Sean Marks: Business Capstone and the Importance of Strategy
As this school year slowly crawls closer to its end, I’ve been able to take more upper-division business class that encompasses my entire business education from the past 4 years. Specifically, I wanted to touch on my business capstone class. The class is quite open-ended and broad as it deals with industry analysis and the competitive advantages of firms within their industry. Up to this point in college, I’ve been able to take classes from every single major, but I’ve yet to take all of this information that I’ve accumulated and put it all together. With my capstone class, we’ve been able to analyze a variety of multinational corporations on all aspects of the value chain including sourcing and procurement, distribution and marketing, and after-sale service. We often analyze all aspects of a company rather than simply focusing on financials or marketing efforts which is unlike nearly every other class that I’ve taken thus far. It’s refreshing to see how I can put to use the knowledge that I’ve gained from all the classes I’ve taken. On top of this, the capstone is extremely discussion-based with far less lecturing than a typical business class. This allows for much more interaction among my peers, and this has been quite nice especially given the virtual environments we’ve been used to. However, after many consecutive quarters of online class, Santa Clara professors have done an amazing job at making virtual/hybrid classes much more seamless as time has gone on.