Into the Woods

Smith Gets Real with Experiential Learning

Overnight rain has soaked the trails at Little Bennett Campground near Washington, D.C., where University of Maryland undergraduates gather for class on Oct. 11, 2014. Instead of textbooks, the students carry folding chairs and other outdoor gear to a pavilion that provides shelter from a lingering drizzle.

Conditions are perfect for economics major Shiri Cooper (Class of 2015), who has come with her teammates to test a prototype for lightweight waterproof boots that hikers can wear over their regular shoes.

“Class comes alive when you know you are designing something for the real world, and you really have the potential to make money from your product,” Cooper says.

Other teams at the campground are developing products ranging from a multipurpose backpack to a rugged smartphone case that comes with a virtual forest ranger app. The goal for each team is to obtain crowdfunding or other investments and then bring the innovations to market.

Along the way, students receive guidance from Bass Pro Shops product developers, who review the ideas and provide feedback.

“Teams can test the waters and take risks,” says Bass Pro Shops Director of Global Sourcing David Leif, MBA ’09, who provides a Smith connection to the retail world. “It’s enjoyable to see the fresh ideas and enthusiasm the students have.”

Two other Bass Pro Shops veterans, including one with 30 years of experience in outdoor retail, help keep the students grounded in reality. Leif says the review process can be grueling, but the students have responded well.

“I have been pleased and surprised,” he says. “Some of the projects that seem to be leaders are fairly viable.”

The outdoor product development course, taught by Smith Professor Oliver Schlake, is part of a push at the Smith School to deliver experiential learning in every program — helping students bridge the gap between theory and practice.

“Education needs to focus on one important thing,” Schlake says. “We need to create meaningful experiences that students cannot recreate themselves. That’s how I see my job description.”

The infusion of reality into the curriculum requires new thinking about teaching methods and how professors measure success. Traditional classrooms punish wrong answers, but research and development teams in the real world often celebrate failure as part of the innovation process.

“Part of the experience is finding a pathway to success,” Schlake says. “This is an environment where you can get an A by failing, but failing intelligently.”

Other Smith professors and program directors already have embraced the school’s commitment to experiential learning in a variety of ways. Following are 10 examples, ranging from Schlake’s new course to pioneering efforts that have thrived on campus for decades.

REAL ACCESS

Before venturing into the wild, Schlake’s students visit Bass Pro Shops in Baltimore for a guided tour to help the aspiring product developers get inside the minds of their customers. “This is like the backstage pass at a concert,” Schlake says. “We create access for our students.”

Engineering major Zeb Shereef (Class of 2015) uses the opportunity to look for market gaps with his classmates, who come from business, art, journalism and other university backgrounds.

“If this was solely engineering, we would not be able to get so many perspectives,” Shereef says. “Everyone has their own input into the products.”

He says attendance is high in Schlake’s class because the various teams feel ownership for their projects. “We get hands-on experience doing this,” Shereef says. “I don’t think you could do this in a traditional classroom setting.”

REAL INTERACTION

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is sometimes noisy, and so is the bank management class of Smith finance professor Haluk Ünal. His Master of Finance students shout, wave their arms and scramble around the room during three-hour banking simulations at the school’s satellite campus in Washington, D.C.

“You can teach the components of bank management in siloes,” Ünal says. “But you won't be able to teach bank management as a whole unless you go and actually start managing a bank. That is what students do in these simulations.”

The activity, designed and led by Olson Research Associates, includes iPads for each team loaded with simulation software. After each round of trading, students lock in their results and then check live standings on a screen at the front of the classroom.

“This teaching technology is very attractive,” Ünal said.

REAL COMPANIES

Consumers have different needs and patterns when they go online to shop. Working with Merkle, a customer relationship marketing agency based in Columbia, Md., Smith students helped one global company make sense of its Web analytics in spring 2014.

“The students learned in the field,” says Smith Professor Michael Trusov, who taught the course. “It was real data for a real client.”

The course is part of the school’s Master of Science in Marketing Analytics program, led by Smith professor Wendy Moe. She says the Merkle partnership is one of many in the graduate program that incorporates reality-based learning.

“Several of our classes have hands-on components,” says Moe, who also cites a market segmentation project that students recently completed for insurance provider GEICO.

REAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

A seven-week journey starts with a 60-second pitch for part-time MBA students in the Real Entrepreneurship Competition course taught by professor David Kirsch at the Smith School’s satellite campus in Rockville, Md.

“The winning pitch is one that gets votes,” Kirsch tells the working professionals during their first evening together on Oct. 27, 2014. One by one, the students stand and present their business concepts.

A golf entertainment facility, wine tasting party facilitator, dry cleaning pickup service and pet fitness company quickly emerge as frontrunners to advance to the second week, when 38 individual ideas will be whittled to 10 group projects. Then each team will start gathering market intelligence to find out what customers really want.

“You are going to get sick of me telling you to do more customer discovery,” Kirsch tells the class.

At the end of the semester, one winning startup will stand supreme. The course concept, developed by Kirsch with Smith colleague Brent Goldfarb, emerged from peer-reviewed research the pair conducted in 2009, showing that investors rarely read the business plans that aspiring entrepreneurs develop.

Now, instead of writing long reports about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, Smith students dive into their markets and learn by doing.

