Exchange Student Resources - Zicklin School of Business

If you are a student at one of Baruch’s partner universities and wish to study at Baruch as a visiting exchange student, you must apply through and be nominated by your home institution. Only students who are currently attending institutions that have exchange agreements with Baruch College are eligible to enroll at Baruch College as visiting exchange students. As an exchange student, you may take courses from across Baruch’s curriculum, work or intern up to 20 hours per week, and utilize all the services that are available to Baruch students.

Learn more about what awaits you at Baruch College:

Academic Culture in the United States and at Baruch College

Preparing to Arrive

Adapting to an unfamiliar academic culture can sometimes be difficult. We at the Weissman Center for International Business and the Baruch College Study Abroad Office hope to make your transition to Baruch as painless as possible. As exchange students you are in general entitled to the same “rights and privileges” as normal degree candidates, but that means that you are also subject to the academic and administrative regulations and policies in place at Baruch for all students. In addition, since you will only be attending Baruch College for a semester or academic year, there are some specific academic procedures that you are required to follow.

You can consult the Baruch College Bulletins for the detailed explanations of all academic policies governing Baruch students and information about student life at the College.

Exchange Student Application

Academics

General Information about completing the Application

The Baruch College Exchange Student Application is due no later than April 1 for the fall semester, and October 1 for the spring semester. The Application can be completed and submitted electronically.
The first three pages of the Application request biographical and academic information, and provide a place for you to compose your Statement of Purpose for studying at Baruch. Please make sure that you provide all information requested in this section. If you have a question about what is being asked for, please contact the Study Abroad Office (study.abroadxc@baruch.cuny.edu).
We strongly recommend that you read these detailed instructions before you begin working on this section of your application, because doing so will help you avoid any errors that might delay work on your course permissions and registration.

Application Requirements

Student Status

Baruch College accepts exchange students at both the undergraduate and graduate (post-graduate) levels. At Baruch, an undergraduate is one who (normally) studies for four years after high school and then graduates with a “Bachelor’s” degree of Arts, Science, Business Administration, etc. A graduate student at U.S. universities is one who has already completed at least a bachelor’s degree, and may be studying for an M.B.A. (or other Master’s degree) or a Ph.D.

The degree programs at your home institution may not correspond exactly to those at Baruch. It is important for you to know whether you should register as an undergraduate or graduate exchange student while attending Baruch.

Undergraduate Students

If you have not yet completed a first degree at your home university, you should in most cases select “undergraduate” as your student status on your application. If you have already completed your first degree, or are enrolled in the equivalent of a Master’s program, you should normally select “graduate” as your student status. If you are unsure which category to choose, please note this when you submit your application. We will examine your academic record and advise you on which status you should choose.

Ordinarily, students who select “undergraduate” as their student status will only qualify to enroll in undergraduate courses, designated, with some minor exceptions, by the numbers 1001 through 4999. Generally speaking, the progressive numbering of undergraduate courses by thousands reflects an increase in the difficulty of the subject matter covered. For example, the course ECO 1001 is an introductory course in Micro-Economics, ECO 3100 is Intermediate Micro-Economics, and ECO 4100 is Advanced Micro-Economics.

Graduate Students

Anyone designated as a “post-graduate” student at her/his home university (i.e., anyone who has obtained a first degree) will normally study at Baruch as a graduate student, and will also normally wish to enroll in graduate-level courses at Baruch, which are designated by a course number of 9000+. For example, all the following courses are examples of graduate-level business courses: ECO 9723, FIN 9983, and MKT 9750. If you are in this category, you should select “graduate” as your student status on your application.

It is sometimes possible for graduate exchange students to enroll in an undergraduate course, especially in an area outside their field (for example, if a graduate business student wanted to take an introductory course in U.S. politics or government). However, the Baruch Dean’s Offices will seldom if ever grant permission for an undergraduate exchange student to enroll in a graduate course. If you are a graduate student but may wish to take one or more undergraduate courses, please indicate “graduate student” as your student status and provide the Director of Study Abroad with the permission of your home institution to enroll in undergraduate courses.

Selecting Courses at Baruch

Your Application contains a Course Permission Form (see pp. 4-5). You will use this form to enter information about the courses and sections of courses you wish to take while studying at Baruch.

