All of these opportunities are for-credit activities done within the context of a course. For extracurricular activities, see list of non-course-based activities section.
If you would like to know if one of these courses satisfies your programs requirements, please consult the eCalendar.
Note: There may be additional opportunities. Check with instructors if a course not listed here has an experiential component.
ACCT 385 Principles of Taxation
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students are given a set of taxpayer facts and tasked with completing a federal T1 tax return along with providing a memo addressed to the taxpayer discussing relevant tax planning strategies.
BUSA 410 Experiential Projects in Management
Fall 2023
The experiential learning activities of this course will be determined by the instructor and thus may differ from year to year and student to student. In Fall 2023, the course is titled Increasing Impact and Performance: Directed Experiential Learning Practicum. Students complete part-time activities outside the classroom (e.g., part-time work, volunteering) then reflect on their experiences and those of their peers.
Industry or community collaboration
BUSA 451D1 & BUSA 451D2 Creating Impact Through Research
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Core component of the Integrated Management Student Fellowship (IMSF), an experiential leadership development program at Desautels. The Fellowship spans both Fall and Winter semesters and is composed of a faculty research project, a community impact initiative project, that students complete while enrolled in BUSA 434. Faculty research projects are an opportunity to experience academic research and partnership development in a participatory manner under the guidance of an accomplished academic. The community impact initiative projects entail working in small groups to research a challenge within the framework of the UN 17 SDGs, design a solution to this challenge, and implement the solution within the boundaries of the program's assigned hours.
Industry or community collaboration
BUSA 465 Technological Entrepreneurship
Fall 2023
Students complete an individual field study where they interview a tech startup, map and evaluate their strategy, and then propose an alternative viable strategy. Students also complete a project in teams where they develop their own tech startup from scratch.
Industry or community collaboration
BUSA 497 Internship in International Business
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
The internship will consist of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks at an approved host institution. The institution should be located either overseas or have an international focus.
Industry or community collaboration
FINE 440 Honours Investment Management Research Project 1
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Students are exposed to all areas of the investment management business, including thesis development, valuation, economic analysis, sustainability, risk management, compliance, marketing, client communications, and fundraising.
FINE 450 Honours Investment Management Research Project 2
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Continuation of research work on company, industry, risk management, strategy and macro research reports, contemporary issues in finance presented by market practitioners.
FINE 456 Hedge Fund Strategies and Trading
Fall 2023
Students operate as portfolio managers and traders in hedge funds and use top rated real-life platforms (Bloomberg, Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade).
FINE 477 Fintech for Business and Finance
Winter 2024
The course includes interactive cases where students work independently in small teams to present solutions. The course also includes an individual optional project where students are given basic details of a firm and are asked to find information from public sources and prepare a report.
FINE 541N2 & FINE 541N1 Applied Investments
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students work in teams to manage real money. They receive “clients” who are real people who have been anonymized, and work in teams to create portfolios for their clients. The teams then develop an active portfolio strategy and have nine months to make trades on behalf of their “client”. The class also collaborates with Desautels Capital Management, where the students in FINE 541 act as the “clients” for DCM.
INDR 294 Introduction to Labour-Management Relations
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students are involved in a 6.5-hour simulation. Prior to the simulation the students are coached by industry leaders, they subsequently prepare a bargaining book and re-negotiate a collective agreement.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 333 Systems Analysis and Modeling
Fall 2023
Students work with a small organization to analyze the business processes and information systems of the "client" organizations. The project involves interviewing key persons, examining business documents, analyzing the current information systems, and making recommendations for new business processes and systems design.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 339 IT Consulting
Winter 2024
Students go through the various steps of consulting (scoping, contracting, collecting, and analyzing data, presenting, etc.), which they then adapt and apply to a real company or project.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 341 Developing Business Applications
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Through a series of assignments, students create real websites and applications, such as a website for a fictional business and a game application.
