Sabine Hotho - Strengths and Benefits

When we talk about postgraduate courses and study at universities, we always tend to think that it is all about sealing abstract knowledge and academic research, which constitutes the body of knowledge we pass on to our students. And it is clearly the case that study in a postgraduate program is about academic study, is about doing research. It is about writing a dissertation. It is about learning the knowledge of sealing the contents of your chosen subject area.

But, our programs in business school here, at the Dundee Business School, are a little bit different perhaps. We do not just place emphasis on academic study, on sealing, on concepts. If you study finance, then of course, you have to have the tools, the concept of finance and study strategic management. If you have the tools, the concepts, you know what is the latest, or are the latest developments in the discipline.

But you also need to know, how does that work in practice, how does that play out in practice? And what's actually happening in practice that might challenge our academic understanding of what's happening. So, studying development skills and knowledge in the business school, really means quite a lot of things. It means making sure that our students understand the key concepts, [inaudible 00:01:19] knowledge bases of the disciplines.

But in addition to that, we need to develop their ability to make decisions in complex circumstances, their ability to recognize complex problems, develop creative solutions for such problems. We need to evaluate outcome of doing that. We need to develop our student's competence in being innovative. They need to be able to do divergent thinking, as much as convergent thinking. They need to develop leadership skills. They need to develop the whole range of what we call, the probability skills, that really encompasses the range of skills adjusted toward outside the academic study.