Student Resources

Check out the Rice Business Curriculum page on this site for a general overview of Core and Elective courses.

Core and Elective course syllabi are available for your reference in the Course Syllabi folder. 

Before being able to register for any courses, ensure all student holds are removed in your ESTHER account. 

How? This guide contains step-by-step instructions on how to.

This guide contains step-by-step instructions on how to register for courses in ESTHER. 

You can also reference the quadmester Course Schedule at courses.rice.edu to find the appropriate course registration numbers (CRNs) for desired course sections. 

In order to populate all quadmester courses, 

To order your course textbook(s):

Once a Rice Business student is in their final quadmester, they are eligible to apply for degree conferral and graduation. 

Interested in learning more about regalia, announcements, class rings, and more? Review this Rice.edu page: Information for Master’s Degree Students. 

Read through this Rice.edu website to get all the details on how to get your own Rice University Student ID.

Read through this Rice.edu website to get all the details on how to get your own Rice Recreation and Wellness Center membership.

One perk of being a graduate student at Rice University is that Rice Business students have access to Coursera For Rice. Through the online LMS platform Coursera, Rice is offering access to a variety of supplemental courses curated by the University for students to take advantage of. These self-paced courses range from ‘Foundations of Mindfulness’ to ‘America Through Foreign Eyes’ to ‘Investment and Portfolio Management.’ 

Note: course offerings are subject to change at any time. 

To Access:

Familiarize yourself with these important quantitative skills and terminology to jumpstart your MBA journey. Rice Business offers students the opportunity to learn and/or brush up on these three subjects via prep-courses offered on Coursera for Rice.

Courses

Instructors:

These courses were designed to equip students with a basic understanding of business finance, accounting and data analysis. While you aren’t required to complete them prior to starting your program, they can help you prepare for the rigors of graduate education. In addition, students are introduced to and refreshed on basic knowledge and skills for aspiring business leaders.

Having taught at Rice for nearly a combined 40 years, our faculty have found that newly enrolled students often lack confidence in some fundamental quantitative skills, and struggle with accounting and finance mechanics and terminology. These courses include a varying series of lectures, practice opportunities, and instructional video walk-throughs that will allow students to confidently take a seat at the leadership table.

Students will have the opportunity to practice foundational math skills, become familiar with important terminology, and complete scenario-based problems commonly found in finance or accounting courses. More specifically, learners will construct financial statements, navigate key concepts and tools in financial accounting, identify basic principles of financial valuation discounting, perform data analysis, and more.

This course will equip students with the quantitative skills needed to begin any Masters of Business Administration program. The goal is not to build foundational skills or expert mastery but rather, to provide some middle ground to “shake the rust off” skills that a typical MBA student probably knows, but may not have thought about for quite some time. The course provides a quick refresher on top level math and statistics concepts that will be used throughout the MBA curriculum at any school. 

All of the concepts will be reinforced with practical real-world examples. All calculations, formulas, and data analysis will be performed in excel, with many detailed demonstrations. For those unfamiliar or less comfortable with spreadsheets, the course will also prepare students with a basic facility for using spreadsheets to solve quantitative business problems. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for any audience.

Financial Statements are a key source of information about the economic activities of a firm. This course is a primer on the construction and basic interpretation of financial statements that should provide learners with a rudimentary understanding of the types of information included in the four primary financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and statement of stockholders equity. 

We will spend time recording transactions using accounting terminology and then building financial statements from those transactions to provide you with an understanding of how and why transactions influence the various financial statements. We will focus on the language of accounting including such terms as the accounting equation, debits and credits, T-accounts, journal entries, accruals versus cash flows, and more. 

By the end of the course, learners will be able to understand the basic differences and similarities of the four financial statements, and will have developed a solid foundation to build upon in an introductory financial accounting course at the MBA level. It is ideally suited for those learners that have never taken a financial accounting course before, as well as for those students who would like to refresh their understanding of basic financial accounting concepts.

This short course surveys all the major topics covered in a full semester MBA level finance course, but with a more intuitive approach on a very high conceptual level. The goal here is to give you a roadmap and framework for how financial professionals make decisions. We will cover the basics of financial valuation, the time value of money, compounding returns, and discounting the future. You will understand discounted cash flow valuation and how it compares to other methods. 

We also step inside the mind of a corporate financial manager and develop the basic tools of capital budgeting. We will survey the how, when, and where to spend money, make tradeoffs about investment, growth, dividends, and how to ensure sound fiscal discipline. Our journey then turns to a Wall Street or capital markets perspective of investments as we discuss the fundamental tradeoff between risk and return. We then synthesize our discussion of risk with our valuation framework and incorporate it into a series of direct applications to practice. 

This course requires no prior familiarity with finance. Rather, it is intended to be a first step for anyone who is curious about understanding stock markets, valuation, or corporate finance. We will walk through all of the tools and quantitative analysis together and develop a guide for understanding the seemingly complex decisions that finance professionals make. By the end of the course, you will develop an understanding of the major conceptual levers that push and pull on financial decision making and how they relate to other areas of business. 

The course should also serve as a roadmap for where to further your finance education and it would be an excellent introduction for any student contemplating an MBA or finance concentration, but who have little background in the area.