Madeleine Coles
Life Editor
Education vs. experience is a boxing match employers have been betting on for years. Some people say college is the only way to ensure a high-paying and fulfilling career; others insist that working up through a company is the smarter choice. While any professor must have an education, ISU has a blend of professors with years of education in college, and those with years of hands-on career experience in their fields; some with both.
John Ney, a professor of business and marketing, has a master’s degree and 18 years of corporate experience.
He worked for AT&T before eventually helping build Syringa Wireless and running its sales and marketing department.
In 2008, he started as an adjunct professor at ISU and became a full-time professor in 2012 after selling Syringa Wireless.
According to Ney, he has always loved teaching, so the career switch came naturally to him. But he said his previous experience has definitely assisted him in the classroom.
“I think it gives you a little bit of street cred to have been out there,” he said. “I share with my students what did work, but I also share with them what didn’t work. I tell them straight from the school of hard knocks, this worked and this didn’t. And I usually get a lot of comments in my evaluations that students really like the real-world concepts that I share.”
Ney said he believes in giving his students the opportunity to experience those real-world concepts for themselves.
Every semester, his students participate in a group project where they adopt a local business and write a marketing plan for that business.
“The feedback I get is that students really enjoy working on a real case,” Ney said. “Real-world examples and knowledge that will benefit them when they graduate is so important.”
Martine Beachboard is another professor for whom academia was not their first career. She worked as a journalist in Arizona for 10 years and worked in public relations at the University of Maryland before teaching journalism and advertising at ISU.
Beachboard agreed that providing students with real-world knowledge and skills is a top priority.
“I think it’s important students graduate being able to do something,” she said. “I kind of feel like in general, people want students to come out of here able to get a job.”
Like Ney, she said she uses her previous career as a way to relay to students the reality of their career field.
“It helps to say you know what you’re doing because you’ve been there,” Beachboard said. “Sometimes when you’ve actually done something, you can tell students incidents of what really happened.”
She added that transitioning from one career field to the other came with unique fulfillment.
“There’s something really satisfying about being a practitioner, especially in mass comm or media,” she said. “But when you teach, the main satisfaction comes from students finding something they can be passionate about.”
Professor Donna Lybecker, who teaches international relations, environmental politics and comparative politics, shared similar views about finding satisfaction from the passion of students.
“One of the things I love the most about academia is that you get challenged every single day by your students,” she said. “They view issues from a different perspective that is oftentimes really insightful. When you’re in other professions, you just don’t interact with the same number of individuals.”
While in graduate school, Lybecker worked summers for U.S. Geological Survey.
After finishing her degree, she began working for the U.S. Forest Service before taking her first job within academia, where she worked under an economist looking at how citizens used and managed land.
She echoed Beachboard and Ney’s sentiments about focusing on employability.
“I think [having worked outside academia] makes me a teacher who is more focused on practical application,” Lybecker said. “I think it is important for students to know and have a base knowledge of things they can directly apply to a job in the future.”
She added that while academia is incredibly important, she’s grateful the experiences she has had outside of the world of teaching.
“I know that people refer to academia and teaching as the ‘ivory tower,’” she said. “And I think academics know what the real world is, but I also think there are things that are different working outside of academia that are really important. And when you have experienced those, they play into your teaching and research and all the stuff that makes up academia.”
Beachboard agreed that having a diverse background can assist an individual professor; she said she also believes having a diverse group of professors can assist a university as a whole.
“Personally, I think the blend is really nice,” she said. “A blend of backgrounds and appreciation for different perspectives is what university is all about.”
