Was It Something I Said?
Welcome Back to the Future
By Vijay Mehrotra
"Welcome back / Your dreams were your ticket out.
Welcome back / To that same old place that you laughed about.
Well, the names have all changed since you hung around,
But those dreams have remained and they're turned around."
John Sebastian, "Welcome Back"
The Facts: I am now an assistant professor in the Decision Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University. I teach undergraduates and MBAs, business majors along with a smattering of other students from other departments.
The Transition: Even though I teach in a business school, what I do as a professor seems preposterous to most people that I knew in the business world. The teaching load is daunting to many ("what do you talk about for all that time?"). Others, graduates of prestigious academic and professional programs, are not sure why I would settle for anything less. The mo$t common que$tion$ are almo$t never expre$$ed directly, but in$tead hang breathle$$ly un$poken. My continued consulting work in industry does little to convince these people that I am not insane.
The Return: Eleven years after finishing my Ph.D., I am back in academia. I hear students' voices in the hallway outside my office, engage in the rituals of university life (holding office hours, attending meetings, preparing for class, grading exams, griping about The Administration), and feel the tenure clock ticking.
Being on a campus brings familiar joys. Teaching has always been a pleasure, even as I do far more of it than ever before. I greatly enjoy visiting with students, hearing about their dreams and hopes, and doing my small part to help them down life's road. I welcome opportunities to stroll across the green grass of autumn, to relish the crispness in the air and to feel — if only in those fleeting, delicious moments — that all is right with the world.
There are also predictable frustrations. I am by nature impatient with bureaucracy, and even working at Blue Pumpkin (a small company with just over 200 employees) I would occasionally grow frustrated. San Francisco State has 27,000 students, 800 faculty members, and a staggering number of department, college and university regulations, committees, procedures, programs, processes, precedents and protocols. Yikes!
More significantly, I must once again confront my own self-doubts, most notably about research. During new faculty orientation, one scholar after another confidently described their academic interests to the group, while I sat dumbly, wondering nervously about my own research agenda. As I struggle through the queueing networks literature, preparing a paper from my dissertation and getting a sense of what has happened since I "left" this field, the inner doubts begin to scream again: "You're not smart! You can't even follow this stuff! What are you doing here?!"
"Was there something that made you come back again?
So what could ever lead you / Back here where we need you?"
Plausible Explanations: What exactly am I doing here? Well, there is the official rap about getting married, having a less stressful job, decreasing the time spent on both commuting and business travel, and starting a family soon. There is the more cynical explanation that I "just wasn't tough enough to cut it in The Real World," and so had to flee back to the ivory tower.
Finally, there's the "It's a Wonderful Life" version. Last January, I was in Minneapolis on business, and decided to visit some undergraduates at my alma mater, St. Olaf College. These students were doing a projects course, forecasting calls and staffing requirements for a large retailer's help desk operations, applying what they had learned in their math majors. In those few magical hours, rolling up my sleeves and providing for these fine young people from my rich trove of accumulated wisdom, I suddenly realized my true calling.
The real truth is different from all of that. This isn't a world-class research factory like Stanford or a first-class liberal arts college like St. Olaf. SFSU is a gritty commuter school in an odd corner of the city, featuring an ethnically and economically diverse student body of Anglos, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans of all sorts and foreign students — and faculty — from just about everywhere. Almost all students work outside of school, and more than one-third are the first in their families to attend college. I feel good about my contribution to their educations, and about participating in this patchwork. As Gloria Steinem said, "Go to San Francisco State. It's the only campus that looks like the world."
Moreover, this is also a new career. Can I become a great teacher, or even a good one? Since I'm still in my first semester, the jury is clearly still out. Sure, I'm totally comfortable speaking in front of groups, but how will I do when they see me week after week, for an entire semester? How will I test, how will I grade, and most importantly, how will I stay a couple of lectures ahead of my students? How will they respond after they've seen my shtick a couple of times? Can I balance the competing demands of teaching three courses a term, publishing high-quality research and providing service to the university? Will I somehow succeed in learning the ways of this surprisingly complex institution and find my place in its culture?
Like my students, I've got a lot to learn — and that's what I'm doing here. Isn't that what a university is for?
Vijay Mehrotra teaches in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State Univ.
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