The Opening Week of the Semester

As the first week of the semester draws to a close I thought it would be good to review what I’ve dealt with. The first week (and also the last week) is not typical of other weeks in the semester. The first week has its own character. Yet, it has been a typical “first week.”

Although I was involved in meetings related to fundraising, building a new building, updating our graduate online classes, and the expectations we have for our doctoral students when they teach or conduct research, this first week really revolves around getting close to 6000 students into classes.

There have been miscellaneous questions about classroom scheduling, syllabus requirements, course cancellations, and the availability of teaching assistantships.

Of course, we had a number of students who absolutely had to get a particular class at a particular time. In most of these cases, the student’s procrastination is to blame. In other cases, resource constraints (e.g., room availability or reduced faculty and staff) have created situations where we cannot offer enough classes to meet demand.

I saw several students who were dismissed last semester and whose request for readmission was denied. Even in a college as large as ours, we actually look at each and every one of these cases. In most of these cases, the student’s grade point average is too far below the required minimum to reasonably expect that the student will be able to raise it enough to stay in good standing. In some cases, it is mathematically impossible. I hear promises and guarantees that the student will make all A’s and all will be well. It comes as quite a shock to some of them that I base my decision on past performance. I hope this is the wake-up call they need to begin managing their education, and their lives, better.

We dealt with some tragic situations, too. I had three students who had to cope with either a parent’s unexpected death or catastrophic illness this week. Suddenly, these students have emotional and financial pressure that we would not wish on any young adult. In most of these cases, the students show uncommon grace and I am proud of the way members of our faculty step up to accommodate the needs of these students.

As the semester begins, I look forward to working with the President’s Council – our student group of student organization presidents. I hope all of our classes go well. I hope our students show up prepared for class. I hope the students push the professors to be better teachers and the professors push the students to be better learners. I hope our professors draw on the research they do to add more value to our classes. And when life gets in the way, I hope the students and the faculty make good decisions.

If these things happen, it should be a good spring.

Oh, the stories I hear!

Happy New Year!

Last year was very hectic for me and my blogging suffered as a consequence. One of my new year’s resolutions is to get back into the swing of things here. Generally speaking, I’ve tried to create posts that would provoke some thoughts. That will continue, but I’ve also decided to broaden the topics I cover. In other words, I’m going to also give you a glimpse into the issues that find their way to my office. To get things started, I thought it would be insightful to post a few of my very memorable student / parent interactions from the past two-and-a-half years.

There was the young lady whose mother called to inform her professors that the student would miss classes for a week while recovering from a minor, yet significant, surgical procedure. After some checking, I determined that the young lady was not a student at Florida State. That wasn’t what mom and dad had been led to believe for the past year or two.

There were twins who stopped by to ask if it was possible to get an “F+” instead of just an “F.” They thought mom would be less upset about an “F+.”

There was the young man who emailed that he probably would have done better in his classes if he had been as focused on them as he was on gambling this semester. Could he have another chance?

There was the young lady who told me (in December) that she wanted to turn in all of her work at the end of the prior summer semester, but her professor had refused to take it. Now, she wanted to drop the class (six months later) to remove the “F” on her transcript. I told her to email the work to me and I would consider the request. Based on her reaction, I am not surprised that I have not yet received the work.

There was the young lady who told her parents that we changed the rules on her in the middle of the year. Now she had to take another course in the spring and would not be able to graduate in the fall. Her parents complained, to the president’s office no less, and the matter was referred to me. After some checking, we found out that the real reason the young lady would take classes in the spring was because of the failing grades she had earned in the fall.

One student stopped by to determine whether he could get an “incomplete” grade in his courses. I asked about his circumstances. Well, he had missed some child support payments and “that usually leads to spending two or three weeks in jail.”

Of course, they aren’t all knuckleheads. There’s the young man who was in an accident that left him 100% deaf. He has worked extra hard to recover and keep up in his classes. Now fitted with Cochlear implants, we expect him to graduate and be successful.

