Raikes School Curriculum

Year One

RAIK 10 — Raikes School Freshman Seminar (0 credit)

• Start your Raikes School experience by getting to know the people, resources, and opportunities that will shape your next four years. You’ll connect with classmates and alumni, build a résumé and prepare for the career fair, map out your academic plan, explore research and career possibilities, and get involved in the campus and Lincoln communities. You’ll also spend time on the skills that make college life easier - from time management and resilience to wellness, empathy, and finding your place within the Raikes School community.

RAIK 163H — Innovation Processes & Software Engineering Fundamentals (3 credits)

• Learn how ideas become products people actually want to use. You’ll work with a team to find a real problem, talk with potential users, test your assumptions, build and refine prototypes, and develop a business model around your solution. Along the way, you’ll get hands-on experience with design thinking, customer discovery, software engineering, agile methods, AI tools, and pitching—and you’ll finish the semester by presenting what your team created and what you learned along the way.

RAIK 183H — Computer Problem Solving Essentials (4 credits)

• Learn how to take a problem and turn it into working software. You’ll build programs in Java while learning the fundamentals of computational problem solving:  breaking down problems, designing algorithms, working with control flow and functions, handling input and output, and building with object-oriented programming. Through hands-on programming and lab work, you’ll practice testing, debugging, organizing your code, and creating interactive applications. You’ll build the habits and foundation that you'll use throughout the rest of the Raikes School computing curriculum.

RAIK 181H — Foundations of Accounting (4 credits)

• Learn to read the financial story behind a business and use it to make better decisions. You’ll build a foundation in both financial and managerial accounting, learning how companies record transactions, create financial statements, understand costs, build budgets, and use financial information to plan and evaluate decisions. You’ll also put those skills to work on real companies—including analyzing a publicly traded company and deciding whether you would invest in it or lend it money.

RAIK 182H — Foundations of Economics  (4 credits)

• Economics is about much more than money—it’s a way of understanding how people make choices and what happens when millions of those choices interact. You’ll explore both microeconomics and macroeconomics, using economic tools to think about how individuals, businesses, and societies make decisions and how economies behave as a whole. Through problems, discussions, and team projects, you’ll apply that thinking to questions ranging from business strategy to big societal challenges such as homelessness, food insecurity, and climate change.

RAIK 184H — Software Development Essentials (4 credits) 

• Take your programming skills further by learning how larger and more sophisticated software systems are designed. You’ll work with data structures, recursion, algorithms, object-oriented design, databases, and discrete mathematics while building projects such as Pac-Man, a novel generator, a truth-table tool, and a gig scheduler. Along the way, you’ll spend plenty of time coding in hands-on labs and strengthen the software engineering habits that matter beyond the classroom: writing clean, modular code, testing it thoroughly, working from specifications, and choosing the right tools and structures for the problem at hand.

RAIK 185H — Foundations of Leadership (1 credit)

• Leadership at the Raikes School starts with understanding yourself. In this course, you’ll explore your strengths, personality, leadership style, comfort zones, and the ways you show up on a team through discussions, workshops, reflections, interviews, and creative projects. You’ll practice giving and receiving feedback, learn from different perspectives on leadership and a life well lived, and start building a personal approach to leadership that you can carry into your teams, career, and life beyond the Raikes School.

Year Two

RAIK 270H — Statistics and Applications (3 credits)

RAIK 283H — Software Engineering III (4 credits)

RAIK 341H — Marketing (3 credits)

• Learn to think like a marketer by figuring out who your customers are, what they value, and how to build a strategy around them. You’ll work with a team to develop a new product and create a full marketing plan—digging into customers and markets before making decisions about positioning, differentiation, pricing, promotion, distribution, and implementation. Through cases, discussions, presentations, and your team project, you’ll practice using marketing frameworks to make the kinds of decisions product leaders, entrepreneurs, and managers face every day.

