does not take away from the program; the endgame is the same as the full-time program.
“The PMBA is a lot more self-driven, of course,” he said. “But, I think there may be something to learn from the online classes – in industry this is how things happen. It’s not like you can always spend lots of time with one group and then more time with another; lots of things happen at once today.”
For more information about the PMBA, go to http://www.olemissbusiness.com/mba/pmba/ .