Hill and Young named “Favorite Business School Professors”

Two faculty members at the University of Washington Foster School of Business have been named to the Poets & Quants list of “Favorite Business School Professors Teaching MBAs.”

The influential MBA portal counts Foster’s Charles Hill and Lance Young as two of the most inspiring, innovative and indelible business educators in world today.

Poets & Quants’ list of favorite professors is a spinoff of its recent “Best & Brightest MBAs” in the class of 2016, which included new minted Foster grads Emily Claire Palmer (MBA 2016) and Becky See (MBA 2016).

Chill strategy

Hill, a fixture at Foster since 1988, is a professor of management and organization and the Hughes M. and Katherine G. Blake Endowed Professor in Business Administration.

An expert in corporate strategy, Hill is a two-time recipient of the school’s Charles E. Summer Outstanding Teaching Award (2008, 2016) and the Robert M. Bowen EMBA Excellence in Teaching Award (2014, 2016), and a four-time winner of the TMMBA Excellence in Teaching Award (2003, 2006, 2007, 2008).

Palmer nominated Hill for his uncanny ability to transform student perspectives.

“There are a number of great ones at Foster, but our core strategy professor Charles Hill (aka “Chill”) takes the cake in my book,” Palmer told Poets & Quants. “His classes on the Google algorithm, the small-package shipping industry, the Cloud, and the Cola Wars completely changed the way I understand the world. He is a master at the Socratic method of teaching. There was no sitting back and relaxing in that class!”

Young energy

Neither is there room for complacency in the demanding entrepreneurial finance classes taught by Young, who joined the Foster faculty in 2003 and has been a senior lecturer of finance and business economics since 2011.

Young has received professor-of-the-year distinction in the Foster School’s Undergraduate (2009), Full-time MBA (2008), Evening MBA (2007, 2008, 2011), Technology Management MBA (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016) and Global Executive MBA (2014) programs. He also has won the PACCAR Award for Excellence in Teaching (2011), the Charles E. Summer Outstanding Teaching Award (2013), and the Ron Crockett Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2015), as well as the Fama-DFA Prize for influential research in asset pricing (2010).

See nominated Young for his attention to inclusivity and commitment to deep student learning that results in a welcoming and electric classroom atmosphere.

“Lance is an unassuming, brilliant mind, and he has such a unique style and energy for teaching that students walk away from his classes confident and excited about finance,” she told Poets & Quants. “He cold calls on all students so everyone can participate, intentionally coaxes students into debates about nuanced topics, and relaxes everyone with his great sense of humor.”

Best and brightest

That’s high praise from two of Foster’s—and the b-school world’s—best and brightest grads.

Poets & Quants noted that Palmer, a former yoga instructor, founder of a children’s theater camp, park ranger and musician, used a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the final album of her band, “Duck and Goose,” before turning to business with hopes to eventually “change the world.”

At Foster, Palmer was a Fritzky Leadership Fellow, a Board Fellow for City Fruit, co-chair of the Environmental Innovation Challenge, chapter leader of Foster’s Net Impact and singer for the MBA band, “The Network Effect.” Her most satisfying contribution to Foster, however, was founding the MBA Resilience Committee, dedicated to helping fellow students process the pressures of a rigorous MBA experience.

Palmer is joining Amazon as a senior product manager, with the ultimate goal of being “a leader in shifting our food and farming industries toward environmental, social, and economic sustainability.”

See also came to Foster with an eclectic resume that includes the titles of Peace Corps volunteer, international talent recruiter, improv comic, and investment fund manager… in Kyrgystan.

At Foster, See served as vice-president of diversity in the MBA Association, MBA Ambassador, Board Fellow for TeamChild and teaching assistant in international business. She was active in Net Impact, Women in Business, and Diversity in Business. As a Social Entrepreneurship Fellow through the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, she researched and published a report on creating a more renewable power grid in Washington state.

But See said she was proudest of her role in founding the MBA Council on Diversity & Inclusion, creating a sustainable mechanism for all of the MBA student organizations to coordinate efforts to address biases and engender inclusive leadership.

See joins Alvarez & Marsal as a performance improvement consultant, with ambitions to eventually lead an organization that provides financial resources to small businesses in underserved communities.