Andrea Hershatter is Senior Associate Dean and Director of the BBA Program in Emory’s Goizueta Business School. She has led this program for approximately two decades and has helped to achieve nine consecutive Businessweek ranking in the Top 10, a distinction held by only four undergraduate business programs in the world. Speaking with business librarian Nora Wood, Professor Hershatter discusses her journey to academia and the evolution of the BBA program at Goizueta.
This interview is captured in a two-part series. Read part one here – Goizueta Faculty Interview: Andrea Hershatter and the Evolution of the BBA Program (Part 1)
Can you tell me more about your experiences serving on the board of the Economic Empowerment Initiative and on the board of directors for The Speech School? How did you get involved with these organizations?
The Economic Empowerment Initiative, I am starting to cycle off of. This was started by an Emory College alum who was interested in bringing financial literacy to under-served students and I still believe very strongly in what they do. However, through my work at Goizueta and through the Grad Gen work that Emory Board member Rick Rader has charged Emory with doing, I think I personally have been more focused on helping our students teach financial literacy through some programs we have here.
The Speech School, I am super excited about. Actually, that was also an Emory connection – one of the people on the board of the Speech School was president of the graduate business association back in the day when I worked with the MBA program. She connected me with them because she thought having higher ed connections and expertise would be useful to them. So the Speech School is many things – first, it was founded to assure that children born hard of hearing had the opportunity and educational input and stimulus to develop their brains and therefore their language acquisition normally – a very lofty mission – but the piece of it that I have been involved with is through the Rollins Center. This has taken early childhood language and literacy acquisition to be its primary purpose. It turns out that independent of hearing ability, children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds get talked at and around and hear far fewer words than students from more privileged economic backgrounds. Therefore, the Rollins Center has developed a program to train and educate early learning educators and anyone working with birth through 5-year-olds with the skills so they can talk TO children and bring them up to reading and language readiness much earlier, so it has the potential to vastly change those kids’ lives.
Now Rollins has expanded its mission in both directions. They are rolling out a new program through Grady called “Talk with Me, Baby” that will help new moms learn the importance of talking to their children, which might not be something that all people are culturally accustomed to. For example, first generation immigrants don’t want to talk to their babies because they want them to learn English, but the research says that is entirely wrong and learning a language is the best gift you can give a child. And similarly, Rollins is working with educators starting at kindergarten and up to give them more robust reading skills and language skills based on research.
So I have been thrilled to be part of that, and this last semester in the spring, was able to convince John Kim, our faculty member teaching consulting, to take on the Speech School as the consulting project for the class. Our students worked on how the Rollins Center could create some operation efficiencies and marketing messaging that would help them. So it’s a beautiful marriage of things I care deeply about.
I also see that you are on the board of Campus MovieFest and that you have a strong interest in pop culture and music. Could you tell me more about your work with Campus MovieFest and how it overlaps with your own passion?
So, the two primary founders of CMF were both BBAs back in the day, and I was lucky enough to work with them then on what first started out as a project figuring out how to get students to use iMovie software to make movies. It has since grown to be the largest independent student film festival in the world – more than 1 million students have made movies across the world. So CMF is a theater for their larger organization called Ideas United. What happens is students who are identified as proficient film makers through Campus MovieFest become part of a distinguished filmmakers network and through a curated, crowd-sourcing process, Ideas United is able to provide companies with commercials and other narratives done by extraordinarily talented young people with really high production values at a literal fraction of the cost through a traditional ad agency. So I have loved watching them, and I would say my role as a board member is actually more as a cheerleader than anything else, but the number of intersections between my interests in entrepreneurship and film and the students I work with and the existence of CMF and I’m also the faculty adviser to ETV which is the sponsor of CMF, so there’s a lot of alliance there and Campus MovieFest is for sure one of Emory’s leading points of pride and I’m thrilled to work with them.
What’s your favorite business book and why?
It’s always the last thing I read because that sparks my imagination. In general, I like authors who write mostly from a journalistic point of view and take interesting phenomenon and use academic research to describe them, such as a Malcolm Gladwell who is very high on my list. But the one I wanted to tell you about is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson. I found this book to be absolutely fascinating. He looks at everything from how songs become popular to why particular apps take off while others do not and he’s a journalist himself. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a contributor to NPR’s Here and Now. First of all, he writes beautifully, and he’s fabulous with a great narrative tone. He starts each chapter with a very provocative story about, you know, the set of circumstances that led Lucas to create Star Wars, for example, that completely grabs you. And then he’s able to weave in the unpredictable and ungovernable forces that allow something to rise to the fore and also the intentional pushes that make something like 50 Shades of Grey into the phenomenon that it was. So, I find it to be absolutely fascinating and wonderful, and, in this moment having finished it a week ago, it is my favorite new business book.
I’m also reading a book called Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (also author of Where Good Ideas Come From) because my mind is on design thinking and innovation and both of these books are consistent with that. So this book is about how although in the long-run, each of the phenomenon he discusses had very practical industrial use, at inception, each was created for novelty purposes, everything from moving mechanical dolls to the actual color purple – which gave birth to dyes, which gave birth to the garment and fashion industry. So I’m very interested in that as well.
What are three words that come to mind when you think of the business library?
- Comprehensive
- Supportive
- Well-Researched
To put the asterisk on that, I was the one who worked with someone several head librarians ago to create the Business Research Certificate. One of the things that was mind-blowing at the time which is still mind-blowing today is that those resources were available to the students for the asking. In most cases, if I am intentionally going out to add value to the educational experience, I have to find people and money to do it, and this was the opposite of that. We had the people, we had the resources, all we needed was to create a program. I think that has been a wonderful asset for us to tap into at the Goizueta Business Library.