Though it has been four full years since then, (my transition is described at www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-10-03/frsomething.html), people still regularly hit me with variants of the following questions:

1. "How's your new job?"
   
   
2. "Do you like teaching better than The Real World?"
   
   
3. "Great having summers off, isn't it?"

What are they really asking? I suspect it is 4.: "Is this university gig the last stop on your professional tour?" Many friends seem to think that this is just another phase of mine, another of the many bouts of madness that they have seen me go through, soon to be replaced by God Knows What.

Happy with my new career, I am only mildly annoyed at such questions. My stock answers:

1. "Not so new any more, really."
   
   
2. "It's definitely different."
   
   
3. "I really do work just as hard all year round — just ask my wife."
   
   
4. "Well, you'd have to ask my tenure committee. But I would like to stay. Most days, I really do feel like I'm doing something worthwhile."

At the same time, after four years on the job, I have a deep sense that I am just beginning to learn what being a professor is all about. What follows are a few thoughts about how my perspective on academia has evolved since I returned to university life.

Finding My Way in the Classroom


With a background in theater, a knack for public speaking and a penchant for pushing my way into the spotlight, many friends and colleagues have assumed that teaching would come easily to me. In the back of my mind, perhaps even I had conjured up some gilded image of myself as a Sage on the Stage, masterfully and effortlessly sauntering into class, dispensing wisdom and oozing inspiration.

At this point, many of you are no doubt either cursing my arrogance, having a good laugh at my expense, or both. My reality has been quite different from what I had imagined.

Wilbert J. McKeachie, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has written a book called "Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research and Theory for College and University Teachers." Now in its 11th edition, this book is widely considered to be the definitive guide to teaching for new faculty. Unfortunately, I am just now in the midst of reading it for the first time. In particular, Part 1 provides a veritable catalog of the mistakes that I have made repeatedly. In particular, two major errors — insufficient first-time preparation and poor choice of textbook — have really haunted me.

Don't get me wrong; I mean well. I set aside copious amounts of time for putting together syllabi, choosing assignments, finding supplemental readings and so on. But for better or worse, my teaching style is highly interactive and intuitive, and so I have a hard time envisioning what a course will feel like in the abstract. The result is that before teaching a class for the first time, I seem to spend most of my pre-semester prep time scratching my head, listening to iTunes and playing on-line Scrabble (see www.isc.ro at your own risk). Not surprisingly, the first time through any class is a bit torturous for both me and my students, with an alarming number of mid-semester course corrections as I slowly get a sense of what I'd really like to do.

Overall, I have made my peace with this phenomenon and have now made it a practice to warn my students when I'm teaching a class for the first time. But the poor choice of initial textbook still haunts me, and I think for good reason. As McKeachie points out, "Research on teaching suggests that the major influence on what students learn is not the teaching method but the textbook." [1] To avoid future pitfalls, I would love to see a resource that helps new instructors cut through the staggering number of books that are available on seemingly any OR/OM/STAT topic and identify texts that other professors have used successfully in their courses, along with comments on strengths and weaknesses. Anyone? Anyone?

Finding My Way Philosophically


Though I sometimes struggle with what I should teach, I am quite clear on why I teach. My philosophy of education is rooted in the liberal arts, and I seek to teach my students to think critically, to communicate effectively and to become lifelong learners. In practice, the biggest teaching challenge is to align my day-to-day student interactions, especially in the classroom, with these high-minded ideals.

Like many of you, I teach at a business school despite having neither an undergraduate nor a graduate degree in business. The last four years of teaching business students in undergraduate, graduate and executive programs has been a significant cultural education. Unfortunately, my sense is that many of my students have a decidedly different agenda for their education than I do. Many are in school just to get their diplomas, and they have chosen to pursue a business degree for its perceived vocational advantages rather than for its intellectual content. The courses themselves — and especially required core classes like statistics and operations that are perceived as being difficult — are to be endured rather than embraced.

How to reconcile this disconnect between my own ideals and my students' expectations? This dissonance can be both discouraging and exhausting. Some days, it is certainly tempting to shake my head, accept that they just don't get it and coast down some path of least resistance until the bell mercifully rings.

Mark Edmundson, professor of literature at the University of Virginia and a prominent critic of today's academic culture, would not be surprised that I sometimes give in to this temptation. Edmundson's indictment of our colleges and universities is that too many faculty members have simply given up, tailoring our own teaching to meet the students' wants and needs by "creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice" [2] — resulting in less compelling classes and less capable graduates.

For my business students, "enjoyable" and "nice" translate largely into things like bullet-point exam preparation notes, multiple choice questions, simplification (or outright avoidance) of complicated concepts and an absence of constructive confrontation. To wit, one of my students recently wrote on her evaluation of my teaching, "you shouldn't ever say 'you're wrong,' but rather 'almost' or something like that."

Somehow, I can't do it. The most important skill that I am trying to convey to every student is the ability to cut through the chaos, notice patterns and identify problems that can be solved to create value. Some amount of confusion and conflict, while not enjoyable, is a very natural part of the learning process. The spoon-feeding that many of my students crave — and I must confess that as student I clamored for it, too — is simply antithetical to these core objectives.

