Starting Fall 2024, all incoming BCom students will be required to complete a minimum 3-credit experiential learning course to graduate with a BCom degree. Students may fulfill this requirement at any point during the BCom program. For more information, including specific program requirements, please consult the BCom Degree Requirements in the eCalendar.
Courses that fulfil the Experiential Learning Degree Requirement are indicated in the course repository below.
Jump to Other EL Opportunities for a list of courses that do not currently fulfil the Degree Requirement, but that still include experiential learning components.
Desautels Experiential Course Repository:
The following courses may be taken to fulfill the Experiential Learning Degree Requirement for incoming BCom students, starting in Fall 2024.
BUSA 451D1 & BUSA 451D2 Creating Impact Through Research
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Core component of the Integrated Management Student Fellowship (IMSF), an experiential leadership development program at Desautels. The Fellowship spans both Fall and Winter semesters and is composed of a faculty research project, a community impact initiative project, that students complete while enrolled in BUSA 434. Faculty research projects are an opportunity to experience academic research and partnership development in a participatory manner under the guidance of an accomplished academic. The community impact initiative projects entail working in small groups to research a challenge within the framework of the UN 17 SDGs, design a solution to this challenge, and implement the solution within the boundaries of the program's assigned hours.
BUSA 497 Internship in International Business
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
The internship will consist of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks at an approved host institution. The institution should be located either overseas or have an international focus.
FINE 440 Honours Investment Management Research Project 1
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Students are exposed to all areas of the investment management business, including thesis development, valuation, economic analysis, sustainability, risk management, compliance, marketing, client communications, and fundraising.
FINE 450 Honours Investment Management Research Project 2
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Restricted to students in the Honors Investment Management program. Students work as equity analysts at Desautels Capital Management. Continuation of research work on company, industry, risk management, strategy and macro research reports, contemporary issues in finance presented by market practitioners.
FINE 464 Pension Funds and Retirement Systems
Winter 2025
Students spend the semester working towards writing a case that will be used in a case competition the following Fall. Students spend time researching topics around pension funds, presenting ideas, and receiving feedback from peers as the class decides what to focus the case on. Students then work in groups doing research and writing parts of the case.
FINE 541N2 & FINE 541N1 Applied Investments
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students work in teams to manage real money. They receive “clients” who are real people who have been anonymized, and work in teams to create portfolios for their clients. The teams then develop an active portfolio strategy and have nine months to make trades on behalf of their “client”. The class also collaborates with Desautels Capital Management, where the students in FINE 541 act as the “clients” for DCM.
INDR 294 Introduction to Labour-Management Relations
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students are involved in a 6.5-hour simulation. Prior to the simulation the students are coached by industry leaders, they subsequently prepare a bargaining book and re-negotiate a collective agreement.
INSY 333 Systems Analysis and Modeling
Fall 2024
Students work with a small organization to analyze the business processes and information systems of the "client" organizations. The project involves interviewing key persons, examining business documents, analyzing the current information systems, and making recommendations for new business processes and systems design.
INSY 339 IT Consulting
Winter 2025
Students go through the various steps of consulting (scoping, contracting, collecting, and analyzing data, presenting, etc.), which they then adapt and apply to a real company or project.
MGPO 364 Entrepreneurship in Practice
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students go through the steps required to launch a business in a hands-on and experiential way. The course places particular emphasis on teamwork and fieldwork and is following the human-centred, iterative Design Thinking approach.
MGPO 402 Dynamic Cities
Winter 2025
The course focuses on three key theories of National Competitiveness and includes a visit to a number of different countries. Students draw from material taught in other areas of Management to apply ideas to the different organizations visited.
Travel study
MGPO 430 Practicum in Not-for-Profit Consulting
Winter 2025
This course is designed around a pro bono consulting experience and is intended for students to develop real-world skills through action-based learning. It is meant to connect students to both the NGO community as well as the consulting world.
MGPO 434 Topics in Policy 1
Fall 2024
Students are tasked with combining ideas and frameworks related to technology, innovation, and organizing to offer consulting advice to a real organization. This organization, which changes each year, is faced with choices and challenges in deploying new technologies in a real-world environment.
MGPO 475 Strategies for Developing Countries
Fall 2024
Real World Challenge Group Project: Students work on designing a solution to a real-world problem faced by experts in industry and in various sectors that affect developing countries. Each team will participate in one challenge, proposed by a guest expert. Students will incorporate class concepts in their innovative solutions, which they will then present to guest experts.
MGSC 417 Project and Risk Management
Winter 2025
Students will be assigned a project or an element of a project (e.g., stakeholder management) originating in a real organization. Students will address this project with the project operations and risk management tools learned in class. Students will have the opportunity to review their progress with the organization's representatives at the mid-point of term.
MGSC 483 Analytics-Based Community Project
Summer 2024
This interdisciplinary experiential-learning course will partner students with an NGO to draw on that organization’s knowledge in sustainability or analytics. During these projects, students will implement AI and analytical tools to, for example, study the health of bee colonies, track microplastics in the ocean, help micro-farming initiatives, or develop compost optimization.
