BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
have challenged the world in the past.
and for the coming year the applications are still open.
Having the previous
What were the reasons behind last year’s launch of ELTE’s Doctoral School of Business and Management? Since its foundation, ELTE Faculty of Economics (previously, the Institute of Business Economics) has aimed at offering the full range of higher education, from bachelor’s to PhD studies. We are a young faculty with talented and experienced staff. The story goes back to 2017 when a cohort of 40-50 excellent tutors with outstanding academic performance, supported by the senate of ELTE, started work on building the Institute. Most of these tutors had been working together at bachelor, master’s, and doctoral levels for about 15 years, so it was evident that we had the expertise to obtain accreditation for each of the three levels. The rapid growth in the number of students we received initiated the transition from an institute for business economics to a faculty of economics and was eased by the PhD programme accreditation. In other words, the intention and experience to run a PhD programme was present, but we first had to reach maturity by running relevant postgraduate programmes for consecutive years. Business Schools are often encouraged to play a greater role in their communities. Can you give an example of a new event, activity, or initiative with this in mind? Community-building has certainly not been eased by Covid-19, and one present initiative aims at forging international relationships with similar institutions outside Budapest and Hungary to help like-minded students form groups, cohorts and alliances. For example, our students have been actively involved in case study competitions, which serve as a bridge between knowledge
patterns in our mind, we emphasise and teach the importance of planning in business. However, in the past
few years we have faced new, hardly predictable circumstances that one has to adapt to, such as the pandemic, or the war in Ukraine. No one can find a precise description in a textbook
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of what to do and how to settle into new situations, both in business and our private lives. We train our students to be creative, versatile, and open-minded, which means that, based on the relevant acquired factual and applied knowledge, they can tailor a solution to any new scenario. We also help our students understand the viewpoints of both an employer and employee, and multinational and national companies, given the macro and micro interests. Our priority is to develop students’ dynamic capabilities to be proactive or reactive, as is required. ELTE FE offers English-language degrees at undergraduate level. Do you have any figures on the proportion of international students that are normally enrolled in these programmes? How popular are they with domestic students in comparison to the bilingual and Hungarian degrees? We started with four bilingual undergraduate degrees (English and Hungarian) in 2018, and from 2019, we have also offered two of these as English-only degrees (Finance and Accounting, and International Business Economics). These are becoming increasingly popular among Hungarian students with an approximately threefold increase [in admissions] in the last year. For the coming year, we already know that around 300 more prospective students have applied, compared to last year. The ratio of international students is around 25% this year,
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