DeCal Course Offerings

The Undergraduate Program offers DeCal courses every semester. These courses are a great opportunity for the larger UC Berkeley community to benefit from student-led courses on specialized Business Administration topics. All courses are offered exclusively as UGBA 98/198 and as Pass/No Pass. UGBA 198 credit earned will count towards the 38 units of upper-division UGBA requirement for Business Administration majors.

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Spring 2025 DeCal List

How to Avoid Burnout: Workplace Longevity for Future Leaders

Description

In today’s fast-paced, post-pandemic world, burnout has become a significant challenge across industries. This course is designed to equip future business leaders with the skills and insights to not only prevent burnout but to foster thriving, purpose-driven workplaces. Through a series of engaging topics and guest expert-led discussions ranging from founders and investors to local C-suite executives, students will explore how organizational culture, leadership, and personal well-being intersect to create a healthy, balanced work environment.

Investment and Capital Flow in Private Capital Markets

Description

While many are familiar with public market investing in stocks and bonds, investments in the private markets have grown greatly in the past decades. This course provides an immersive introduction to private market investing across Venture Capital, Growth Equity, and Private Equity. Students will explore the frameworks and techniques used to evaluate opportunities in the private sector, including Total Addressable Market (TAM) modeling, market mapping, and introductory Leveraged Buyout (LBO) modeling.

Leading with Kindness: Inspiring the Next Generation in Business

Description

This course is intended to provide a vital preparation for anyone looking to learn more about furthering kindness, mindfulness, and ethics as leaders in the corporate world. We will teach essential terminologies, the tools that will enable engagement in open dialogue, and the skills necessary to ignite change through strategies that create value for society. The course will be structured as a progression of four models based on the Haas Defining Leadership principles. Each module will explore ethics concepts in the context of these basic principles, and engage students in self reflection through 4 projects that align with each principle. We will also be hosting distinguished speakers to provide students with real world perspectives into kindness and ethics in the workplace.

Side Hustles for Skill-Building and Extra Income

Description

This course is designed to empower you with the knowledge, skills, and mindset to launch and manage successful side hustles while balancing your academic commitments. Once every week, we’ll explore various aspects of side hustles, from idea generation to execution, emphasizing practical applications, including the value of building monetizable skills and the importance of diversifying one’s income streams. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your own side hustle proposal, start your venture, and reflect on your entrepreneurial journey as a whole.

Sustainable Business and Global Public Health

Description

The purpose of our course is to teach students about the intersection of sustainable business and global public health. This will be accomplished through an analysis of case studies from different businesses as well as discussion posts, guest speakers, and assignments promoting corporate social responsibility and ESG (environment, social, and government) framework. With the environment being a major area in public health, we will study how businesses that produce smoke, oil, petrochemicals, etc. affect minority groups and economically disadvantaged communities the most. We will discuss how business can move towards more sustainable practices, specifically examining the social determinants of health and looking towards ideas to help reduce this disparity in healthcare accessibility.

From Idea to IPO

Description

Interested in learning about how to take new technologies, like Blockchain, CRISPR, and Machine Learning, to market? This course will help you explore all these technologies (and more) and also assist you in learning how the entrepreneurship ecosystem of Silicon Valley works. We’ll have guest speakers who are leaders at startups to established companies, discussions on news articles, and many fun activities to understand how to take an idea to an IPO.

Introduction to Business Recruiting

Description

The world of business is multifaceted and intricate. Navigating the different opportunities and how to access them can be challenging. This course aims to unveil the basics of business from a recruiting standpoint in order to increase access and equity in various sectors. Students will work through five different modules that each target a different aspect of Business-related careers. Through hands-on workshops, guest speakers and detailed coursework, Introduction to Business Recruiting will provide a 360-view on navigating the business world and how to succeed in it. The five modules include basics of recruiting, consulting, finance, tech, and a class-elected path that varies based on semester.

Breaking into Case Competitions

Description

This course is designed for people who want to build and improve their case competition skills. As a team, we want there to be a mix of skill-building workshops and real-life practice experiences to introduce students to the world of case competitions. The course will cover case competition structure basics, the art of storytelling, financials, topic deep-dives, and build strong presentation skills. Throughout the semester, we will also bring in Berkeley Haas Case Team alumni who can sit on a panel to discuss their experiences in international case competitions. We will leverage a mix of instruction methods; lecture, discussion, and group work.