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Work through business cases, leadership simulations, and boardroom decisions in this two-week course for high school students at the UBC Sauder School of Business.
Rated 4.6 out of 5 for classroom experience by students surveyed across the broader program in 2026.
Course Description
Take a seat at the boardroom table. A growth idea may sound exciting until someone asks about its costs, customers, and consequences.
In this course you will see how business decisions connect across leadership, strategy, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship, and technology. Work through cases and simulations to see how companies create value and make choices. Connect revenue, costs, and margins to financial statements, then use customer insight to examine positioning. Tools such as SWOT and PESTLE help you consider a company's strengths, competition, and wider pressures.
Step into a leadership simulation to test communication, incentives, and team culture. In a boardroom role-play, compare shareholder and stakeholder priorities, then debate the trade-offs among growth, sustainability, profitability, and accountability. Explore how AI and digital transformation could change business operations and introduce new risks. Daily reflections help you consider what kind of leader you want to become.
This two-week course is part of UBC Sauder Business Academy. The course is available to residential and commuter students. Beyond class, students connect focused academic work with campus life, growing independence, and clearer direction about what students may want to study or pursue next. The program is developed and academically led by UBC Sauder School of Business.
What You Will Do
• Map how businesses create value for customers and other stakeholders
• Connect financial statements with revenue, costs, and margins
• Use customer insight, SWOT, and PESTLE to weigh strategic choices
• Work through a leadership and teamwork decision simulation
• Explore how AI and digital tools can change business operations
• Role-play boardroom decisions and debate growth, sustainability, and accountability
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Explain how leadership, marketing, finance, and strategy influence one another
• Use cases, financial evidence, and business frameworks to examine a decision
• Compare stakeholder priorities and support a responsible leadership recommendation
You’ll leave with case analyses, insights from leadership simulations, and a certificate of completion.
Why Business Leadership Skills Matter
Business leadership requires students to see how decisions connect across an organization. A strategy may affect customers, employees, costs, incentives, and long-term reputation at the same time. Cases and simulations help students identify those relationships, compare options, and explain why one tradeoff may be more responsible than another.
Leadership reflection adds a personal dimension without reducing leadership to personality. Students consider values, communication, accountability, and how teams make decisions under pressure. Financial and marketing exercises give their recommendations practical grounding, while governance debates ask who should have a voice. These skills support collaborative projects, future business study, and any role where people must balance performance with consequences for others.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade.
If you follow business news, like leading a team, or want to understand why companies make the choices they do, this course lets you try those decisions from several angles. You’ll analyze cases, test ideas in simulations, and weigh what responsible leadership looks like when priorities compete.
No prior business coursework or specialized software is required. Be ready to work with classmates, use standard spreadsheets and presentations, and reflect on how your own decisions affect a group.
Recommended by More Than 4 out of 5 Students
Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 UBC Sauder program.
Your Summer at UBC Sauder School of Business
The UBC Sauder Business Academy gives high school students a two-week introduction to university-level business at the UBC Sauder School of Business in Vancouver. Led by UBC Sauder School of Business faculty and industry experts, the program combines lectures, simulations, case studies, and faculty-led workshops with team projects that address real business challenges. Students explore leadership, marketing, finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship, then present their ideas to faculty and industry guests in a final showcase.
Outside class, optional on-campus housing, student socials, and networking events bring together students from Canada and around the world. The Point Grey setting, with forest, ocean, and mountain views, gives the summer a distinctly West Coast character as students build business fluency, confidence, independence, global connections, and clearer direction about university study and future careers.
The program is developed and academically led by UBC Sauder.
Summer Discovery Certificate of Completion
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive