Business Student Culture: A Questionnaire

So you’re now a first-year professor at a new university, and you’d like a Cliffs Notes guide to the type of students you will be teaching. Welcome! Most books on university teaching contain useful generalizations of college students as a whole. “Gen Z students are more career-focused” or “Gen Z students have this type of relationship with technology” statements can be useful to professors, even those who are still relatively young. However, it’s a little harder to find good resources aimed at describing the actual topic you teach (business students versus history students, etc.).

Now that I have been a business professor at four different universities and am starting new at a fifth, I realize I am most interested in the differences between business students at each university. That is often where teaching becomes more nuanced. Here’s my estimate, based on my experiences, as to where the most important differences exist. I usually have taught Operations Management, Principles of Management, and Technology and Innovation Management to undergrads.

A few ground rules: I am only listing a question if I am sure that the answer has been different at different universities I taught at. Some questions that others may consider to be important (such as if the student is first-gen college) may not be listed here, feel free to comment your own. My questionnaire is biased in that I usually teach juniors and seniors, and that I usually teach more technical courses (requiring more math/Excel) than not. If you like this, let me know and I’ll post the longer part two.

Student Business Experience:

1. Do the students know at least one business person relatively well (even if a parent)?
2. On average, have they worked an internship?
3. Are they more interested in working a career that will earn a decent wage, or accomplishing ambitious personal goals? (Dreamers versus Strivers)
4. If told to dress up for a business event, would students have lots of questions or have a good idea of the basics?
5. To what extent does the university first-year experience train students in business essentials (such as business writing, etiquette, etc.)?
6. How common are student class backgrounds? (e.g., did most of the students take similar classes, or are a significant portion of them transfer students, earned credit, etc). For that matter, how common are wealth backgrounds? (big variation or fairly similar? First gen to go to college?).
7. If asked a general workplace question such as “Tell me about a time a Manager/Leader showed you empathy,” do they have enough life experience to be able to answer?
8. If a professor brings up a recent, important news story (say, when Facebook bought out Instagram), how many students pay attention to such things, and would they be particularly excited to discuss a breaking-news type event?

Student Technology Experience:

1. If given relatively good written directions, can students do new things in software on their own, or do they require classroom/video direction?
2. Have they already learned business software such as Excel?
3. If asked to find some business context on a news event (e.g., the effect of Suez Canal grounded ship on global operations), are they relatively skilled in basic search engine retrieval and/or business database?
4. How comfortable are they with open-ended exploration (e.g., assignment to search this business database and use any two articles to support the idea that Google should have not fired this executive)?
5. If asked to create content (graphic, table, chart, etc), are they able to produce a decent result?
6. If asked to make a video on a topic for class, do they naturally have some idea of lighting, props, showing slides, etc.?
7. Would students rather use class time to watch a video, or do it on their own?