INTERNATIONAL BSC PROGRAMME
IN ECONOMICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Modern business enterprises need employees with a combination of skills and qualifications from the fields of business economics and modern information technology, as the global competitiveness and organisational fitness of a modern business organisation depend entirely on the organisation’s ability to use IT successfully. In the knowledge society of today, it is of crucial importance to ensure that information is communicated to employees, customers and sub-contractors in the right way.

In response to that need, the HHC Business School Centre - a university college located in Slagelse, about an hour west of Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen - launched its own international BSc programme in Economics and Information Technology. The programme is a 3½ year, English-taught, programme which combines the disciplines of the more traditional business administration programmes with a number of courses concerned with the analytic, business-related and strategic significance of IT, in addition to such familiar disciplines as programming and systems maintenance. The programme is very much project and practice oriented and includes six months of internship in a business organisation.

The BSc Programme in Economics and Information Technology is essentially a theoretical and practical degree programme aimed at providing students with a broad-based perspective on key issues and problems facing private and public organisations today, especially in terms of the use of information technology. To this end, the programme is composed of a number of modules designed to provide the students with theoretical as well as practical qualifications for a career in business - qualifications that will enable them to identify, define and provide solutions to the specific problems facing an organisation or company.

The modules of the programme fall into four main categories: General economics, business economics, computer science, and ancillary courses (such as methodology) - each module consisting of a number of individual courses. The computer science module embraces maintenance, renewal and development of computer systems for commercial use in addition to a number of elective courses allowing the students the possibility of delving more deeply into a certain more specialised aspects of IT.

A special feature of the programme is the close link to the world of business. To ensure practical and successful use of the academic and theoretical qualifications acquired during the programme, part of the sixth semester is spent at a company or other type of business organisation where the students are required to work on assignments defined by the companies or organisations in collaboration with HHC Business School Centre. During this period of internship, the students keep in close contact to their supervisors at the school. As a conclusion to the internship, the students are required to prepare a project report, subsequently to be defended at an oral exam; and the school provides the students with feedback on their practical performance record and the quality of their work for the company etc.

Finally, in the seventh and last semester of the programme, the students prepare a final bachelor project based on a cross-curricular problem involving both computer science/IT in a broad sense and business economics.

Since IT is not only part of the academic programme but also the tool for communicating with the school and for handing in of assignments etc., all international students are issued with laptop computers free of charge.

Now in its third year, the programme (originally the offspring of an agreement with a Chinese college) manages to attract students from a large number of countries around the world (18 different nationalities at the last count), all contributing to an international atmosphere at HHC Business School Centre, which is a comparatively small university college with some 250 full-time BSc students (in business economics) and 150 full-time BA students (specialising in modern languages and communication) in addition to a large number of part-time students.

HHC Business School Centre itself is located in modern buildings, fully equipped with up-to-date information technology and all manner of facilities, providing an excellent environment for academic study, in- and outside of class, and for socialising after hours.

Slagelse is an education centre accommodating a number of other educational institutions besides HHC Business School Centre. The town itself is not large (35.000 inhabitants) but an attractive and lively place - well suited to young people, with good shopping, cultural activities and all imaginable sports and leisure facilities.