Lindner First-Year Experience
You don’t have to wait to change the world. Bold business learning starts “Day One” at Lindner.
Lindner's unique First-Year Experience starts with placing you in a learning community made up of 25 students with whom you'll explore your first year of business curriculum.
UC's learning communities help students build friendships with classmates and experience the feel of a small college with the benefits of a major university. Taking the majority of your first-year classes together, you and your learning community will tackle Business Pathways and Essentials of Business as a team.
Business Pathways
More than half of Lindner students enter as Business Undecided. That's okay! Taught by a student's academic advisor, Business Pathways helps first-year students become acquainted with all the major and minor options within Lindner and even across UC. Students often add to or modify their major or minor areas of study as they discover new passions and ultimately find the perfect combination of majors and minors for them.
Essentials of Business
The Essentials of Business course is the first taste of experiential learning students will have at Lindner. Students are introduced to fundamental business concepts which they will then put into action with Project Strategy, Project Innovation and Project Impact.
Project Strategy
Greater Cincinnati is home to many of the world's leading corporations. For Project Strategy, students partner with companies like Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati Reds, Fifth Third Bank, or Delta Air Lines, meeting with executives, learning about their organizations, and performing strategic analyses of their operations. Students learn how to fully research a company and its industry, brainstorm and investigate potential strategies, and ultimately present recommendations to the client's leadership team.
Each student team includes 20 to 24 freshmen, led by a PACE leader, an upperclassman who serves as a teaching assistant and mentor. During fall semester, teams study their designated organizations, conducting a SWOT analysis to gauge the firms' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and make strategic recommendations.
- 84.51
- Acorn
- altafiber
- Ameritas
- Beechmont Automotive
- BM2 Freight
- Cincinnati Reds
- Cincinnati Youth Collaborative
- Cintas
- Coldwell Banker
- Deloitte
- Eastern Personnel Services
- Enerfab
- EY
- Fastenal
- FC Cincinnati
- Fifth Third
- Forvis
- GE
- Graeter’s
- Great American Insurance Group
- IKEA
- Isotoner
- Johnson Investment Counsel
- JB Hunt
- KAO Brands
- Kept House
- Kolar
- KPMG
- Kroger
- LaRosa’s
- Loth
- Motz
- Northwestern Mutual
- Paycor
- Pep Promotions
- Perfetti Van Melle
- Phillips Edison
- Plante Moran
- P&G
- Prospiant
- Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Cincinnati
- RSM US LLP
- Sibcy Cline
- Skyline
- State Farm
- Taste of Belgium
- Tata Consultancy Services
- Terracon
- The Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky African American Chamber of Commerce
- The Kleingers Group
- TQL
- Uber Freight
- Valley Interior Systems
- Woody Sander Ford
- YWCA
Project Innovation
Project Innovation encourages students to focus on the startup end of the business spectrum to hone their creative, innovative and entrepreneurial skills. Students begin by dreaming up a new product or service then performing market research, developing financial models, and creating a full business plan to support and launch their concepts.
Project Innovation is more than a class assignment; it's a real-world opportunity to determine the feasibility of an actual business. Students also have the chance to enter their business plans in pitch contests sponsored by the UC Center for Entrepreneurship, potentially winning cash prizes to help fund their business idea.
Recent Project Innovation concepts include CollegeLeaseMe, a student furniture and equipment exchange; Why Wait, a restaurant wait-time app; Koned, portable meals served in a cone; Deoscreet, a portable, organic deodorant for women; College Compas, an on-campus navigation app; and Flavor Your Day, a flavored-water dispenser.
Project Impact
The benefits of a business education are not limited to the for-profit sector. In Project Impact, students work with a partner organization, using their newly-acquired business skills to help that organization achieve its goals and improve the Cincinnati community.
On Your Mark ...
Experiential learning starts "Day One" at Lindner. Your first-year experience will introduce you to the broad opportunities within business, allow you to apply what you're learning immediately to real companies and finish your first year strong with a deep understanding of what is expected on you as you progress through the remainder of your coursework and pursue co-op opportunities.