A passion for business development and performing arts led Macquarie undergraduate, Kriti Jain, to a combined degree of a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Arts.
'Best of both worlds': Kriti Jain has found many advantages to studying a double degree.
“The double degree gave me the convenient option to study my two disciplines of interest. Plus, with the combined degree option, I can finish two degrees in a shorter timeframe,” she says.
While studying for two degrees concurrently can be challenging at times, Kriti says it has given her the “best of both worlds” in pursuing both creative and theoretical disciplines. Studying for a double degree has enhanced her problem-solving and leadership skills within multi-disciplinary backgrounds.
Professor Eric Knight is Executive Dean of Macquarie Business School and says that it’s imperative for young people to keep their options open when it comes to their education, to arm them with a diverse set of skills and improve their employability.
When we design our courses, we work with industry, whether that be banks, consultancies or economics houses, to create our degrees.
“The benefit of doing the double degree in business is it gives you more choice. If you’re not sure exactly what you want to do when you come to university, doing one thing is risky because if it turns out to be the wrong thing, you’re stuck,” Knight says.
“Doing a double degree gives you a series of options that may turn out to be extremely valuable in ways you didn’t initially anticipate. And a business degree is a great extra option because it gives you the fundamentals in things that become really crucial when you end up working within organisations.
“We live in a society where understanding how the economy operates is a useful skill. Even if you don’t go on to be an economist, you read about economics when you open the newspaper.
"And understanding how budgets work is a really useful skill even if you end up working for yourself because you need to know how to deal with tax, accounting and finance. Even in medicine, as a doctor or as a physiotherapist, if you end up running your own practice, you need to understand how to run a team or build a business.”
Universal skills: Professor Eric Knight says doing a double degree in business gives student options that can be extremely valuable.
As with all degree courses at Macquarie, a business degree exposes students to a wide range of practical, hands-on experiences that help prepare them for the real world.
“When we design our courses, we work with industry, whether that be banks, consultancies or economics houses, to create our degrees”, Knight says.
“Then we often engage them in the classroom throughout the degree. We also provide internship and other PACE-related opportunities in the degree to have a very real-world experience.”
An excellent example of this is Macquarie’s Finance Decision Lab, which simulates real-life settings, allowing students to experience what it’s like to actually be on the trading floor and operating in the job they might wish to have one day. There are other behavioural decision-making labs, and Macquarie is also introducing a partnership with Forage which creates virtual data sets where students can do digital internships.
Continual exposure to new ideas
Indigo Rizzo-Lopez is in his fourth year at Macquarie, studying a Bachelor of Psychology and Bachelor of Commerce and says he enjoys combining two separate fields because it keeps him exposed to new ideas and allows him to link different concepts together.
Versatility: Indigo Rizzo-Lopez enjoys being able to link different concepts together through his double degree.
“My study pathway is also four years long which gives me more time to gain work experience and build meaningful connections in the MQU network," he says.
“I'm currently working for Apple as one of their Genius Bar technicians, for MQU as a PAL facilitator, and I do some photography and consulting for small businesses on the side.”
Macquarie is also unique in that it offers students a wide range of business programs in addition to the Bachelor of Commerce, including a Bachelor of Economics, Bachelor of Finance and Bachelor of Marketing.
“No other business school or university in Australia has that degree of choice, which is why we are the No. 1 business school in Australia,” Knight says.
“The business school has received a lot of prestigious awards that reflect the quality of the teaching staff and the faculty in the school. We’ve recently become the lead institution of a $130 million digital finance co-operative research centre, and we’re No. 1 in Australia for our Master of Applied Finance. These accolades really reflect on the teachers, the school’s accomplishments and the school’s research quality.”