Course Registration

Courses and Classes

When used in an academic context at Baruch College, course is the term used to refer to a specific lecture or seminar. Courses at Baruch College are designated by a prefix that indicates the department offering the course (for example, MKT for Marketing, FIN for Finance, ENG for English, POL for Political Science, etc.), followed by a four-digit number that indicates the course’s academic level. With some exceptions, undergraduate courses will be designated by the numbers 1001 to 4999. Undergraduate courses increase in difficulty according to the thousands-level of the course. Thus, 1000-level courses tend to be introductory survey courses, while courses offered at the 3000-level or 4000-level are considered “upper division” undergraduate courses. Courses within the same thousands-level are considered equally demanding, though they may require different amounts of preparation.

For example, the course designated FIN 3610 is an undergraduate course offered by the Baruch Department of Finance (as a 3000-level course, it is an upper-division undergraduate course); MGT 9720 is a graduate course offered by the Baruch Narendra Paul Loomba Department of Management (in general, graduate courses are all 9000-level).

At Baruch, any given course can be divided into one or more classes. Each specific class of a course contains a different set of students, it is taught by a specific faculty member, meets on specific days, at a specific time, in a specific classroom. For example, the course ECO 4000 (Statistical Analysis for Economics and Finance) can have up to eight different classes in a given semester. A student in any one of these specific classes would be taking the course ECO 4000.

In your application, you will be asked to select the courses you wish to take, and to indicate the preferred class(es) of these courses. It is very important for you to understand this distinction in order to fill out accurately the Course Request Form in your Application.

Course Permission

Many courses at Baruch that you will be interested in taking are either upper-division undergraduate courses or graduate courses. Most such courses have one or more prerequisite and/or co-requisite courses that students must take before being allowed to enroll in the more advanced course. For example, to be eligible to enroll in the course FIN 4610 (Advanced Corporate Finance), a Baruch undergraduate student must already have successfully completed the courses FIN 3610 (Corporate Finance), FIN 3710 (Investment Analysis), and ECO 4000 (Statistical Analysis for Economics and Finance).

Each of these three prerequisites for FIN 4610 in turn has its own prerequisite(s): FIN 3000 (Principles of Finance) is a prerequisite for both FIN 3610 and FIN 3710, while STA 2000 (Business Statistics I) is a prerequisite for ECO 4000. (Graduate courses follow the same basic pattern, though graduate courses generally have fewer prerequisites.)

Since you will be studying at Baruch for the first time, you cannot have completed any of the specific prerequisite(s) at Baruch College for any of the courses you wish to take at Baruch. This means that you will need to have special permission entered manually to override Baruch’s registration software, which blocks registration if prerequisites are missing from a student’s record.

This special permission may be granted only by the Chair of the specific department offering the course or the Dean’s Office of the respective Baruch “School” (Business, Arts and Sciences, and Public Affairs).

Baruch Officials will grant you permission to take a given course only if they are convinced that the courses you have completed at your home university are roughly equivalent to the prerequisites listed for the Baruch course you wish to take. You can assist these Baruch officials by requesting only those courses that both correspond to your current academic level (undergraduate or graduate) and for which your previous education has adequately prepared you.

Some Baruch courses will list other courses as a “pre- or co-requisite.” This means that you may take the course if you have already completed the equivalent of the prerequisite at your home university, or if you also take the second course listed at the same time (in other words, as a “co-requisite).

Even though the Dean’s Office and department chairs will be able to examine your transcript, a course you have taken at your home university might not be an exact match to Baruch prerequisites. Consequently, in addition to your transcript, you may wish to submit supplemental information (such as class syllabi/detailed course descriptions) with your application to demonstrate that the work you have done at your home institution is roughly equivalent, in terms of subject matter and academic level, to the courses required at Baruch as prerequisites. The Baruch College Bulletin as well as the Schedule of Classes will indicate the prerequisite(s) for any given course at Baruch. You should also view the descriptions of the individual Baruch prerequisites in the Bulletin or the Schedule of Classes to determine whether the courses you have completed at your home institution match the content of these prerequisite(s) for the Baruch course(s) you wish to take. Many finance courses at Baruch are highly mathematical, so please be sure that your training at your university has adequately prepared you for the courses you want to take at Baruch. Any material on the content of your previous course work will help Baruch’s academic officials determine which courses are best suited for you.

