A lot of people go to college for seven years. They’re called doctors, according to the classic cinematic masterpiece Tommy Boy. That movie introduced me to a few assumptions before I actually attended school; like college is all about partying, and D’s get degrees. But my collegiate experience was drastically different from Tommy Callahan’s thanks in large part to the unique university culture where I studied and the various professors that shaped my education. I had some truly inspirational and thought provoking instructors. I also had a few legendarily lack-luster professors, and a whole lot who found themselves somewhere in the middle of that scale. For the most part my professors were good, although I’ve judged them on the assumptions I made about them and their profession.
My brother-in-law Ryan Gardner and I met in our college town when we lived across the street from each other. Even though we attended the same university, our assumptions didn’t exactly always line up in this conversation in a really interesting way. Thankfully Dr. Gwendolyn Dolske, professor of philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona and host of the Good Is in the Details **podcast, was gracious enough to come on the show and let us pose to her all of the assumptions we had. I’ll apologize now for the number of times I brought up business school in this episode. She and Ryan were cool about not calling me out for the excessive mentions… typical b-school guy. [Facepalm]. Dealing with the wide variety of student attitudes professors encounter is one of the many things for which professors don’t get enough credit!