Teaching econ is a full contact sport: Meet Owen Professor Luke Froeb

Luke Froeb is the man! Despite being a goofy academic, with a tragically unkempt sense of style, Luke Froeb was a highlight of the werewolf's business school experience. This little promotional featurette from Owen barely skims the surface of Froeb's addictively caustic, yet effective teaching style.

Froeb's blunt personal style, in your face attitude, and take-no-prisoners approach not only made his Managerial Economics class provocative and challenging, but also helped drive the key take-aways home in a stark and memorable fashion. Like the Yin and the Yang, his abrasiveness is balanced by his talent for being appropriately self-deprecating. He's a real gem of an instructor and memories of his classroom will stick with the werewolf for the foreseeable future.

The werewolf has always enjoyed the themes of economics, and the casual informal pursuit of it, but was always disappointed by how poorly the subject had been taught while he was an undergraduate. If the field had more professors like Luke Froeb, he thinks students would be more drawn to it.

The Business School Experience: CPR or UPS?

This clip sums up the werewolf's business school experience. Well, not really, but close.

It was shortly after business school started, during one of those intense study sessions where nothing makes sense, while realizing the scope of the pending disaster that was Corporate Finance, that the werewolf's good friend, and partner-in-crime, the Saint Bernard, fired up this video. It immediately alleviated the asphyxiating pain of weighted average cost of capital calculations and gave the werewolf the gift of hope for the first time in a couple of weeks. Sayings like "knocking the truck window out," "givin' the man UPS," and "that's the way it was" became a coded vernacular for gauging how a particular class, day, event, was going at b-school.

The werewolf doesn't believe that having an emotional circle jerk with an over-educated therapist or binging on pre-packaged pharmaceutical wonder pills is a solution to any credible problem we face as humans. However, staring the cosmic joke that is life in the face, laughing, and moving on to the next challenge is. However, this video was a great secondary coping mechanism.

Someone very smart aptly described the b-school experience as drinking from fire-hose. Anonymity precludes the werewolf from giving credit where it is due, but rest assured, that quote is understated in its accuracy. It really only applies to the first year, and more accurately the first-half of the first year, but boy, does that quote hit the nail on the head.

The werewolf was always more of a "dreamer with an attitude" than the "master of the universe" that traditionally pursues an MBA. He certainly fits the bill as an atypical MBA searching for a career. B-school changed the werewolf in several ways, mostly for the better. In hindsight, it was a grueling, but worthwhile experience that he is thrilled he undertook. It has given him, coupled with exile a unique perspective on life. At the moment, the werewolf feels "like the man was dead" but is eagerly searching for "some UPS." Please bear with him as he tries to reflect, make sense of, and place value on his b-school education.