Creighton offers its graduate students a unique opportunity to study the business side of science while pursuing another degree, working or holding an internship.

The Professional Science Masters, or PSM, is an innovative two-year accreditation designed to prepare students for science careers in business, government and nonprofit organizations. There are 246 PSM programs across the country, and Creighton’s PSM Degree in Bioscience Management is one of only three offered nationwide.

The general objective of Creighton’s PSM degree is to offer students a set of courses, half from Bioscience and half from a general business curriculum, including leadership, finance and marketing.

“We call it an MBA for scientists,” Dr. Trent Wachner, the PSM faculty program director and professor of marketing, said.

Business development director Steven Kelly said that even though the acceptance for the program is low, Creighton would like to expand certain areas of study.

“The accreditation process is extremely selective, but once you get it to your university, it is very easy to add additional programs as long as you meet the curriculum requirements,” Kelly said. “We would really like to grow in the field of energy science as well as pharmacology.”

Wachner said that there are certain advantages to this program that had been non-existent in the past. “The beauty behind expanding the PSM programs offered here at Creighton is that students from across the science disciplines can take their business classes together, and you can create collaboration across fields,” Wachner said.

Another aspect that makes the program unique is that is operates on a weekend format, so students take classes on Friday afternoon and all day on Saturday for one year. Creighton currently has nine students enrolled and 31 students have graduated from the program.

Reine Black is currently enrolled in the program and also pursuing his MBA at Creighton.

“This program has opened my eyes [as well as] many doors for opportunities for me to be a part of the science community without isolation in a lab,” Black said. “I now have the ability to work with scientists and the people involved in the business aspect of that scientific development.”