Full-Time MBA Professional Development

The UF MBA program offers a range of activities that develop key professional attributes recruiters seek in job candidates. These activities encourage successful leadership and professional development.

To fully utilize all the resources offered by UF MBA and maximize your educational experience, you are encouraged to engage in a variety of activities.

Career Accelerator

The UF MBA Career Accelerator Program helps current students capitalize on development activities that add value to the MBA experience. The program is customizable and includes a number of experiential learning opportunities, including innovative academic coursework and co-curricular experiences.

In order to facilitate participation in activities that are most valuable to you, the UF MBA Program has established the Career Accelerator Program. This program provides all full time students with up to $500 of discretionary funds to participate in activities such as case competitions, company visits, additional career fairs, assessments, career development programs, practical industry skills training, global immersion trips, “A Day in the Life” corporate residency program, and other activities that add value to their overall experience.

Experiential Learning

The mission of Gator MBA Gear is to offer Full-Time UF MBA students the opportunity to manage a real e-commerce business in an experiential learning environment outside of the classroom. Students design products, craft marketing plans, purchase inventory, write financial plans and create a superior customer experience for UF MBA Alumni and current students.

Tactical Skills Seminars provide students in-depth training using industry tools that give them an immediate competitive advantage. Seminar topics include Excel, Argus, Bloomberg, SPSS, Cognos, MS Project, ACL, and other technical skills necessary to flourish in the workplace.

The MBA Association (MBAA) serves as the umbrella organization that organizes programming for the MBA student body. Internal events such as socials and intramurals, and external events such as our philanthropic 5K and community service activities with Habitat for Humanity are offered to create cohesion among all MBA students. Clubs in areas such as Finance, Marketing and Big Data are organized under the MBAA, and provide you with many opportunities to strengthen your leadership skills and grow professionally.

UF MBA offers a variety of opportunities for you to enhance your skills as a member or leader in one of our many student organizations.

A select group of second-year MBA students serve as supplemental interview coaches to incoming one- and two-year students. The goal of the program is to provide UF MBAs with additional realistic interview simulations, beyond the existing sessions with our Business Career Services advisors, prior to the fall recruiting season. These student coaches have all successfully navigated the recruiting process for companies like ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Anheuser Busch InBev and Procter & Gamble, securing highly competitive MBA summer internships. They have been trained by the Business Career Services advisory team to conduct mock interviews and will deliver specific, actionable feedback that will improve your performance and confidence during actual interviews.

Integrated Technology Venture is a year-long, for-credit interdisciplinary collaboration meant to emulate the earliest stages of a technology startup company. Students and faculty from business, engineering and law team up under the guidance of a volunteer CEO to work intensively with a technology invented by a University of Florida researcher. While the students gain valuable real-world experience, the technology is pushed towards commercialization. Deliverables of the program include an institutional-grade business plan and a working prototype.

GatorNest is a hands-on learning experience for those who want to make a difference with a real company. Conducted through the College’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center, GatorNest provides the best way to learn as students take on the goals of a real enterprise. As participants in GatorNest, students are able to engage their analytical and creative skills and apply them in unscripted situations, ultimately enhancing the learning process while creating value-add solutions to problems facing early-stage ventures.

Global Immersion Experiences offer a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the world of international business, as well as condensing the majority of course work for an entire two-credit course into a one-week class.

Students participate in these workshops to help improve networking and communication skills.

Networking

  • Networking Nights: Opportunities to meet and make meaningful connections with UF Warrington alumni as well as current UF MBA students and staff. (Not to mention tasty food, drinks and lots of fun.)
  • City Treks/Company & City Immersions: Select city trips include company visits and networking events with local recruiters and UF Warrington alumni.
  • National Black MBA Association: The NBMBAA professional development partner of UF MBA. Become a member of NBMBAA today.

Case Competitions

Where can you sharpen your critical thinking and analytical skills while networking with top executives? Case competitions provide opportunities for UF MBA students to team with classmates and put your skills and talents up against MBAs across the nation. Case competitions are vehicles for you to drive your personal brand by displaying your leadership, knowledge, creativity and expertise to recruiters from top companies.

Not only do we encourage students to participate in case competitions, we support you financially when you do. Students may use Career Accelerator Fund monies to register and travel to case competitions. For those competitions where we select you to represent the University of Florida, the UF MBA program will pay all expenses.

Speaker Series

The Hough Graduate School of Business—home of UF MBA—sponsors focused Speaker Series that connect students to issues occurring in daily business. Students come into contact with a diverse and high-quality array of professionals who are on the leading edge in their respective fields.