INSY 434 Topics in Information Systems (Design Thinking)
Winter 2024
Students work with a not-for-profit organization to help build digital solutions.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 440 E-Business
Fall 2023
Students gather real data about an active e-commerce website to create a strategic analysis and recommendation plan.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 442 Data Analysis and Visualization
Winter 2024
Students work on a project with an organization to apply data visualization and analytics techniques seen in class.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 446 Data Mining for Business Analytics
Fall 2023
Students will be given real-world datasets and will develop data-driven business projects as a part of the team and individual projects in this course.
MGPO 362 Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students assume the role of organizational consultants, providing advice about how to build a new organization. Their goal is to deliver a written evaluation of the company’s prospects as-is, where they would direct them, and how that will affect their future.
Industry or community collaboration
MGPO 364 Entrepreneurship in Practice
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students go through the steps required to launch a business in a hands-on and experiential way. The course places particular emphasis on teamwork and fieldwork and is following the human-centred, iterative Design Thinking approach. Classes will be run in a workshop mode, with experiential exercises and guest speakers complementing the hands-on work in the field.
Industry or community collaboration
MGPO 402 Dynamic Cities
Winter 2024
The course focuses on three key theories of National Competitiveness and includes a visit to a number of different countries. Students draw from material taught in other areas of Management to apply ideas to the different organizations visited.
Travel study
MGPO 430 Practicum in Not-for-Profit Consulting
Winter 2024
This course is designed around a pro bono consulting experience and is intended for students to develop real-world skills through action-based learning. It is meant to connect students to both the NGO community as well as the consulting world.
Industry or community collaboration
MGPO 434 Topics in Policy 1
Fall 2023 (002 section only)Students are tasked with combining ideas and frameworks related to technology, innovation, and organizing to offer consulting advice to a real organization. This organization, which changes each year, is faced with choices and challenges in deploying new technologies in a real-world environment.
Industry or community collaboration
MGPO 438 Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Fall 2023
Explores key concepts associated with social entrepreneurship and social innovation – the application of principles of entrepreneurship and innovation to solve social problems through social ventures, public ventures, and not-for-profit organizations. Focuses on the social economy, including how the market system can be leveraged to create social value. Students are asked to prepare an Interview Guide and conduct interviews and other observations as part of this project.
MGPO 475 Strategies for Developing Countries
Fall 2023
Real World Challenge Group Project: Students work on designing a solution to a real-world problem faced by experts in industry and in various sectors that affect developing countries. Each team will participate in one challenge, proposed by a guest expert. Students will incorporate class concepts in their innovative solutions, which they will then present to guest experts.
Industry or community collaboration
MGSC 401 Statistical Foundations of Data Analytics
Fall 2023
Students will participate in two prediction games using data analytics. In the first one, students will have to predict the rating of upcoming movies and see how their predictions benchmark with those of professional websites. In the second game, students build on their first project by developing a predictive model for one of five datasets.
MGSC 416 Data-Driven Models for Operations Analytics
Winter 2024
Students are provided with a dataset. They use appropriate descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive modelling techniques learned in class to derive relevant managerial insights. The goal is for the students to learn how to develop a data-driven decision-making strategy from data to model to decision.
Industry or community collaboration
MGSC 483 Analytics-Based Community Project
Summer 2024
This interdisciplinary experiential-learning course will partner students with an NGO to draw on that organization’s knowledge in sustainability or analytics. During these projects, students will implement AI and analytical tools to, for example, study the health of bee colonies, track microplastics in the ocean, help micro-farming initiatives, or develop compost optimization.
Industry or community collaboration
Travel study
MRKT 354 Marketing Strategy
Fall 2023
Students present a real-world example of a company or product category/industry and demonstrate how one or more marketing principles can be applied to solve a problem.
Industry or community collaboration
MRKT 355 Services Marketing
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students identify and critique the services marketing strategies of an organization of their own choosing against concepts, models and frameworks covered in the course. Students conduct primary and secondary research and analyses to understand the issues and the market. They subsequently prepare and present a services marketing plan to aid the organisation to develop and position a superior value proposition to their targeted audiences and resolve the firm's most critical issues.