RAIK 186H — Foundations of Leadership II (1 credit)

RAIK 284H — Software Engineering IV (3 credits)

RAIK 370H — Data & Models II: Data Science Fundamentals (3 credits)

RAIK 381H — Fundamentals of Finance (3 credits)

Year Three

RAIK 401H & 402H — Design Studio I & II (6 credits)

• Put what you’ve learned at the Raikes School to work on a real problem for a real organization. You’ll join an interdisciplinary team and spend the academic year working directly with an industry, government, nonprofit, or startup partner to discover customer needs, design a solution, build and test software, and iteratively delivering a working solution. Along the way, you’ll learn how professional product teams operate—from managing requirements and planning releases to DevOps, testing, communicating with stakeholders, and adjusting when a project doesn’t go exactly as planned. First-year Design Studio students contribute fully as team members while learning the processes and expectations of the Studio. 

RAIK 371H — Data & Models III: Fundamentals of Management Science (3 credits)

RAIK 372H — Business Law & Ethics (3 credits)

Year Four

RAIK 40 — Raikes School Senior Seminar: Professional and Life Skills (0 credit)

• College prepares you for your first job; this seminar helps prepare you for everything that comes with it. Students affectionately call this course “Adulting 101!” You’ll learn from Raikes School alumni and other professionals about the practical decisions that show up after graduation, including negotiating salary and benefits, understanding insurance and investing, relocating to a new city, continuing your professional development, and building a life outside of work. You’ll choose sessions based on your interests and leave with practical advice for navigating your career - and the “real world” - with a little more confidence and ability.

RAIK 403H & 404H — Design Studio III & IV (6 credits)

• Return to Design Studio with experience under your belt and take on greater responsibility for the success of your team and product. You’ll spend another academic year tackling a real challenge with an external partner, but this time you’ll typically step into a team leadership role - helping set direction, manage the project and product, work through team and client challenges, and guide a solution from discovery through production-ready releases. You’ll deepen the technical, business, communication, and leadership skills you developed during your first Design Studio experience while learning what it takes to help a team deliver something that genuinely works for the user.

RAIK 476H — Business Strategies (3 credits)

RAIK 401H & 402H — Startup Studio I & II

• Turn an idea into a real company. In Startup Studio, you’ll spend two semesters building and launching a startup with a team, combining the Raikes capstone experience with the fast-moving, learn-as-you-go environment of an undergraduate startup accelerator. You’ll identify and validate a problem, build and iterate on a product, find customers, develop your brand and go-to-market strategy, pitch to different audiences, and learn how to sell what you’ve created. Along the way, you’ll tackle the parts of entrepreneurship that happen beyond the product—financials and fundraising, legal and intellectual property questions, hiring and team culture, partnerships, leadership, and the occasional need to rethink your original plan. With financial support from Invest Nebraska and matching partners, the goal is bigger than a prototype or class project: by the end of the year, your team is working toward a launched, self-sustaining business.

RAIK 405H & 406H — Research Studio I & II

• Spend a year exploring a question that doesn’t have an answer yet. You’ll work with a faculty mentor on interdisciplinary research that connects technology with fields across campus, using computing, data, and other tools to investigate complex problems and develop new ideas or solutions. Along the way, you’ll shape a research question, apply research methods, analyze what you discover, and share where your work leads.

RAIK 491H — International Studies: Global Branding

• Take your Raikes School experience global with an immersive study abroad experience in Brazil. You’ll explore how technology, culture, economics, and other forces shape global business through case studies, field exercises, and educational work with our partner ESPM. Then you’ll take that learning into the field, visiting some of Brazil’s most influential brands and organizations - from technology and social media to consumer products, fashion, and retail. You’ll see firsthand how companies innovate, build brands, and compete in a rapidly changing global market.

RAIK 480H — Generative AI: Applications, Ethics, and Research

• Focuses on research and discussion to examine recent developments in and the implementations of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Covers ethical implications and potential broader impacts, while applying them to various domains, culminating in a class project. Specific concepts covered include core generative technologies ranging from variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and transformer-based models like large language models (LLMs) and diffusion image generation; key related concepts in terms of data considerations, model parameters and hyperparameters, finetuning and prompt engineering techniques; and practical use cases in terms of technology and industry through research paper reviews and case study discussions.

RAIK 453H — User Interfaces

• Introduction to the areas of user interfaces and user experience through reading and hands-on experiences. Areas covered include the psychology and physiology of design, the process of interface design, cultural values and accessibility, designing for beauty and delight, and dynamic evaluation strategies.