Ultimately, this means that I've got to "sell" my students on my approach to their education — and after years as an entrepreneur I'm an absolutely shameless salesman. I read the newspapers and surf the Web looking for examples to connect my material to the "real world." For my undergraduates, I use as much of their vocabulary and as many of their cultural references as I can get into my head. For my MBA students, I find out about their backgrounds and try to relate classroom topics to their specific experiences and interests. I draw sloppy pictures and use shaky metaphors. I crack jokes, tell stories and make fun of the university administration. I try to make my courses fun, both for me and for my students.

Edmundson acknowledges the need for all this, but is nevertheless offended by the value that students place on the "likeability" of their professors: "I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says she 'enjoyed' the course — and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations — somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind." [3]

I now take it as a given that every course I teach requires me to regularly make the case for why the material is worth studying, to sell the students in order to get and keep their attention. Unlike Edmundson, however, I don't dislike myself for doing so, nor do I think that this in any way cheapens my students' experience.

No doubt there is a slippery slope lurking nearby. While actively trying to connect with students, I must also resolve not to either dilute the material or lower my expectations of students in terms of mastering it. To do so would definitely cause me — and probably some of my students — to hold my efforts in lesser esteem.

This is a decidedly tricky dance, and I'm still trying to master its steps.

Helping Students Find Their Way


What aspirations do my students have for themselves? What hopes should I have for my students' careers? How can I help them achieve these goals? These questions haunt me.

Yes, I understand that what happens to my students outside my classroom is not my responsibility, and that a student's own intrinsic motivation and capacity is probably the strongest determinant of future achievement. Still, it is clear to me that:

1. We matter. Students may not achieve everything that they can imagine, but they will almost surely not achieve any more than they can imagine. As teachers, we contribute greatly to their sense of the possible.
   
   
2. We benefit. Among the many things that I have learned from Erhan Erkut over the years is the clear understanding that, as he said during his presentation at last year's INFORMS Teaching Management Science conference, "students are gold." [4] The good ones that we are able to attract to our field serve us in many ways — as ambassadors for our courses while in school and as sources of projects, ideas and funds once they have graduated. Conversely, when we fail to deliver on these inherent promises — of interesting compelling employment, of future opportunities — word gets out about that, too. [5]
   
   
3. We Care. Most of us have an instinctive affection for our students and genuinely want to do what we can to help.

So what am I doing to help make the future lives of our students more successful and satisfying? First of all, my colleagues and I are actively seeking ways to enable our students to efficiently gather useful information about the world outside the university. A small and energetic group of student leaders has chartered a new departmental student association, whose first few projects include a new Web site anchored by a searchable network for informational interviews, a "Life after SFSU" panel discussion featuring five alums and a mentorship program. We have built a diverse set of guest speakers that we use across our entire curriculum. All of these activities are intended to increase the amount of information that our students have about what is possible.

Also, we are striving to establish deep and enduring relationships with organizations that are likely to value and hire our students. This involves much more than just answering the phone when they call or badgering them to give us some data for use in our research. Rather, we are building individual contacts within these firms who understand our faculty, our programs and our relative strengths. Inspired by Michael Trick's presentation [6] at last fall's INFORMS conference, we are also trying to earn social capital by figuring out how we can provide value to these companies, whether through student projects, more classroom coverage of relevant domain knowledge, specialized training courses for their employees or other mutually beneficial interactions. For example, recently we have spoken to several firms doing analytic work with increasingly large piles of Internet data; all of them were pleased with our students, but several encouraged me to add contemporary large-scale data analysis — current methods, contemporary software tools and scalability — to our curriculum. Having an honest and committed relationship means taking this kind of input to heart and being willing to act on it.

None of this is easy. Building solid connections requires lots of energy as well as a long-term commitment. But over the past four years, I've become increasingly convinced of its importance, for our students and for our department.

If I'm still writing about all this stuff in another four years, that means not only that I'm a slow learner, but that I've somehow managed to get tenure. Wish me luck.



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decision Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University and an operations management consultant. He is also the author of the "Was It Something I Said?" column in OR/MS Today, which he did not have to write this month in exchange for agreeing to contribute this article to our annual "Back to School" special.

References

1. McKeachie, W. J., 2001, "Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, Eleventh Edition," Houghton Mifflin, p. 2.
2. Edmundson, M., 2004, "Why Read?", Bloomsbury Press.
3. Edmundson, M. 1997, "The Uses of a Liberal Arts Education," Harper's Magazine, September 1997.
4. See Erhan's presentation in the digital workbook that is available online via http://meetings.informs.org/TMSWorkshop/TMS06/post-workshop.php.
5. Erkut, E. and A. Ingolfsson, 2002, "Managing the Student Supply Chain," OR/MS Today, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 36-41.
6. Trick, M.E., 2006, "Volunteering, Social Capital and Professional Leadership," INFORMS National Meeting, Pittsburgh (November 2006).

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