Understanding Your Professor

I once had a business school colleague who wore Birkenstock sandals with black socks and shorts every day to class. I had another who chain smoked, rarely made eye contact, and carefully scripted his lectures because he didn’t feel completely comfortable in front of groups.

If faculty seem like unusual creatures, maybe it is because we have such unusual expectations of them. Here’s the deal: You have six years to prove that you have many new interesting observations backed up by data that students want to hear, editors want to publish, and colleagues want to read so that they can learn from you. There are only two outcomes after six years: unemployment or promotion with a job for life. If you make the first cut, we are going to ask you to be even more interesting and secure a national reputation. If you achieve this distinction, we promote you again. By the way, the average project takes more than two years to complete. Eighty-five to 90 percent of papers professors submit for publication are rejected. Students expect you to be on the top of your game every class. If you need help, call. Otherwise get busy. Time is ticking.

That is your professor’s world and understanding it can help you get the most out of your time at UCF. In high school, your faculty were professional teachers.  They were paid to teach. UCF faculty are professional learners. It is what motivates them: they like to learn and it is what they value most in others. This distinction is not meant to excuse poor classroom performance, but if you want to impress a professor, demonstrate that you are eager to learn — a process where you are an active partner in discovery rather than expecting them to “teach.” It is a subtle distinction but an important one. Faculty hate it when they believe they are “spoon-feeding” students — pouring information into passive, empty heads. Questions like “Is this going to be on the test?” drive them insane. Ask it and they will dismiss you as a lazy student not worthy of their time.

Time is a faculty member’s most valuable asset. A professor has just six years to make a name in a world that is very hard to impress. That includes the time they are in class with you. Students are a professor’s legacy. The more successful students a professor has the better their reputation. But class time is short, and by necessity, focuses on the things that matter most to student success. Not everything a faculty member says is golden, but the answer to the question, “Did I miss anything important when I skipped class?” — will always be yes.

So now you’re thinking maybe the best strategy is to hide in the back and try not to say the wrong thing. A popular but bad idea. You came here to learn, and the best education happens in those moments you get to sit on a log with a professor and talk one-on-one. So go to office hours, especially when it is not right before a test or assignment is due. Getting to know a professor is a bit like being on a blind date — prepare, ask good questions, and listen. The best professors I had gave me new perspectives that changed the way I viewed the world. They devoted their lives to the study of a subject they believed was important and wanted to share their insights with anyone who would strike up a conversation. In sharing their ideas, they hoped to change the world. It should not surprise us that unique perspectives come from unique individuals. You don’t have to wear Birkenstocks, or chain-smoke. Just engage, appreciate the insight, and put it to good use.

Welcome to the Majors is Tomorrow

Welcome to the Majors is tomorrow.  It is likely to be different than anything you have experienced so far in college.

When someone becomes part of something that is different from what they have experienced, it is a good idea to mark this change with an event that signifies their movement into unfamiliar terrain and helps them better understand what will be expected of them going forward.

This is why we do Welcome to the Majors. The College of Business is different than what students have experienced to this point in their education. How different depends a bit on where they are coming from, but one way it is different for every new student is the importance we place on “doing” here. Up until this point, you have probably thought that school was about acquiring knowledge and seeking to “be” something– an accountant, finance major, etc., Success required you to sit and learn– passively consuming lectures and correctly repeating what you were taught on exams.

The basic message of Welcome to the Majors is that strategy won’t be enough to succeed. The College of Business is a professional school. We believe the ultimate purpose of business education isn’t knowledge, but action. Don’t misunderstand. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t learn to do things with that knowledge, it’s not something that is going to help you in your career.  Employers don’t hire you for what you know, the hire you for what you can do, which by the way is to solve their problems, not yours

To prepare you to succeed in that environment, the College insists that you learn how to do, even what that is uncomfortable for you.   This starts at Welcome to the Majors where we encourage you to think about what you want to do in your career rather than what you want to be, it continues in our core REAL courses where we ask you to work in teams to solve real world problems and in our professional development courses where you need to invest time in getting out of your comfort zone and do things that will help you develop your professional network. We want you to leave us with a reputation for doing that gets you a great job offer before graduation.

All of this will require a change in your mindset. Welcome to the Majors is just the start of that process. It will introduce you to the many opportunities you have in the college to embrace doing, connect with amazing people and get to where you want to go. But you need to come ready to dive in. Fortune here favors the bold.

Welcome to the College of Business

Today is the first day of the fall semester. If you are new to the college, you are not alone. We welcome more than 1800 new students to the College today along with several new faculty and staff. You’ve probably heard that we are big: more than 8200 undergraduate students, about a 900 graduate students and 225 faculty and staff. It can be hard to stand out in such a large crowd. If you stand in the back of the room and wait to be discovered or provided the help you need, you guarantee disappointment and risk total failure. Fortune
favors the bold in the College of Business. Don’t miss out on accessing the many resources we have to help you succeed.  The first seven weeks are critical to your success.  If you start out badly, its hard to catch up.

