Hi everyone, I'm Catenya McHenry and you are joining us on a brand new Q & A with
Lil. We are so excited to keep doing these and of course, great to see you Lil. You
are on campus today I see. How are you doing?
- Well I'm doing great. I wish we had more people to drop by. One of the
true pleasures at the McCombs School are the chance encounters. And of
course during COVID there are fewer chance encounters so I hope to see
more of you down the road.
- Yes, well I'm excited to talk to you today. We have a long, well, not a
long list, but a good healthy list of topics to talk about today. We're
going to talk about contact tracing and how things are going on
campus as well as in the city when it comes to COVID testing. We'll
talk about some research updates from our esteemed professors.
We'll talk about free speech week, as well as homecoming, and then
we have some exciting news for a project that we've been working
on for a little while. So let's get started with contact tracing.
Can you give us an update on how things are going and how cases look on campus
as well as throughout the city.
- So one of the great things is, the deans get an update from the dean
of Dell Med, Clay Johnson. And just this week, he was saying that things
continue to look very low here on campus and in Travis County. The
hospitalizations and the positivity rates are pretty low. There are a few hot
spots developing in other cities in Texas but not here in Austin nor in
Dallas or Houston this week.
So, it's looking still pretty good. But we continue to encourage
you to participate in the proactive community
testing which is easy to accomplish here on campus.
- So, we've gotten off to a pretty good start in the fall semester,
can you talk about what the spring semester will look like?
- Well, we're in the middle of planning for all of our courses
right now and we're planning in the same way for the fall.
So, the McCombs School will be offering I hope about half of
its sections in hybrid format, where students can choose to come face-
to-face with their professors. Although, if they need to be
studying from home, they can do that. In a dual modality.
Our largest classes will still be fully online and that means the
total number of student credit hours, the majority of those are
online but we're doing everything we can because we have so many professors
that are willing to be here in person with our students. But in short, the
spring will look much like the fall.
- And speaking of professors, in addition to teaching, they've been really busy
with research so we have some fantastic research updates
Several of professors, their research and their research papers have landed
in some top tier news publications.
So let's talk about some of our research highlights.
- So one of the things that is just a highlight, a couple of times a month
is that our associate dean for research, Susan Bernard Cheque and her
assistant Lisa Stackovich sent out a really great research newsletter
that has all the links to the papers. Clickable, and I like to collect and
look. And one of the things that we see is that marketing professor,
Steven Anderson, just won the best dissertation paper award
in the in forms journal for his "Pathways to Profit, the
"Impact of Marketing versus Finance Skills on Business
Performance."
And it's a randomized controlled field experiment with different types of
business training to nearly a thousand entrepreneurs in South Africa.
Congratulations Steven.
And we've also had numerous professors cited in the Wall Street
Journal this month and in Bloomberg's Press Wire. And so, Andrew Brodski,
in our management department, has a new paper that was quoted in the
Wall Street Journal about the benefits of elevating a communication to
face-to-face if at all possible when the conversation needs to be more delicate
than merely informational. For which text is fine. And John Griffin was in
the Wall Street Journal with his colleague Sam Krueger about
the housing market crash recently.
And then in the IROM department, professors Wynn, Lynn, and Winston,
were featured in a Bloomberg story about how to keep sales people
motivated in an online environment, where you can't have face to face
team meetings. So, I commend the research newsletter to all of you
so that you can learn more about what all of our colleagues are
doing.
- Well, they are doing some great work, and we also mention those too in the
McCombs Minute.
So make sure you're up to date on the McCombs Minute as well. Congratulations
to all those professors, some really great work.
So we have something else exciting that's coming up called free speech
week, which is October 19th through the 25th. So there are events happening
all across campus which president Hartzell has encouraged the colleges
to participate in. And McCombs is hosting four events. So talk about the one
headlining event. We have a special guest speaker.
- Well, we have an MBA Alum who when she worked for Microsoft
Inspire had as their social lead, had one billion impressions of her media
posts. And she's going to present a session on personal branding and
I think this is very important for our students because we of course are
celebrating free speech. And the right to make ones opinions known in
whatever platform we want, but she'll be talking about personal branding
and how one might think about is there a trade off between posts
that students make on a facebook or an Instagram, or a Snapchat, or
other Tik Tok where down the road employers and colleagues and other
people in your life have those social media outlets as another way to get
to know you. And to what extent do you want to avail yourself of
all of your free speech rights while you're building your personal
brand.
And the Salem Center for Policy here at the McCombs School
has a number of free speech activities as well and I'm just
very excited that President Hartzell is encouraging all of
these non-partisan recognitions of freedom of speech and the
press. Which is very important on the eve of presidential
election.
- Yes. Right, this is a very crucial year. Rachel Lee is the guest speaker
that you were mentioning who is an MBA Alum. And in addition to
the Salem Center the career management department, or
career management group is also planning to host an event
too. So make sure you pay attention to the McCombs
calendar to see when those events are happening that
you can participate in.
I'm getting my words mixed up. I had my coffee today. So, also
coming up during that week is homecoming week, which this
time for the first time, it will be virtual. But still, just as exciting as
in previous years. That's happening October 21st through the 24th.
So can you talk a little bit about homecoming week and what we
can look forward to?
- Well, yesterday, I got to record in advance, a pre-game interview
with our athletics director Chris Del Conte, hosted by management
professors Ethan Buress, the chair of the department and Kirk Golds-
bury, who is a lecturer who is a particular expert on sports
analytics and basketball in particular. And they pitched some questions to
both Chris Del Conte and me about how COVID was affecting the athletics
program and the business school and of course our mutual exciting
building projects. Over in athletics they're working on the Moody Arena
for basketball, it's going to be World Class. And here in McCombs, we are
pressing forward with the (inaudible) hall and Hildebrandt hall projects.
- Well, that's very exciting. I know this will be something to look
forward to getting everyone together once again in a
virtual setting. But of course, exciting nonetheless. Something
else exciting that is brand new to McCombs is the McCombs online store. This has been
a project I think that's been in the works for a while and now if you want some
McCombs swag, you can now purchase it. So we'll have a link of course
directly to the store. But talk about how exciting this is Lil, for McCombs.
- So I have a McCombs mask on order right now. I hope you will
find something you like. Remember every Friday is Longhorn Friday,
wear your burnt orange in particularly if you're going to be in a zoom meeting
with people that we want to remember how excellent the McCombs School of
Business here at The University of Texas. So thanks Catenya.
- Yes, you're welcome. Thank you! And again, we have the link to the
online store directly here and also in the description of the video.
Well that is it for today Lil. Thank you so much for joining us and thank
you for all the great insight on things happening in McCombs and things
coming up here in McCombs. Thank you also for joining us today on the
October Q & A. We will see you next time with Lil on our next
Q & A.
- Sounds great.
- Hook em' Horns everybody.
- Hook em' Horns. Thank you.