Finding Courses

Information about the courses taught at Baruch is available online. The City University of New York has an online Global Class Search database that lists the courses that will be taught at Baruch in a current semester, as well as all classes of these courses.

To learn how to use the Global Class Search database to complete your Course Permission Form, please follow these instructions carefully:

From the landing page:

FOR THIS ITEM	CHOOSE THIS VALUE
Institution	Baruch College
Term	the term you will be attending Baruch, or the first term you will be attending, if you will be at Baruch for more than one term
click Next
Subject	use the pull-down menu to select the subject of the courses you are searching for
Course Career	use the pull-down menu to select your status while at Baruch: Undergraduate or Graduate
Course Attribute	do NOT select any item
Course Attribute Value	do NOT select any item
Requirement Designation	do NOT select any item
Show Open Classes Only	check this button
Session	do NOT select any item
Mode of Instruction	In Person
Additional Search Criteria	disregard; do NOT select any item
click Search

The final list of courses and classes for any given semester is normally not available online until October (for the following spring semester) or April (for the following fall semester). However, with few exceptions, most courses taught at Baruch in the fall and/or spring semester(s) of one year will also be taught in the fall and/or spring semester(s) of the following year. Therefore, in most cases you can identify which courses you want to take by looking at the previous year’s courses using the Global Class Search.

Please complete the Course Permission Form and submit it with your Application as soon as possible. You should NOT wait until the current semester’s courses and classes are online. Permission is granted for the course you want (for example, FIN 3610 Corporate Finance), not for an individual class (for example, the individual class FIN 3610 taught Monday and Wednesday 9:05 – 10:20 a.m. by Prof. Bernard Baruch in Room VC 10-125) of that course. Therefore, we don’t need to know right away which individual classes you prefer. If the courses and classes are not yet available online for the semester you will be attending, you should submit your Course Permission Form with only the courses (for example, FIN 3610 Corporate Finance) listed. Once the courses and classes for the semester you will be attending are available on the Global Class Search, you should submit the final version of your Course Permission Form, listing both the courses you want and the individual classes you prefer.

Exchange Students may NOT enroll in classes that are:

Honors classes (any class with an H at the end is an Honors class)
Hybrid, Online, or Partially Online (unless approved by the Director of Study Abroad)
5000-level
Foreign language courses at the elementary or intermediate level (apart from English)
Undergraduate Exchange Students may NOT enroll in graduate-level courses (9000+)
Graduate Exchange Students may NOT enroll in undergraduate-level courses (<9000)

The final version of your Course Permission Form is due no later than October 1st (if you are attending the spring semester) and April 1st (if you are attending the fall semester).

Course Permission Form

Please Note: Your Application contains a Course Permission Form (see pp. 4-5).

Please complete the Course Permission Form carefully, accurately and fully. Here are some things to bear in mind when filling out the form.

List 12 (twelve) prospective courses on the Course Permission Form.
Rank your list of courses in order of preference. Your 1st choice should be number 1 on the form.
If a course you are requesting has more than one class, please enter up to 3 choices of classes on the form using the five-digit code, again ranked in order of preference. In the example below, the department of the course is “ECO,” the course number is “3100,” and the individual classes have the numbers 58804, 56649 and 56657.
Complete your Course Permission Form and submit your Application as early as possible. Remember, special permission must be obtained and manually entered for all courses you are approved to take, and we want to be able to obtain the necessary permissions by your registration date. The longer you delay sending in your application, the less likely you are to get into the courses you are approved to take.
Answer any emails you receive from us promptly. Questions sometimes arise from the department chairs who were asked to approve your course requests, so please be prepared to respond promptly to any inquiries you receive from the Study Abroad Office or the Director of Study Abroad, and provide whatever information or documents requested.
If one or more of your course requests are denied, but you believe that you have taken course work at your home institution that is equivalent to the prerequisites for the Baruch course, you may submit any supplementary documentation you believe might alter the decision. However, it is your responsibility to provide the necessary documentation in a timely manner.
The decision of the respective department chair or Dean’s Office regarding your eligibility for a given course is final.