We’d like for you to tell us about Walker College of Business students and what maybe impresses you about them?

Oh gosh. What impresses me? I was just talking with some people, well, a couple of students this week, that were asking for recommendation letters. And I always ask for a transcript and a resume and they just blow you away with their accomplishments. I probably shouldn’t mention names, and I won’t, but one young lady applied to the Martha Guy Summer Institute program. Wow! She is just awesome, just awesome. Motivated. Challenging. All of the things a faculty member wants in a classroom, you get with Walker students.

Can you tell us what you like most about your job?

Probably doing the internships, supervising internships. That’s probably the most rewarding thing. Secondly, doing out study abroad programs in Germany, in England, in China and other places. It’s very rewarding to help our students see the world and see what it’s like in other places.

Can you tell us a little bit about study abroad and how that works and how students get involved?

Well, we have many study abroad programs, some of them running a year or a semester or we have our summer study programs. This year our summer study programs are going to Asia, Scandinavia, Germany. Wwe have a small one in Spain, which is geared toward entrepreneurship.

And they run anywhere from two and a half to five weeks, and pretty much everything is included in the price of them. And we visit businesses and, in in the case of Germany, we actually work for a week with German students on business cases in small groups. And they work together and develop friendships and collegial relationships. And then we visit eight businesses while we’re in Germany. So they get exposed to a lot of different things while they’re there.

Do all students have the opportunity to participate?

They can. Unfortunately not all can afford to participate, although we do have some scholarship monies available and financial aid is always available to students in the summer study programs.

Let’s talk about your research interests – Do you have a favorite?

Well, my research interests are pedagogical – teaching international business, looking at various international programs around the country. It’s kind of interesting; the latest real kind of academic research I’ve done is on the history of wind power in Denmark and the United States and then a follow-up paper to that which was why the industries have taken such divergent paths in these two countries. And that was a fun paper to do; I did that with a colleague in Denmark.

Can you tell us some strengths of the international business program here at Walker College?

Yeah. I don’t want to reach around and pat myself on the back, but I put the curriculum together for that major and it is probably the toughest undergraduate curriculum in the country because of the requirement for an international language minor. If you come in with no language you end up taking 27 semester hours of language, which is a lot, and it is quite challenging. But, when I got my degree in international business as an undergraduate, there was no language requirement and I felt like I got cheated.

And so I really built this language requirement in. We started off with German, French, and Spanish, and now we’ve added Chinese. And the response of the foreign language department has been just fantastic. They’ve really worked with us all the way to make this work. So the language requirement is a “toughie” but, I think, to understand the culture, you need to understand the language, and it just kind of falls into place.

And the second real defining feature of that is the international requirement – to study abroad or to do an internship abroad. And about half of the students choose to do an internship, which is really interesting. They end up working for a firm in the country which speaks the language of their minor. So it’s a really neat experience. It really throws them into the culture, kind of “sink or swim” when they’re working.

What do our graduates do with an international business major?

Oh, gosh. It’s almost like this is what you need to have these day to get a good position. Our students are working at BMW down in Spartanburg. In fact, an ASU grad is the Human Resource directory down there. They’re working for Maersk, doing management training in Copenhagen, Denmark. Two of our students are there right now doing that. Maersk is a sea-land transportation,  container ships and that sort of thing. It’s the parent company of that. And then when they finish that, they’ll be sent all around the world. One of our – and we’ve had 3 people go through that program – and one of them is in San Diego right now working for one of the container-ship ports there.

Just anything you can think of – both domestic companies and foreign-owned companies our students are working for.

Great. Super. It sounds like you have a lot of interaction with students. What gets you excited about being in the classroom and teaching?

Just having the opportunity to share things with them that they may not be aware of, you know. We were talking just in class yesterday about the demise of the textile and furniture industries in North Carolina. We were talking about NAFTA and the effects that NAFTA’s had. And I was telling them, that really, don’t look upon it as being a loss of opportunity for you but it’s a gain of opportunity because what will be in demand in the future is what we really need to look at.

And those are things like global warming and alternative fuels. If we could put the same kind of emphasis that we did for the space race in the 1960s, and I lived through that so it was kind of an exciting time. These present all kinds of opportunities for students – alternative energy sources, doing something about global warming. All the technology that’s involved needs business and it needs international cooperation. So it’s just a neat fit for our students.

If you were going to sell Walker College of Business, how would you do that? What’s great about it.

If I was going to sell it? Faculty that are committed to the learning process. Small class sizes. My classes right now are 16 and 25. I teach two and they’re small, intimate classes. They’re classes in which people get to know one another.

In my class, the whole class works on a group project. It’s not just groups within the class, but it’s the whole class working together. So they get a chance to really know one another well. And those are the people they’ll be working with for the rest of their working lives – who are the people that they meet here and the connections that they make here.

So that’s a real opportunity – to have small classes and to have that opportunity to work with faculty members, and not teaching assistants. It’s not that I have anything against teaching assistants, but faculty members have a little bit more experience.

I’ve been here for 29 years and I love this place! I do. I love coming to work everyday. I love my job. I love what I do and it’s not work. It’s fun.