There’s another young man whose grades were suffering because he was overly-involved in mentoring and volunteer activities. We talked about how he would be better able to do these things if he took care of his own needs first. He’s learned to manage his time and is doing great.

There’s the young lady who had no idea what major to choose and ended up in one that was just a bad fit for her. She presented herself in a professional manner, made a case for why we should consider her for admission to the business school, and followed up with more information when we had questions. We gave her a chance and she has shined. She will do well.

And finally, there is the President’s Council. This council is composed of the Presidents of the various student organizations. These students are focused, mature, and destined to do well in whatever career paths they choose.

The Curriculum Conversation

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to spend some time visiting with Dr. Charles Isbell, Jr., the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. Isbell described the innovative way the College of Computing had restructured their curriculum in the face of the declining enrollments in computer science that followed the dot com bubble bust just after the turn of the new century.

After our visit, I gave some thought to how the conversation around curriculum can dictate what we consider. In a nutshell, Georgia Tech has been able to change the conversation about curriculum from “what do you want to be” to “what do you want to do?” In doing this, they have created a flexibility within their curriculum that will allow them to respond to the dynamic environment of computing.

Surprisingly, Dr. Isbell related to me that when they began to consider how they would implement this new curriculum approach, they did not need to create many new classes. (I believe he said they only created two new classes.) They found they only needed to “repackage” their existing curriculum in a new way.

Their new approach makes so much more sense than the old way of thinking! They find that they can now identify specific humanities electives that students should take, because they can relate the elective to what the student wants to do after graduation. Students can now explain to recruiters why they are taking the classes they take, because they understand how the classes prepare the student to do what they want to do. (The old answer to why a course was taken: “Because it’s required.”)

Now, colleges of computing are probably much more accustomed to change than colleges of business are, so translating the idea into a college of business would take some work. But I think in the long run, changing the conversation from, for example, being a finance major to managing the financial assets of an organization, or from being an MIS major to applying technology to solve business problems, could produce a better graduate. Many of my colleagues will argue that they do this already, but it really isn’t how the conversation usually progresses. We tend to talk about majors. We tend to talk in the context of our silos.

Even these changes pale, however, when we really start to think “outside the box.” Imagine envisioning the business curriculum in terms of the interfaces between commerce, government, business, and consumer, rather than majors. This perspective could get us out of the major silos completely. I hope to write more on this idea in subsequent posts.

It Hasn't Been a Vacation

It has been over a month since my last blog post. The reason for the delay has been that I have accepted new responsibilities and now oversee all of the academic programs in the college. I've been busy learning new things that I need to know for this new responsibility.

However, I plan to be back! I hope to have a new post (or two) in December and resume my posting on a more regular basis in the spring.

Thank you for your interest in my thoughts and have a wonderful holiday season.

10,000 Hours

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, makes the case for a person needing to spend 10,000 hours to become expert at the highest level in his or her field. He presents evidence related to athletics, music performance, and professional expertise (e.g., programming a computer), among other fields. (He emphasizes other significant factors that contribute to success, but I’m just focusing on the hours spent working on one’s expertise here.)

This raised the question in my mind of how the 10,000 hours compares to a college education.

Our undergraduate degrees are based on 120 credit hours of course work. A three hour class typically has about 45 hours of “contact time,” that is, the amount of time the student sits in class excluding examinations.

One hundred twenty hours of course work translates to 40 courses (40 courses X 3 credit hours = 120 credit hours for the degree). Realistically, though, only 20 of those courses will be business courses. The other 20 are courses to satisfy general education, humanities, liberal studies, science, and so forth requirements. So, to focus on the hours contributing to business expertise, we have

20 courses X 45 contact hours per course = 900 hours.

Educators like to assume that students spend at least as much time preparing for class as they spend in it, so we might optimistically double our estimate to 1800 hours. (Notably, a lot of class time is not necessarily “active learning,” so perhaps our estimate should be labeled very optimistic.)

