Dean’s Message

I would like to extend you a warm welcome to the School of Business at the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK).

Our vision is to be is to be students’ preferred choice for internationally recognized business education in the UAE enriched by the impactful research and outreach of our dedicated faculty.

The School’s mission is work with the AURAK ‘family’ to prepare tomorrow’s business leaders to be thoughtful, creative, collaborative and responsible with an ability to think critically, communicate their ideas clearly and take initiative in applying what they have learned.  Backed by a diverse faculty committed to enrich their teaching and enhance their community impact by engaging in applied, cross-disciplinary, and pedagogical scholarship, the School provides a transformational, student-centered learning experience based on the North American model of higher education enriched by attention to the culture of the region.

To prepare students for an evolving marketplace, we seek to continually improve the delivery of our business programs.  With the approval of the Commission for Academic Accreditation in (CAA) of the Ministry of Education, we moved in Fall 2020 to consolidate five undergraduate programs -the BS in Business Administration, BS in Human Resource Management, BS in Finance, BS in Accounting, and BS in Marketing into a single BSBA with Majors in Accounting, Finance, Human Resource Management and Marketing.   This should make it easier to assure employers that our undergraduate students are achieving a common set of program learning outcomes while allowing to develop new majors in partnership with US universities that have a similar program structure.  An important milestone in this process of major development was the approval by the CAA of new BSBA majors in Business Analytics and Hospitality and Tourism Management in Fall 2021.  We also offer two CAA accredited graduate programs: the Master of Business Administration (MBA) and the Executive MBA (EMBA). The MBA and EMBA programs offer courses on the weekends to facilitate attendance by a working student population. While the Executive MBA is limited to participants with at least five years of managerial experience, both graduate programs have a practical emphasis and are designed to enhance the career goals of executives.

To advance our quest for international recognition, we have become members of AACSB International (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) and have thus established a place to actively engage with a world class business school network. We are already well on the way along what is typically a five-year process to achieve Initial Accreditation by this body, with initial self evaluation and two progress reports being accepted and the School between declared ready to receive a visit by a Peer Review Team in February 2023. We see this as a continual improvement journey which will help us better serve our students and our stakeholders. AACSB sets the gold standard for business school accreditation, and our successful completion of this journey will validate in a global context the standards we are setting ourselves.