CAMPUS & CAREERS GUIDE : Course Provides the Prerequisite--a Laptop

Enrolling in one of the executive MBA programs at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management gets you a list of required courses and a classroom as big as all cyberspace.

Recognizing that students in the school’s two part-time MBA programs are busy professionals scattered throughout California, the school decided four years ago to link them via a local network and to require them each to have a laptop computer.

Other campuses have issued similar requirements in recent years. But what pushes Anderson to the head of the pack is that it actually provides the computers--Macintosh PowerBook 520c models, each loaded with the same array of software.

That decision, administrators said, has paid off handsomely, allowing students to instantaneously exchange data, documents and discussion with professors and fellow students.

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Ken Little, a financial analyst for Arco, graduated this spring with the first group of students in the Fully Employed business administration master’s program to be outfitted with the laptop computers. “They were just indispensable for doing group projects and exchanging ideas in a quick, efficient manner,” he said.

Little lives in Santa Monica, close to UCLA’s Westwood campus. But he was part of a working group whose 12 members lived throughout Southern California. Getting together for project meetings would have been a hassle, if not impossible. Instead, he said, “every few days we’d exchange a bunch of files to keep information flowing and keep everyone current on the research.”

When students do attend classes on campus, they can plug their computers into the network outlets installed at every seat in Anderson’s new state-of-the-art instructional complex. “With the move to the new building we’ve created a physical infrastructure unparalleled anywhere in the world,” said Jason Frand, director of computing and information services.