No one is surprised when large numbers of Chicago students earn advanced degrees in law, education, medicine or other standards. But observers who look a little deeper might discover a student who writes a doctoral thesis and has it published as a book titled “Guilty Pleasures: Female Camp from Mae West to Madonna,” or a program that teaches complex law to people who don’t want to be lawyers.
Skimming down the list of graduate courses offered in Chicago universities and college catalogs brings to light a number of new or unexpected programs.
“Corporations whose employees aren’t performing as well as expected usually turn to job training to fix what’s wrong,” said professor Mary Lanigan, director of the graduate program called Human Performance and Training at Governors State University in University Park. “That solution is fine–unless the employees’ problem isn’t lack of skills.”
Many graduate schools offer programs on employee training; only two schools in the country prepare students to look into other possible causes of low performance. One of those schools is Governors State.
Lanigan described the approach she recommends. “When we come in, our first step is to find out what’s interfering with the employee’s productivity. Sometimes it’s an environmental problem like the equipment being set up wrong; sometimes the employees don’t have enough incentive to perform, or maybe what’s needed is a change in management strategies.”
The employment rate for graduates of this master’s degree program is 100 percent. Mary Jo Burfeind, who completed the Governors State program in December, was a trainer at Allstate Insurance Co., Wheeling, when she enrolled and is now the company’s curriculum manager. “I was attracted to the program because it had a practical approach,” she said. “Everything I learned in those courses I could put to immediate use on my job.”
Chicago Studies, new in fall 1999, is a two-year master’s degree program at Loyola University Chicago. During the first three semesters, students take courses on Chicago history, ethnicity in Chicago, urban economics and the arts in Chicago.
Field trips give students a close-up look at what they are studying. Among them this year was a bus tour of the Bronzeville area with a guide in his 80s. “He grew up in Bronzeville and had personal recollections of most of the places where Chicago’s black community took root,” said Maureen Hellwig, graduate program director of Chicago Studies.
“The people in this first class make up a wonderful collection of Chicago occupations,” Hellwig said. “We have an alderman who’s a woman, a Chicago police officer, a public school teacher, a Carmelite priest, a woman who works at the Chicago Office of Tourism and a man who’s writing a book on Latino politics in Chicago. They bring a lot of experience and knowledge to the table, so our discussions are lively and rich.”
Each year the university names will name a student to be a program fellow. The fellows will receive a scholarship and, in exchange, will co-teach one of the core courses. Kathleen Hogan is the current fellow. Hogan is the co-owner and co-founder of the Heartland Cafe on Chicago’s North Side, and a community activist. For the last 20 years, she taught urban studies at classes offered by the Chicago-based Associated Colleges of the Midwest.
– Doctoral candidates at the University of Chicago were able to get a degree in film history through the English department for more than 10 years. Two years ago, however, the university formed the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies staffed by faculty members who are known worldwide in cinema circles. Very early films are one of their specialties.
“This is a program in which everything you know about literature, political theory, music and art comes into play,” said Tom Gunning, a professor in the art history department and acting chair of the cinema committee. “Film is an art form that goes through the same movements, like surrealism, that the other arts do and helps us to understand these movements from a different angle.”
Doctoral candidates write dissertations that can be quite colorful. It was graduate Pamela Robertson Wojcik, now teaching film studies at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind., who wrote the dissertation on feminine camp that became a book published by Duke University Press. “I wanted to study film because it’s so fresh,” Wojcik said. “It’s hard to say something original about classical literature.”
The committee keeps enrollment small to be sure graduates find job opportunities.
– The first of Loyola University’s three Child and Family Law programs began in 1993. “The idea was that while medicine had pediatricians, law didn’t have specialists to represent child clients,” said Diane Geraghty, a law professor and director of the programs.
The original program is a series of courses added to the regular law curriculum that give students the information and skills they will need to represent child clients effectively. Graduating students receive a juris doctor degree.
The second program grants a master’s degree to lawyers who are already practicing and want to be better child advocates.
The third offering is for professionals who don’t intend to be lawyers and instead earn a master of jurisprudence. “They are pediatricians, nurses, teachers and social workers who feel that to help children effectively they must understand the legal system,” Geraghty said.
A student in the third program, Juanona Brewster, and three other women who are in classes with her have made a postgraduation plan. “The four of us are all interested in family mediation, and we’re going to set up a group practice,” Brewster said.
– “The financial program at IIT is the first in the nation to focus entirely on modern capital markets,” said Pamela Reardon, executive director, Center for Law and Financial Markets at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Financial industry leaders started the program in 1992 and many are on the advisory committee.
“Our students learn real-world skills in seven key areas: compliance, energy markets, financial engineering and programming, investments, market infrastructure development, risk control and trading.
“Throughout the program we prepare students for today’s financial marketplace, which is evolving at an astounding pace.”
Student Jeff Peterson had worked as an engineer for 22 years and had earned a master’s degree in business administration in that time. “When I began thinking about a change, co-workers and friends recommended the IIT course, and I could see that it had a more sophisticated view of financial markets than my MBA program,” he said. As many students in the program do, Peterson has landed a job before graduating and is now director of operations at International Equity Trading Partners in Chicago.
Karen Peterson, an eldercare consultant, is enthusiastic about her work and equally enthusiastic about the master’s of gerontology program she’s taking at Roosevelt University’s Schaumburg campus. “My clients are older adults and their families; I let them know what their best options are so they can make informed decisions about things like housing and support systems,” she said. “The courses I’m taking–stress management, the psychology of aging and public policy courses that include Social Security and Medicare entitlement–are helping me help my clients cut through the complexities they face.”
Daniel Krause, associate professor of sociology and director of the gerontology program, said: “Our students take five core courses in gerontology to help them understand what it means to grow older, and they also take career-oriented electives.
“For instance, one of our graduates chose business electives, and when she completed her degree competed successfully against several MBAs for a job in a particular bank. It seems the bank was looking for someone to work with older depositors to set up investment programs, and she filled the bill.”
– “Just as physics changed our lives in the 20th Century, biotechnology will change our lives in the 21st Century,” said Alicia Loffler, director of the Center for Biotechnology at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Evanston.
Biotechnology links industry and the latest biological research in hopes of producing useful and marketable products. Much of the work focuses on genes, and most of the products have medical uses.
Students in the center’s master of science program get their instruction from faculty members in the medical school and from the biology, chemistry and engineering departments. Experts from the biotechnology industry also come to the center to teach.
Student Walter Grubb recently completed a three-month internship at a small biotechnology company in San Diego. “The company is conducting clinical trials on five different chemicals for treating neurological diseases,” he said. “My assignment was to help develop deals with pharmaceutical companies that can help support the research and get the products on the market as soon as possible.”
The company has hired Grubb to continue the work he did as an intern.
The center has almost finished designing a new two-year MBA in biotechnology that will start in September 2001.
“The most popular subject in the Kellogg School this year is e-commerce,” Loffler said. “We expect biotechnology will be equally popular.”
