The Grad School Diaries: The Summer School Paradox

When you’re a college student showing up for the first day of class, there’s an anticipation you feel showing up for class on the first day; a very human anxiety in the face of the unknown. At lower levels of your education you don’t get a feeling like this; most of the teachers are known to you, by reputation if not in person, and even if a specific class is just a disaster waiting for a place to happen, you probably didn’t have much choice about taking it in the first place. But as a college student, you’re assumed to be an adult, and you probably selected the section and the instructor (if not the actual class); you may even have selected which building in which your section of the class will be taught. If failure comes to you here, it’s entirely your own fault – and the price of failure will almost certainly be higher than just being left back for a year and having to try again. What they don’t tell you is that it’s exactly the same from the other side of the podium…

For summer of 2010 I had volunteered to take any class the Department needed covered, which sounds a lot like shameless toadying until you realize that we get paid more if we work in the summer – and there are people in line ahead of me for the Management Strategy class I normally teach. I’d also prefer the challenge of getting ready for a class I’ve never taught before to sitting idle, and there’s also the fact that if I end up looking for work at a teaching college somewhere (and I might have to; I’m not exactly one of the fair-haired children of this discipline) it would be helpful to have experience in multiple courses on my vita, but I didn’t mention any of that when I threw my hat in the ring. In the event, it turns out they had an overage of people who wanted to teach strategy, but a shortage of people for Management 325 (Human Resources), which is how I wound up teaching a subject that isn’t from my specialty or even my side of the Department. Which, in turn, is how I wound up here, in a classroom on the first level of the business complex, with one week to learn a whole class worth of material, adjust to working in a windowless classroom with state-of-the-art audio/visual systems and miserably bad ventilation, and absorb an entire semester worth of unfamiliar class content…

Fortunately, public speaking isn’t exactly a new thing for me; I’ve taught three previous classes here at MSU, plus all of the seminars I did for the Santa Monica College SBDC program (over a hundred two-hour programs in all) and the three-day grant-writing programs I taught back in the consulting firm days. But the truth is, no matter how many times I do this, it’s always the same: I’m always a bundle of nerves until it’s time to go on – and then I step up to the lectern and switch on the microphone, and I know exactly what I’m going to do. At least this time I’ve got the slides and materials for the class ready to go – courtesy of one of my colleagues who normally teaches 325 (and gets much higher teacher evaluations than I do). Now all I have to do is find the balance of when to speak from the podium, when to wander into the class, when to cue the slides and when to start the videos, and get a feel for the content I’m trying to get across…

Because the truth is, I may not know much about Human Resources in the sense of being to quote chapter and verse from management textbooks or the foundational articles in the field – but I know a lot about managing and leading people. It’s possible that I’ll never amount to much in academia, just as I never amounted to much in business. But every time I see that light go on behind somebody’s eyes; every time one of the people listening to me out there in the class suddenly grasps the concept I’m trying to explain, and realizes what it might mean to them as a working manager; every time one of my students learns something he or she never knew was even a real thing, I realize that it doesn’t matter about all of the things I’m not. I am a teacher – and it will do fine…

When is a career screw-up and lightly-regarded doctoral student not a failure? When he’s making both business and academia just slightly better than they would be without him. I’ve traveled a long way to learn this Summer School Paradox – but I think I’m glad I did…