Travel study
MRKT 355 Services Marketing
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students identify and critique the services marketing strategies of an organization of their own choosing against concepts, models and frameworks covered in the course. Students conduct primary and secondary research and analyses to understand the issues and the market. They subsequently prepare and present a services marketing plan to aid the organisation to develop and position a superior value proposition to their targeted audiences and resolve the firm's most critical issues.
MRKT 438 Brand Management
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Student teams must select a brand and conduct a brand audit. Each team conducts a deep dive examination of the brand to assess its underlying sources of brand equity and recommend ways to improve and leverage it.
MSUS 400 Independent Studies in Sustainability
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students are required to do research or a field project under the academic supervision of a Desautels professor. Projects are to be arranged individually with professors. A detailed student proposal must be submitted to and approved by the Academic Supervisor, Managing for Sustainability Mentor and the Associate Dean Student Affairs, BCom Program.
MSUS 401 Sustainability Consulting
Winter 2025
Designed around a pro bono consulting engagement, this course provides real-world experience in applying management consulting theories and tools to plan and implement projects that move organizations towards sustainability.
MSUS 497 Internship in Sustainability
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Internship of a minimum of 150 hours of work over a period of 8 to 12 weeks, at an approved host institution, with a focus on sustainability.
ORGB 380/BUSA 356 Brazil Study Abroad Program
Summer 2025This program includes two courses that relate international business concepts directly to the Brazilian context and to the Latin American business environment more generally. The program includes regular lectures, guest speakers, and visits to business in Montreal, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.
Travel study
ORGB 423 Human Resources Management
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students will conduct interviews and research to thoroughly analyze an HR function (e.g., HRM planning, recruitment and selection) in a real organization. Students will examine their practices and use the theories covered in class to make recommendations for improvement.
ORGB 434 & FINE 434 Comparing Startup Ecosystems of Israel and Canada
Summer 2024
In a course run like a start-up, students visit, observe, and interrogate organizations in both Canada and Israel involved in start-up ecosystems, work in collaboration with student partners from an Israeli university to develop and present a proposal to make improvements in one country's (either Canada or Israel) start-up ecosystem based on lessons and experiences from the other. These proposals are presented in a competitive context at the end of the course.
Travel study
RETL 407 Retail Management Project
Winter 2025
Students undertake a real-life “consulting” project related to retail management. This involves defining actual problems and recommending solutions to global companies. Throughout the project, students are exposed to a variety of real-life strategic and operational issues in retail management. Each project is multidisciplinary or multi-functional in nature and will have significant impact on one or more operational/competitive capabilities of the company. Students are expected to participate fully in developing and delivering core aspects of the project to the client.
RETL 410 Sustainable Retail and Entrepreneurship
Fall 2024
Students are taken through the stages of developing a business concept in sustainability and retail. The experiential learning component culminates in a competition where student teams will pitch their business ideas to a panel of external business experts.
Other EL Opportunities
The following courses DO NOT fulfil the Experiential Learning Degree Requirement at present; however, they still include an EL component and may be of interest to students seeking hands-on experiences.
For activities that take place outside of courses, see our Extracurricular section.
ACCT 385 Principles of Taxation
Fall 2024
Students are given a set of taxpayer facts and tasked with completing a federal T1 tax return along with providing a memo addressed to the taxpayer discussing relevant tax planning strategies.
FINE 456 Hedge Fund Strategies and Trading
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students operate as portfolio managers and traders in hedge funds and use top rated real-life platforms (Bloomberg, Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade).
FINE 477 Fintech for Business and Finance
Winter 2025
The course includes interactive cases where students work independently in small teams to present solutions. The course also includes an individual optional project where students are given basic details of a firm and are asked to find information from public sources and prepare a report.
INSY 341 Developing Business Applications
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Through a series of assignments, students create real websites and applications, such as a website for a fictional business and a game application.
INSY 434 Topics in Information Systems (Design Thinking)
Winter 2025
Students work with a not-for-profit organization to help build digital solutions.
Industry or community collaboration
INSY 440 E-Business
Fall 2024
Students gather real data about an active e-commerce website to create a strategic analysis and recommendation plan.
Industry or community collaboration
MGPO 362 Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship
Fall 2024 & Winter 2025
Students assume the role of organizational consultants, providing advice about how to build a new organization. Their goal is to deliver a written evaluation of the company’s prospects as-is, where they would direct them, and how that will affect their future.
Industry or community collaboration
MGSC 401 Statistical Foundations of Data Analytics
Fall 2024
Students will participate in two prediction games using data analytics. In the first one, students will have to predict the rating of upcoming movies and see how their predictions benchmark with those of professional websites. In the second game, students build on their first project by developing a predictive model for one of five datasets.
MGSC 416 Data-Driven Models for Operations Analytics
Winter 2025
Students are provided with a dataset. They use appropriate descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive modelling techniques learned in class to derive relevant managerial insights. The goal is for the students to learn how to develop a data-driven decision-making strategy from data to model to decision.
Industry or community collaboration
MRKT 453 Advertising and Media
Fall 2024
Students act as a team from a marketing agency for a Montreal-based client. Students interact with the organization throughout the course to understand the target market and the consumer’s journey, and subsequently evaluate their communication efforts for appropriateness and efficacy. Students then create and present a comprehensive advertising plan based on the client brief and communications diagnostic.
Industry or community collaboration
