I fucking love Kellogg professors.
And yes, the profanity is really necessary. I've never been more impressed by a bunch of teachers, who are razor-sharp smart, fun & entertaining, and genuinely care about their students. Now of course there is variance among the pool, but the number of professors who stand out at Kellogg I do feel is larger than average.
For instance, today, Schummer and McKeon, two Decision Analysis profs, gave a 2 hour long session on card-counting. This was not a theoretical exercise. These two professors actually frequent Vegas together as a card-counting team for fun (and profit), and have been quite successful, if their life-time bans from multiple casinos are any indication. In fact, notice the title of their handout.
We just finished up Special K!, a 30-year old Kellogg tradition that is a revue show that encompasses musical, dance, and theatrical talent with a humorous (hysterical, if you take my biased opinion) view of Kellogg life, soaked in a strong dash of Kellogg culture. The show was a raging success, judging on the feedback we have gotten, and part of what made it so special was the outstanding level of participation by professors. In particular, we had reached out to a number of (quite rockstar) professors, who obviously could have spent their time in many other ways than hanging around us and rehearsing lines to sing with us. Furthermore, other professors were willing to appear in our video shorts, and an even larger number bought tickets to the show, brought their family, emailed out to their students in an outstanding show of support. Yes, Kellogg professors do great research and teach well, but they also have no qualms about poking fun of themselves, have great senses of humor, and are 9 times out of 10 willing to go the extra mile for their students. That's what makes them top notch.
Tim Calkins writes a fantastic blog about happenings in the marketing world, Gad Allon (current Professor of the Year, the highest ) tweets to his students (quote of the day: "Real men use matlab.") and David Besanko sends out relevant, thought-provoking emails to his students on current affairs for no reason other than to stretch our thinking and challenge our preconceptions. I'm lucky enough to be taking Calkins and Besanko this quarter (both HIGHLY recommended) and hopefully I will be able to take Allon's OpStrat next year.
Just wanted to shine a light on something probably less often talked about Kellogg. We have an amazing, fun, student-led culture with clubs & activities up the wazoo, but we have faculty worth going to class for too.