Thus, the undergraduate business education results in 18% of the needed experience to achieve expertise at the highest level.

What happens if we add an MBA?

An MBA adds 12 to 20 more courses, depending on the program. At best, we can double our estimate again to get to a grand total of 3600 hours.

This may explain why internships and work experience are such a benefit for business students. Without these, a student has put in only a little more than one-third of the time needed to achieve true expertise in a business field.

Interestingly, if we add a Ph.D. we can get to the magic 10,000 hour number relatively easily. A Ph.D. program is typically like a full-time job for at least 4 years.

40 hours per week X 50 weeks per year X 4 years = 8000 hours. This amount added to the undergraduate and MBA experience easily exceeds 10,000 – and a strong Ph.D. student is truly an expert in his/her dissertation topic area.

In summary, it seems we should encourage our undergraduates to take internships, our MBA students to have work experience, and our doctoral students to approach their work as a full time job. Their prospects will be better – and our programs will benefit from the reputation of our graduates.

Solving the Right Problem

You have probably heard the statement “A question well put is half answered” or something similar to it. John Dewey wrote this in his book “How We Think” about one hundred years ago. In fact, Dewey’s entire sentence is: “A question well put is half answered; i.e., a difficulty clearly apprehended is likely to suggest its own solution, -- while a vague and miscellaneous perception of a problem leads to groping and fumbling.” (page 94)

I would like to focus on the latter part of the quote; a part that rarely, if ever, is considered. In this part, Dewey writes that a vague and miscellaneous perception of a problem leads to groping and fumbling.

We spend a lot of time in business schools teaching students how to solve problems. We don’t spend nearly as much time in undergraduate business programs focused on the nuances of problem formulation. Students in an MBA program are likely to spend time identifying a problem, especially in a case study course, but even there I would venture to say that we spend more time discussing the pros and cons of various potential solutions to a problem than we do examining how to define the problem we confront and what we can learn directly from the process of formulating the problem at hand.

I’m not talking about a course where a student learns to formulate a linear programming problem or a system of equations. I’m talking about having students study problem formulation. Complex problems have many stakeholders. These stakeholders often have competing and / or conflicting objectives. Resources are often limited. The business environment is dynamic and ambiguous. Often, the problems confronted by decision makers in business are not problems that can be solved in terms of a “correct” answer. More likely, the problem may be resolved with solutions that can be characterized as good, better, or best. In some cases, executing an extensive problem formulation process can dissolve a problem through the better understanding we gain as a result of carefully considering what the problem is.

I suspect we could build an entire class on the topic of problem formulation, and make it really interesting by integrating aspects of research techniques, creativity, and critical analysis, among other topics.

After all, solving the wrong problem rarely leads to any good outcomes.

Now More Then Ever

If the title of this post caught your eye as “incorrect” – congratulations!

One of our new challenges in the business school is to convince students that writing still matters. In a world where text messages and “tweeting” make the ability to communicate with new combinations of symbols an asset, we can understand how the ability to write properly could degenerate. I’m no English professor, but I do strive to write properly. By “properly” I mean I try to punctuate sentences correctly, to use the correct word, and to write clearly and concisely.

Lately, students often object when I do not give them full credit on assignments due to writing errors. Over the last few years, the most common error I see is the misuse of “then.” I don’t know why “then” is used so frequently where “than” is the correct word to use.

All professors have their favorite examples of mistakes and I would not be surprised to find a web site devoted to such errors. Such errors can provide great comic relief, but is that what you want your writing known for in a business setting?

A Newspaper Ad

I remind students that they may be known by their written work well before they are known “personally” in a large organization. The memoranda they write could be read by anyone. That usually does not get their attention until I remind them how easy it is to forward an email.

I ask them, “If someone only knew you by your written work, would they want you in front of an important client? Would they feel you will pay attention to detail and manage an important project well?”

I know some of my colleagues do not want to be in the position of grading grammar, but to the extent we can elevate our students’ written work, we will graduate a better business student. Writing skills are important – perhaps now more than ever!