Located in the heart of Alabama's business center, the Collat School of Business offers a nurturing place for students who value hands-on experiences and mentoring by a dedicated faculty and supportive staff.  The entire city of Birmingham is a classroom for students, a tremendous advantage given the opportunities for year-round internships and the access students have to professionals and business leaders on a daily basis. All business students are required to have an internship or another hands-on learning experience before graduation.

Collat offers eight undergraduate programs and three graduate programs including the newest undergraduate major, human resource management, which launched this past fall. Many other specialized programs have grown out of need from the business community for certain skills. For accounting students, the school offers a concentration in forensic accounting, which is a rapidly expanding field. Several of these graduates have gone on to work with the F.B.I. Social media is a concentration for marketing students that is exploding, and the information systems program has specialty concentrations in cyber security and enterprise computing. Collat also boasts one of the few industrial distribution programs in the county, thanks to the generous support of Charles and Patsy Collat. The program has two tracks — an engineering track and a medical track — and both tracks have a history of producing in-demand graduates with the specialized knowledge needed to work with manufacturers and distributors in the industrial and medical device and supplies market.

Collat emphasizes entrepreneurial thinking in all of its programs. Not everyone will start their own company, but businesses need employees who think like entrepreneurs, who innovate and think differently. The Collat School of Business encourages all students, whether they are in finance or economics or human resource management, to think creatively when examining problems and searching for solutions. The school created an Innovation Lab— the iLab — inside Birmingham’s renown Innovation Depot where students can get experience interning and working with start-up companies inside the depot or incubating their own start-up ideas. It also helped establish a new student-run MakerSpace for UAB students in Sterne Library that is stocked with 3-D printers, 3-D scanners, prototyping kits and other supplies. And the new business building, which is scheduled to open in fall 2018, will share space with UAB’s Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which works to accelerate new company formation and technology transfer on campus.

The faculty's teaching skills complement the uncompromising efforts of Collat’s students. Professors are also accomplished researchers, publishing papers and textbooks that contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge within the business disciplines. But, faculty members are more than just skilled teacher-scholars. They are also deeply experienced professionals, having worked for some of the world's leading companies: Ford, Deloitte, United Airlines, Motorola, Procter & Gamble and U.S. Steel to name a few. It's this combination of faculty scholarship and professional experience that makes a UAB business degree both practical and relevant.

Learn more about the Collat School of Business at uab.edu/business.