About Isenberg
Located on the UMass Amherst campus in the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, the Isenberg School of Management offers comprehensive undergraduate and graduate business degree programs. Accredited by AACSB International, the School confers the BBA, BS, MBA, Professional MBA, MS in Accounting, and Ph.D. degrees. It also awards a master’s degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management and master’s and doctoral degrees in Sport Management.
In 2004, the Isenberg School awarded bachelor’s degrees to 570 students in its six departments: Accounting & Information Systems; Finance and Operations Management; Hospitality and Tourism Management; Management; Marketing; and Sport Management. The School’s MBA programs include a two-year full-time option and fast-growing part-time and online programs for professionals. Its Ph.D. program in business is the oldest and largest among New England’s public colleges and universities.
The Isenberg School’s eighty-three full-time faculty members include endowed professorships and chairs in entrepreneurship, finance, operations management, business leadership, and quality management. The School is also headquarters for the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network and houses four research centers: the Center for International Securities and Derivatives Markets, the Strategic Information Technology Center, the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, and the Nonprofit Center.
The Isenberg School is strongly committed to the integration of business, science, and technology. It pursues those campus-wide interdisciplinary ties through the dedicated leadership of its Isenberg Professor of Quality Management and its annual Isenberg Scholars Program, which awards seven annual $10,000 scholarship programs to outstanding students in business, science, and engineering.
As part of the UMass Amherst community, the Isenberg School participates in The Five College Consortium, which allows students at any of the five participating universities to enroll in classes at the others. In addition to UMass Amherst, the participants include Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College. A free, convenient bus service transports students from campus to campus throughout the Five College system. While the Five College area offers unique academic and cultural advantages, the drive from Amherst to Boston is two hours and to New York City is 3½ hours.
The Isenberg School’s growing alumni network of 28,000 is increasingly influential beyond its traditional base in Massachusetts and New England. Isenberg School alumni are prominent in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, and virtually every major metropolitan area in the country. They also live and work throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia. This growing alumni network is the driving force behind capital campaigns that are reshaping the School and the Amherst campus. In 2002, the School opened its $16 million 45,000 sq. ft. Harold Alfond Management Center, which offers state-of-the-art learning and research technologies. The Isenberg School recently completed a major redesign-construction project in its main building that has created new quarters for its Ph.D. students and its Department of Sport Management. The School is also raising $3.6 million for its Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management’s soon-to-be-constructed Food and Beverage Teaching Facility on the 11th floor of the Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center. The new facility will include a 140-seat dining room as well as classrooms and laboratories for food and beverage teaching, preparation, and research.
The technologically sophisticated, architecturally elegant Harold Alfond Management Center offers students, faculty, and visitors an array of case and meeting rooms, teleconferencing and computing facilities, and student service facilities. The latter includes the School’s Chase Career Center, with its eight soundproof interview rooms.
The four-story building also houses five research centers, including the globally renowned Center for International Securities and Derivatives Markets. For computing, the Alfond Center has complementary wired and wireless access throughout to the Internet and the School’s large file server. The centerpiece of the $16 million 46,000 sq. foot building is its glassed-in 50-foot-high Atrium, which serves as the social nexus for the School and its 3,000 students.
Isenberg Students at Leadership Forum
The Isenberg School offers students rich opportunities for international experience and community service. In addition to participating in the campus-wide semester study abroad program (80 programs in 25 countries), students can explore the Isenberg School’s own annual one-to-two-week programs in China, Germany, Ghana, and Ireland.
The School also provides students with many opportunities for community service. Courses in marketing, operations management, and other subject areas regularly incorporate consulting projects that assign teams of students to local nonprofit organizations. Through the School’s academic departments and student organizations, students have numerous opportunities for service work. These include building houses for Habitat for Humanity, helping low income citizens and foreign students with tax returns, and imparting business and computing skills in Ghana.