All The New Professors At The Leading Business Schools

Emily Garbinsky is one of the experienced professors who found a new home this fall. After six years teaching undergraduate and MBA students at Notre Dame University Mendoza College of Business, Garbinsky begins a new phase of her career in Ithaca, New York, as an associate professor of marketing at Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management. She is teaching the MBA marketing core course this fall.

Garbinsky, who earned her PhD in marketing from Stanford in 2015, spent much of the summer familiarizing herself with her new home — the hiking trails, lakes, and wineries of upstate New York — while also saying goodbye to her first higher-education teaching job.

“I feel very fortunate to have started my career at Notre Dame for a few reasons,” Garbinsky tells P&Q. “I think given the Catholic nature of the institution, it had a really big emphasis on community. And not just community as in the faculty, but as in the entire university. And I can say that even though I don’t have a degree from the university or institution, I very much have adopted the pride and the spirit of the school.

“I think my favorite thing about the university was the students and interacting with the students. Something that I’m really thankful for is that Notre Dame had sort of an open door policy to establish connections and friendships with the students. And I became very close with some people that I had in class. I think it is something that’s really special. Hands down the thing I’ll miss is the students, because they were fabulous.”

THE LURE OF IVY

Garbinsky was drawn to Cornell Johnson for a few reasons. The interdisciplinary nature of the work was a big one.

“One thing about Notre Dame is, I often felt very siloed within the business school,” she says, “and not even within the business school, I felt siloed within my own department. But Cornell is much more collaborative. And it’s collaborative within the Johnson School and even across schools, and I think that’s something that the merger of the Johnson School with the other schools has facilitated. I’m talking to people over in the Dyson School and I’m talking to people in the Hotel School and we’re serving on committees together and we’re getting to know one another and we’re talking. And it’s leading to research projects and potential collaborations and just the resources available at Cornell are astounding.”

The resources she can tap into at an Ivy League school are a huge plus, too.

“They have a statistical consulting unit where you can book an appointment and get advice on a statistical technique that you’re not familiar with,” Garbinsky says. “They have an amazing lab manager, they have several lab spaces on campus, I have an admin that can help me with my course. And these are all things that I had to do myself while I was at Notre Dame.

“Just the resources available for research are astounding. I’m team-teaching the marketing core with two other faculty members that have taught it before, and so it’s really nice to be able to bounce ideas off of them and see how they approach teaching.”

IN-PERSON TEACHING: MUCH BETTER FOR LEARNING

Notre Dame Mendoza conducted much of the 2020-2021 school year in-person, so Garbinsky hasn’t been starved for student contact like many other B-school professors. But it was stressful to teach in a room full of mask-wearers, where proximity is always a concern — something she knows she will still have to contend with at Cornell.

“Notre Dame was pretty adamant about having in-person classes and remaining open, and so I taught in-person in the fall 2020 semester, in a mask of course, and all the students wearing masks,” Garbinsky says. “It was an interesting time, and it was a slightly stressful time, just because at any moment I felt that we could transition online so I had to design a course that could be taught in-person and also remote.

“It was quite stressful, but I think the students were really appreciative of being able to come back to campus and take classes in person. We made it through.”

She says in-person teaching is immeasurably better for the students.

“It was definitely stressful, but I think that it was the best thing the university could have done,” she says. “I think the students definitely learned more being on the campus in the classroom than they would have being remote.”