We are big, but our scale does not define your experience in the College, the shared
beliefs of our faculty and staff drive what goes on here.  We believe that

·        no real learning occurs inside your comfort zone,

·        the most defining moments happen when you get to have a conversation with someone who has something interesting to say,

·       you need to learn to understand and work with people who are different from you,

·        knowledge without action is useless, and

·        a great education expands your horizons, helps you make good choices about how to spend your one precious life, and gives you the skills and confidence to know
that you can compete with anyone anywhere.

We have created a culture and set of experiences that will demand that you engage with us in the pursuit of these objectives.  These things are not negotiable. If you are not willing to sign up for this adventure, we are not the place for you.  Frankly your life here will be miserable.  If you are willing to go down this path, the journey will transform you.

For our undergraduate students, the journey starts immediately.  “Welcome to the Majors” is Friday. It is designed to introduce our newbies to the culture of the college and help them start to form a strategy for how to stand out from the crowd and “get to the one” (if you
don’t know what that means you will). Welcome to the Majors is followed by Majors Week where you will get a chance to meet with some faculty and learn about the various majors in the college.

Besides getting to know some faculty, it’s a good idea to get to know some of your fellow students.  You will be working with them in teams and will need to reach out to them to help you succeed here. A great place to start is with our student ambassadors.. The
Ambassadors are part of the College’s leadership team and play an important role in shaping our culture. They are very visible and anxious to help students.  When you see one, say hello.  Also join one of our many registered student organizations in the college, they will connect you to other students interested in some of the same things you are as well as employers looking for interns and employees.

The Exchange is a place where we invite in community leaders who have interesting things to say to our students. Thanks to our friends at FAIRWINDS Credit Union,  we have a guest in the exchange almost every day.   Most days we have more than one Exchange. Many of our guests in The Exchange employ UCF interns and graduates. They are interested in identifying good talent while sharing their experiences and advice with young people like
you.  At no other time in your life will you have so many potential employers coming to visit you.  Go early and often, but remember to reserve your seat before you go, there are only 120.

By October you will likely have had your first tests in your primary core classes and will need to start taking a hard look at where your interests intersect your skills and talents.  Many students come into the College thinking they want to do something, only to change their mind mid-semester.  The Office of Professional Development can help you understand where you might best fit in.

The goal of all this activity in your first seven weeks is to get you engaged outside of your comfort zone, to get you in the right major, plot an efficient course to graduation and have you develop an action plan for landing the job you want before you leave here. Denise, the Office Professional Development team, the Primary Core Faculty, the Student Ambassadors, and Justin Barwick who runs The Exchange are all here to help you make good choices as you start your time with us.

Welcome to the UCF College of Business. We are glad you are here. Now start
doing stuff.

Admission into the Major, Summer 2023

At the end of each semester several hundred students finish the primary core and find out their major. For some, it is the major they thought they wanted when they came to us. For others it is a major they came to love after they arrived and for still others it is the major they have come to realize offers them the best chance at their success.

This semester, 364 students were admitted into a major within the Bachelors of Business Administration. (The BS in Economics does not require the college core and those students are not counted in these numbers). As has been true for some time, Integrated Business is the most common major in the college, closely followed by Finance. The admission numbers for each major in Summer 2023 are provided in the table below..

The cumulative data since we began the process of selective admission into the majors is provided below. 8671 students have entered a major over this period. Integrated Buiness and Finance are again the most common majors. An examination of the year by year data (not provided below) suggests these two majors are becoming even more common— this last semester they account for 61.2% of all new majors.

Congratulations to all of our new majors. Now get working on maintaining those good grades and getting to the one. Graduation will be here before you know it.

The Best Graduation Gift

Graduation was Saturday. I have been to a lot of them. At least 45 times as a member of the platform party. It’s still one of my favorite things to do. Despite all the pageantry and the central role the President and keynote speaker play in the event, it’s really about the students. No group gets a better view of this than the deans. We shake every graduate’s hand. Every single one. My record for shaking hands is fifty-six minutes straight. It was set with a long line of baccalaureate candidates one May graduation a year or two before the pandemic.

When you shake that many hands, you see a lot of different reactions. There are those shy students who just want to get off the stage. They are crossing it to please their parents. Then, there are those students who are just so glad the whole college ordeal is over. They tend to be gleeful and race across the stage so that they get on with their lives. Other graduates demonstrate their professional demeanor— they give you a firm handshake as they look you in the eye. They tend to exhibit a confidence about their future. A few graduates even pause to thank you for their college experience.

But, a couple of times each graduation a student let’s you know it means a lot more. Typically it’s an undergraduate student, the first person in their family to graduate college or someone at midlife who is looking to redefine their path or prove something to themselves. This time it was a masters student. A young woman who couldn’t hold back the tears as she she shook my hand. I have no idea what her personal story entails, but I was proud and thankful that we are a part of it.

Being a Dean can suck sometimes. You have to deal with a lot of things that weren’t the reason you got into the profession: budget vagaries, poor business processes, hiring difficulties, entitled people, etc., etc., There are days you marvel that anything meaningful actually gets done at all. Maybe this is why we get to shake all the hands at graduation. Seeing the look on that students face when she graduated reminded me why I do what I do. It’s the best graduation gift anyone could ever get.