The Best Professors in the World

In all the havoc and the routine of it, I sometimes forget to appreciate it. 

They invite us to their homes, they participate in our events, they are always accessible and will always find the time and they are with us every day. 

They are the best professors in the world. Recently ranked #1 professors in the world by Princeton review (up from #2) Darden’s professors are one more reason why Darden is such a great program. Yes, they have their research, but it is not why they are at Darden. Our professors are here because they love to teach. As students, we don’t want to feel that classes are simply an obstacle a professor has to overcome in order to go back to his or her research. We want fully engaged professors, that don’t just teach a class because they have to, but teach it because they want to. But we actually have more than we asked for: we have professors who teach because they love to.

There are no office hours for professors at Darden. Instead, their door is always open and they will always find the time for students. The other day after class, I still didn’t have something sit right. The professor invited me to his office when I’m done with classes. “we’ll walk through the numbers, you’ll understand”.

Darden professors are more than instructors. They are fully involved and engaged.

The other night, our professor showed up in our learning teams some time before 10pm. He was on his way back from Tennis and wanted to see how we were doing with our assignment.

In the last day of classes, we all came wearing our section’s T-shirts. One of our professors, of course, was dressed in business attire.  Jokingly, our section rep asked if he didn’t get the email. Our professor seemed surprised that there was an email. Five seconds later, he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal our section T-shirt underneath.

During our Darden-cup games, we get double participation points if professors attend. And they do.

If you’re looking for the best class experience, with the best professors in the world, you can stop looking. But why take my word for it? Schedule a class visit and judge for yourself.

Gazogle

A game we played this week where we were divided into groups and asked to build Gazogles - Lego structures that look like the picture on the right.

The full game description can be found in an article writen by one of our operations professors. This would have probably helped my team not to do as bad as we did, but we cannot look these things up until we finish playing the game or discussing a case due to the honor code. Some more insights we've had in class discussin this is that we could actually talk to our customers and settle deals with them, perhaps sell them special product for premium price. We could also exchange some lego pieces for other pieces (bigger) to make the whole structure simpler to assemble.

I can say that being on the inside (I was assembler 1) you get to diagnose your own process as well as the one before or after you in the way they affect you. We have 15 minutes between rounds to perform process improvement (Kaizen events) but they went by so fast I could have sworn it was 3 minutes. During the events my group failed to consolidate the ideas so we ended up improving parts of the process while other parts (like supplies and procurement) remained inefficient rendering the whole process inefficient.

We failed collecting the input from all the different stations and looking at the whole process and improving it. I guess it may have been easier for an outsider to see things clearly.

This is probably what they hire consultants to do.

Anyway, I guess hindsight is 20/20.