Courses Given at SUNY New Paltz

While SUNY universities such as Stony Brook prides itself on its science department, SUNY New Paltz prides itself on not only its art department, but also its Business Department. The Business Department at New Paltz is very large and popular, and teaches many different categories of business. Ranging from Accounting, Finance, International Business, Management, Marketing, and so on, many different opportunities exist if one decides to dive into business. In my studies, I have found that marketing courses are some of the most interesting, and deal with consumer psychology more than any other branch of business.

At the moment, I am taking the core Marketing course, which deals with marketing concepts such as pricing, consumer demand, needs versus wants, brand loyalty, and the marketing mix. It is very interesting to understand how the minds of consumers work. For example, word of mouth is a great and inexpensive way to get customers to buy products, since it is the most credible source of information. Likewise, if one has loyalty to a brand, he or she would not care about the product rising a few dollars higher. He or she will continue to buy it, since he or she has been using it for so long and any alternatives seem worse in his or her mind. Even if the alternative has never been used, he or she will be more wary in purchasing it. Aside from basic marketing, more advanced courses exist in order to dive deeper into the consumer's mind.

More advanced courses such as Advertising Strategy teach us how consumers appeal to certain advertisements and make them more likely to buy the product shown, and consumer behavior teaches us about how a consumer acts towards different products and how much they are willing to spend buying them. Marketing is a very useful and rewarding major, since it will allow many job paths to open up. I am mainly interested in marketing research, which is about gathering information on different age groups, business competition, consumer interests, and so on, in order to create surveys and give product samples to certain people in order to make them buy my company's products. In conclusion, business is a very rewarding major, and when considering majors, one should give business a try.