Industry or community collaboration
MRKT 438 Brand Management
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Student teams must select a brand and conduct a brand audit. Each team conducts a deep dive examination of the brand to assess its underlying sources of brand equity and recommend ways to improve and leverage it.
Industry or community collaboration
MRKT 453 Advertising and Media
Fall 2023
Group project concerning a product or company identified in a client brief. Students will formulate a strategic plan, pitch their recommendations, and then develop a tactical plan.
MRKT 453 Advertising and Media
Winter 2024
Students act as a team from a marketing agency for a Montreal-based client. Students interact with the organization throughout the course to understand the target market and the consumer’s journey, and subsequently evaluate their communication efforts for appropriateness and efficacy. Students then create and present a comprehensive advertising plan based on the client brief and communications diagnostic.
Industry or community collaboration
MSUS 400 Independent Studies in Sustainability
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Students are required to do research or a field project under the academic supervision of a Desautels professor. Projects are to be arranged individually with professors. A detailed student proposal must be submitted to and approved by the Academic Supervisor, Managing for Sustainability Mentor and the Associate Dean Student Affairs, BCom Program.
MSUS 401 Sustainability Consulting
Winter 2024
Designed around a pro bono consulting engagement, this course provides real-world experience in applying management consulting theories and tools to plan and implement projects that move organizations towards sustainability.
Industry or community collaboration
MSUS 402 Systems Thinking and Sustainability
Fall 2023
Students complete Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) to analyze a real-life case and propose an intervention to improve the situation towards social and ecological sustainability, and a climate change simulation using the En-ROADS simulation model. For the final group project, students conduct an in-depth analysis of a real-world problem of their choice and design action plans to build sustainable systems.
Industry or community collaboration
MSUS 497 Internship in Sustainability
Fall 2023 & Winter 2024
Internship of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks, at an approved host institution, with a focus on sustainability.
Industry or community collaboration
ORGB 325 Negotiations and Conflict Resolution
Fall 2023
Students are required to make records of their real-world negotiations. These can be negotiations over anything: salary, work hours, starting times, cleaning responsibilities at home, where to go for dinner, what movie to watch, purchases, etc. Students must complete a preparation worksheet where they anticipate issues in the negotiation and create a strategy. Students are put in groups and pool their negotiations to create a database. This database is then analyzed to answer questions about their negotiation.
ORGB 330 People Analytics
Winter 2024
Students conduct interviews with HR representatives to understand the organizational context and a current challenge they are facing. They are then required to create a proposal for an analytics project that would address the identified challenge.
Industry or community collaboration
ORGB 434 & FINE 434 Comparing Startup Ecosystems of Israel and Canada
Summer 2024
In a course run like a start-up, students visit, observe, and interrogate organizations in both Canada and Israel involved in start-up ecosystems, work in collaboration with student partners from an Israeli university to develop and present a proposal to make improvements in one country's (either Canada or Israel) start-up ecosystem based on lessons and experiences from the other. These proposals are presented in a competitive context at the end of the course.
Travel study
Industry or community collaboration
RETL 407 Retail Management Project
Winter 2024
Students undertake a real-life “consulting” project related to retail management. This involves defining actual problems and recommending solutions to global companies. Throughout the project, students are exposed to a variety of real-life strategic and operational issues in retail management. Each project is multidisciplinary or multi-functional in nature and will have significant impact on one or more operational/competitive capabilities of the company. Students are expected to participate fully in developing and delivering core aspects of the project to the client.
Industry or community collaboration
RETL 410 Sustainable Retail and Entrepreneurship
Winter 2024
Students are taken through the stages of developing a business concept in sustainability and retail. The experiential learning component culminates in a competition where student teams will pitch their business ideas to a panel of external business experts.
Industry or community collaboration
