Dannals, Fisher, and Kyung Receive 2021 Tuck Teaching Excellence Awards

For teaching in the core curriculum, students chose Assistant Professor of Business Administration Jennifer Dannals, who co-teaches the Managing People course with Professor Daniel Feiler. In the elective curriculum, students for the first time selected two faculty members, “due to a combination of the vote totals, extensive praise for both faculty members, and the unprecedented nature of the remote and hybrid learning environment,” says Caleb Dorfman T’21, the academic representative for his class. They chose clinical professor Peter Fisher, who teaches The Arrhythmia of Finance, and Associate Professor Ellie Kyung, for her teaching in the research-to-practice seminar Time in the Consumer Mind.

The Teaching Excellence Awards were set up by the Class of 2011 to “celebrate the learning environment at Tuck by honoring the faculty who, in the eyes of their students, have made an outstanding contribution to the quality of the educational experience.” Each year, an academic representative from the graduating class surveys his or her classmates about their favorite teachers and meets with a committee to examine the comments and data and select the winners.

Jennifer Dannals, who was named on Poets & Quants' best 40-under-40 professors list last year, has been at Tuck since 2018. She and fellow professor Dan Feiler designed Managing People two years ago, as part of the core curriculum review.  It starts in Tuck Launch and continues through the Summer Term.

“A lot of our natural human tendencies for managing and interacting with others in a workplace can be maladaptive,” Dannals says. “Our course tries to point out those natural biases towards certain behaviors and then gives some structure to thinking about when they’re acceptable and when you should go in a different direction.” For example, Dannals explains, we’re naturally conflict-averse, but sometimes conflict is necessary or even good for a team. Also, we’re naturally more likely to attribute outcomes to someone’s personality or fixed characteristics, so we don’t appreciate the situational factors involved. These over-arching themes cover many sessions, including motivation, decision-making and gender and racial biases.

The Class of 2021 completed Managing People in the fall of 2019. Here are a few of their comments about Dannals’ teaching:

• “Prof. Dannals thinks innovatively about the classroom. Her classes and course materials are engaging and refreshing. Her core class was one of the best parts of Fall A.”
• “Professor Dannals was a tremendous first teacher at Tuck. We got to connect with her early during Tuck Launch and throughout our Fall A term. She was always well-prepared and engaged during our classes, willing to go off on discussion topics of interest to the class while still providing a solid and data-driven grounding for our lessons. Her ability to intertwine practical exercises, class discussions, and academic research stands out amongst the core curriculum as one of the few instances where all three elements intersect to provide a deeper learning opportunity.”
• “Professor Dannals' class was a bright spot during Fall A. Her innovative teaching style with interactive exercises made the takeaways really stick, and she focused on topics that were relevant and interesting. Professor Dannals is also passionate about her work and research and she is inspiring to learn from.”
• “Professor Dannals knows how to make a class both entertaining but also informative. It can be hard to make Managing People novel especially when everyone think its intuitive, but she knows how to make the concepts relatable.”

Peter Fisher came to Tuck in 2013, after a career that took him from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the U.S. Treasury and to BlackRock. In that time, he hired and mentored many MBAs and found that they rarely came equipped to read a balance sheet and to understand what he calls “the deeper meaning of double-entry bookkeeping.” The Arrhythmia of Finance is the course he designed to fill in those gaps which, as the syllabus explains, aims “to provide you with the opportunity to develop and practice analytic skills (principally non-quantitative) that can help you better understand the sources of volatility in financial asset prices: why the heartbeat of finance appears to be irregular.” Fisher breathes life into that question through class sessions such as “What is the role of chance in your life—and in history,” “Why do you think that?”, “What is money and who says so?”, “What makes capitalism go?” and readings that range from Tolstoy and Kahneman to Keynes and Warren Buffet. A friend recently observed that he was teaching “completeness,” and Fisher agrees. To understand the subtleties of risk and money, Fisher invokes a range of disciplines: accounting, economics, corporate finance, business strategy, epistemology and probability, just to name a few.

“This is the course I imagined I would teach,” Fisher says, “but it took me a few years to get it into the zip code that I wanted. The students have been both helpful and wonderful.  I have learned a great deal.”

