Why Study Business?

Selecting an academic discipline is a defining moment for most students.

By choosing business studies, you are making an important statement about who you are.

Commercial transactions have been a driving force of human relations at least since the dawn of the first city-state 6,000 years ago in ancient Sumer.

The world has become many magnitudes more integrated, of course, but the planetary future hinges now, as then, on decisions taken by traders, craftspeople, and the governments that incubate them.

Your business degree places you in a line of thinkers and doers from every country and culture whose ideas and hands-on skills shape and reshape the economic ecosystem, impacting how we live, how we understand ourselves, and how we experience our world.

In a remarkably similar way to the first person ever to make and trade a widget, modern entrepreneurs must simultaneously be manufacturer, finance strategist, marketer, personnel manager, supply chain logistician, and information systems analyst.

Taken together, these vocations put you in the position not only of creating opportunity for your family or community, but of contributing to the shared civic culture.

Perhaps you choose to study business for the quite straightforward reason that you like it, you feel called to it. Or perhaps it satisfies a practical need for a certain type of knowledge or skill, whether that need arises in you or in the community around you.

In either case, your business studies will reveal the world to you.
They will serve as your global positioning system, orienting you in the economy with an ability to see where opportunities beckon, and challenges threaten.

The English word “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomos, meaning manager or steward, typically of a household. Business studies prepare you to be a steward of the global household in which we all live, work, strive, and play.

Simply by enrolling in a business studies program, you declare a purpose to those around you. In the act of becoming a business student, you announce something about yourself or what you want to accomplish.

It may be that you are not altogether certain of the details. They may take time to clarify in your awareness, something that business school can help you sort out.

But whether you are consciously aware of it or not, by taking up your studies, you have made a statement to the world. You are out of the bleachers and in the game.

And if you are like most people with a keen interest in business, you are a life-long learner. You want to know the prevailing theories and understand how they are used. Then you want to apply them in new and creative ways.

Every businessperson is a steward of ideas, every product is an idea made tangible, and whether your work inspires an entire industry or your own wellbeing you are, in the grand tradition, an oikonomos.

So why study business? Because there is room in the ageless world of commerce for your unique aptitudes, your unique sensibilities, and the skills you might just perfect along the way.