Each year prospective business students eagerly await their admission into the University’s Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration, and with good reason. The College was was ranked 29th among public business schools in 2013, according to Bloomberg Business Week.
The college hires a range of instructors, which vary from individuals with years of corporate experience to professors holding doctorates in their field with insights into research, and each of them offer unique teaching approaches.
Dan McCormack is a former corporate official with his own perspective on teaching at Culverhouse.
“It’s always good, in my opinion, to apply real world examples to concepts,” said McCormack. “I also believe that students have a tendency to naturally be more interested in something such as real life experiences.”
McCormack has 35 years of corporate experience, primarily with Canon, a company who produces cameras and other imaging products. He now works solely as an instructor at Culverhouse, teaching courses such as Introduction to International Business and International Marketing.
However, professors holding a doctorate have their own views of teaching in the business field as well.
“The Ph.D is a research degree that provides students with a series of experiences that help them to think in systematic ways that correspond broadly with theoretical frameworks that are used to develop models of human behavior and organizational functioning,” said Daniel Bachrach, a Culverhouse professor and doctor of organizational behavior-human research management. “Insight into the nature of work processes emerges through an in-depth training experience that is designed to prepare future researchers and teachers to think about the business equation at the intersection of theory and practice.”
Bachrach said he spent one year as a doctoral student consulting for a company where he developed a statistics program that was sold to Ford Motor Company. The following year Bachrach worked as a professor and currently teaches Introduction to Management and a doctoral seminar on organizational behavior.
Amanda Fenton, a junior majoring in finance, said there are benefits of each teaching style.
“Speaking as a student who wants to go into corporate [business], it’s awesome to see the experience officials had in the real world,” she said. “You see things that they’ve done that you can apply when you start as a young professional.”
Fenton said having professors who hold doctorates offers an important view in the business school.
“I appreciate in class how they use the data and the information that they’ve done years of research on, and I like seeing how we can apply these facts to our own careers,” she said. “I think the awesome part about Culverhouse is that they offer both, and I think that having both perspectives as a student makes it a stronger education,” Fenton said.