Here are some comments from Fisher’s students, who took the course last fall:

• “Arrhythmia of Finance goes beyond finance and is a class about life lessons. It teaches you how to think. Peter Fisher does a great job of expanding the mind beyond the here and now, to the broad cases throughout life.”
• “Fisher is a fantastic professor. This was probably the most intellectually challenging class I took at Tuck. It made me think hard and differently and he really tests you in the classroom to think about why you do what you do. It changes the way that you think and it causes you to question what you are doing and why you are doing it. He also has a great line up of guest speakers. And it is clear that he really cares about his students. He was one of the few professors to hold in-person lunches and meetings with students in the fall and he even decided to teach an in-person class session (actually an extra class session for him). That is dedication.”
• “Peter Fisher changed my life. From the day I first met him before Admitted Students Weekend, Peter has been an incredibly patient and eye-opening teacher. He teaches me about how to think about life. He spent two hours with me in the lobby of BlackRock NYC that first day. He taught me about the regret minimization framework, a way to make binary decisions. His class is far and away my favorite class at Tuck. There, he taught me how to think about risk, why I might be wrong, and why I think the way I do. Importantly, he taught me to always shoot my shot! Thank you for all you have done for me, Peter!”

From the very first session of Ellie Kyung’s course Time in the Consumer Mind, Kyung aims to disabuse students of the notion that time is just an objective number they might see expressed as the exponent “t” in an equation. “There are so many psychological mechanisms in how we think about time, including how it’s subjective, how it affects your decision-making, and how you use it as a resource,” Kyung says. Kyung leads the students through this theme with sessions on avoiding regret, intertemporal choice and temporal discounting, mental accounting, priming, and time’s role in their own life goals, among others.

The research-to-practice (RTP) seminar is the perfect format to explore these ideas, because the class size is small (14 or so) and each session is three hours, allowing plenty of time for deep conversations and reflection. A central component of RTPs—there are roughly 10 of them offered at Tuck—is to teach students about the knowledge creation process by way of reading academic papers. The objective is not just to develop knowledge about the subject area, but also to discuss experimental design, data collection, and empirical evidence. “Students have to want to dive in and read these papers and engage,” Kyung says. “It’s a nice opportunity for students to see what it is we do as researchers and really dive into one topic and introduce them to a new way of thinking.”

Beyond the implications of the subjective nature of time, Kyung hopes to teach her students to see the limitations and possibilities of data. As managers, students will one day have to make business decisions with imperfect information. They could reject and criticize that information, but the better approach, Kyung says, is to determine what conclusions they can draw from the evidence they have, and then to figure out what additional data they might need to make a better decision. “I want them to be constructive skeptics,” she says.

According to Kyung, it is really the Tuck students who make a class like this possible. It is not easy to learn to read, let alone discuss in depth, academic papers in just one quarter. This year’s students had to be flexible with a hybrid format. “In spite of the challenges that this year posed, everyone was willing to really dig in. It was an amazing experience for me to have that time with them. What I will miss when I leave Tuck is, without question, the students,” she says.

Kyung taught Time in the Consumer Mind last winter. Here are some comments from her students:

• “Professor Kyung's elective was the best class I have taken at Tuck—and it's all because of her as a professor. Ellie so genuinely cares about her students and loves Tuck, and that shows up so much in this class. She challenged us to think critically about not just our time at Tuck and our first post-Tuck job, but to consider how our choices would influence the trajectory of our professional and personal lives. I truly believe I will be a better person and colleague/manager because of her class!”
• “Ellie's elective was one of the most influential classes I've taken at Tuck, changing how I think about both my professional and personal choices around resource allocation, time and prioritization, and decision making. These are all areas that will shape how I live my life moving forward. She also fostered an incredible classroom dynamic that was safe, supportive, vulnerable, and thus deeply connected among her and the students. I was truly emotional when this class ended and have found myself referring to it in conversations more often than not.”
• “Professor Kyung's RTP, Time in the Consumer Mind, was life-changing for me and was the most transformative experience I've had during my Tuck education. The class forces us to grapple with huge, important concepts like the value of our time, the meaning of regret, and how we perceive the future from both a managerial and personal point of view. Yet despite the intellectual and emotional challenges of this work, the class provided an unprecedented level of support: academically, we learned research methods to explore deep questions through experimental design and testing, while personally, our class became a safe haven to be vulnerable and creative as we processed the material and grappled with an intensely difficult year. At the center of this was Professor Kyung herself, who made everything possible through the IMMENSE effort and empathy she brings to every aspect of the teaching experience.”
• “Ellie Kyung is an amazing professor who has a unique ability to connect with her students. This ability helps her to teach incredibly insightful lessons in marketing that have significantly changed how I approach the subject. Furthermore, she has absolute mastery over her subject matter and is able to answer just about any question thrown at her with knowledge of the research conducted in the particular area the question relates to. I thoroughly enjoyed her elective this year and would recommend her to any student!”