REAL TIME

After a recent drop in Amazon stock prices, Wall Street analysts moved quickly to evaluate a potential buying opportunity using real-time data from Bloomberg Professional services. So did Smith finance students, who access the same tools with the same speed as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and other investment firms.

Working in teams, participants in Joseph Perfetti’s equity analysis courses simulate real-world trading from a $1 million portfolio using a Bloomberg product called Stock-Trak. The funds are fictitious, but everything else is real. Students write and submit analyses for each trade and compete for Stock-Trak points. At semester’s end, a higher share of points translates to a higher grade.

“This is a far different experience than discussing cases,” Perfetti says. “It is very powerful for students to walk out of the lab with custom data sets, which they can manipulate into analyses that can be immediately applied.”

REAL MULTIDISCIPLINED

Students in the QUEST Honors Program get a high-level view of Hong Kong’s third-largest port when they look down from the corporate offices of Modern Terminals.

QUEST participant Nicole Blahut (Class of 2015), a double major in supply chain and operations management, says she marveled at the massive arrangement of 50-foot metal containers awaiting shipment around the world. “It almost didn’t look real,” she says. “It looked like Legos stacked on top of each other.”

The China trip, which Blahut did in 2015 as a teaching assistant and in 2013 as a student, is just one elective in the undergraduate program for University of Maryland students from three schools: business; engineering; and computer, mathematical and natural sciences. Overall, QUEST participants complete five courses focused on real-time innovations and organizational challenges.

“If you’re interested in working in teams and you want to do real projects with real companies, then QUEST is perfect,” Blahut says. “It’s almost all experiential learning.”

She says students also benefit from the multidisciplinary approach of QUEST, a point of pride at the university since 1992. “In the real world, you don’t just work with one group of people,” Blahut says. “Putting business, engineering and science students together makes sense. They are able to teach me things that I didn’t know, and I am able to teach them things that they didn’t know.”

REAL SHAREHOLDERS

Class begins at 3 a.m. for Smith undergraduates during Berkshire-Hathaway’s annual shareholders weekend in Omaha, Neb. That’s when investors start lining up outside the main auditorium.

Every year since 2010, Smith finance students have joined the throng with professor David Kass, a longtime Berkshire shareholder.

Separate trips in 2011 and 2013 included a private session with Berkshire CEO WarrenBuffett for Smith MBA and Master of Finance students. In 2014, the activities culminated in an invitation from Fox Business to participate in a live on-air conversation with Buffett and his most famous board member, Bill Gates. The next Berkshire shareholders meeting excursion for Smith students will be May 2, 2015.

“Our students have the opportunity not only to attend the annual meeting, they also meet with several renowned investors,” says Clinical Associate Professor Elinda Kiss, who has traveled with the group since 2013.

REAL IMMERSION

Spring break preparations started early for undergraduates in a 2014 microfinance course taught by Smith professor Susan White and coordinated through the school’s Office of Global Initiatives. Before students arrived in Nicaragua for the 10-day immersion, they raised funds to provide microbusiness grants in the Central American country.

“We gave $100 to one business owner, and she started crying,” says Lindsey Weilminster (Class of 2015), a double major in operations and supply chain management. “When you see that you are making a change, it is really cool.”

During the spring break program, Weilminster and her classmates worked with students at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua in Managua and then traveled to more rural parts of the country to consult with microbusiness owners.

Weilminster says the experience gave her a chance to practice Spanish and opened her mind to global perspectives. “Consulting with people in a foreign country is a huge learning experience,” she says.

REAL MARKETPLACE

Orientation starts with a shock for incoming full-time MBA students looking for traditional lectures at the Smith School. Instead of talking about business, students are divided into teams and told to start one.

The rules are simple. Groups have two weeks to turn $150 of real money into an enterprise ready for faculty and staff customers at the annual Smith Marketplace. Each shopper has only $25 in “Smith Bucks” to spend, so teams must get creative to win revenue.

“There is no better way to learn about a business than doing it yourself,” says first-year MBA student Ryan Smith, co-founder of handicrafts company Terps and Crafts.

First-year MBA student Molley Hardin, co-founder of mask company Teenage Mutant Ninja Terrapins, says the marketplace teaches budgeting, sales, teamwork and time management skills. “We were really thrown into it very quickly,” she says. “That’s part of the whole experience here.”

REAL MONEY

Smith students watch the news closely infund management courses taught by senior lecturer Sarah Kroncke, MBA ’00. During one session in fall 2014, her students focused on the implications of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a debt crisis in Argentina, a pro-democracy uprising in Hong Kong, a data breach at J.P. Morgan, and the split of HP into two publicly traded companies.

Decisions that result are not just academic. Course participants have managed real money since 1993, when a $250,000 contribution from the College of Business and Management Foundation established the Mayer Fund for full-time MBA students.

Based on the success of the Mayer Fund, which has grown to roughly $2 million through appreciation and contributions, the school launched the Senbet Fund in 2006 for undergraduate students. Three years later the school also launched the Global Equity Fund, led by Smith finance professor Gurdip Bakshi, for part-time graduate students in Washington, D.C.

“Nothing can match real-world experience,” says Kyle DiPeppe ’14, a Senbet Fund alumnus who now works as an equity trader at Trillium in New York City. “This was the best course I took at the University of Maryland, hands down.”