Shopping Centers Today

DEC 2016

Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

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D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / S C T 135 Get the New Year off to a GREAT START with these New ICSC Publications! For more information or to order go to www.icsc.org or call +1 301 362 6900 Use Code FREESHIP17 for Free Shipping on orders placed through January 31, 2017 . and develop solutions relating to evolving technology and the need for flexibility in the built universe, says Derrington. The Columbia program discloses no enrollment or graduate statistics, but Derrington describes it as "moderately sized" — falling somewhere between the real estate programs of such peers as MIT, which has about 35 graduates per year, and NYU, which graduates 300 annually. The Columbia real estate curriculum includes core courses for finance, development, design and zoning, construction, law and technology. Around these core courses are electives that go deeper into the various disciplines. In finance, for example, electives may focus on capital markets, REITs or CMBS structures. After that first-semester general overview, students can choose specialized areas of study related to their discovered interests or to their current career path. The university's decision to hire Derrington is consistent with the efforts of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to marry the academic to the practical, through guest speakers, adjunct professors and case studies on the industry's cutting edge. Guest lecturers have included David Lukes, CEO of Equity One, and Conor C. Flynn, president and CEO of Kimco Realty. Columbia's efforts to improve this graduate program is but another example of the ways education for real estate industry professionals continues to evolve, says Sarah Ritchie, manager of student membership and outreach programs at ICSC. "The depth and breadth of student comprehension of this industry increases with every passing year," Ritchie said. Commercial real estate has traditionally attracted professionals who stumbled into the field from a range of backgrounds, including general business, philosophy and history. Yet there is clearly a growing emphasis on developing real- estate-specific skills, as evidenced by the expansion of dedicated real estate programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In fact, notes Ritchie, there are now well over 100 industry- dedicated academic programs in North America alone. One thing that sets the Columbia program apart is that it is not merely about training students along the conventional lines of real estate analysis, but also about producing a professional who can be at the heart of all the change and is able to work out ways to deal with all of it, says Derrington. "My objective," she said, "is to make it the most comprehensive and effective program for the education of the real estate professional of today and tomorrow." n

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