August 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 4
Become an INFORMED Member
By Erhan Erkut
During your Ph.D. program, you received a thorough training in research.
You helped write a number of research papers and research grants. You had
two accepted papers before you started interviewing, and you landed your
first job as an assistant professor on the basis of your research potential.
On the first day of work, your departmental secretary broke the bad news:
You were supposed to teach as part of your job. Not only that, but you were
supposed to teach an MBA course. All of a sudden, reality hit: You had a
Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering with no training in a business school, and
no training in teaching, but you were supposed to start teaching a business
course in two weeks. Well, you pulled out the lecture notes from your graduate
operations research course and did your best.
Sound a bit too far fetched? Perhaps. Nevertheless, many of us can relate
to this story to some extent. Most of us were asked to teach after receiving
no formal training in teaching. Many of us made a not-so-smooth transition
from being a student in an engineering department to being a professor in
a business school. And some of us failed in a big way during our first year
of teaching for numerous reasons. Most of us have learned from our mistakes
and plowed through, though some did not make it.
What can we do to smooth the road for others, particularly for newcomers?
What can we do to improve the teaching performance of people who teach OR/MS
courses -- in business schools and elsewhere? How can we teach our material
effectively? How can we "turn-on" our audiences and make them
like OR/MS? How can we recruit students for our elective courses? How can
we save management science from extinction in business schools?
We may not have all the answers, but we now have a forum to seek some of
those answers. INFORMED (INFORMS Forum on Education) came to life at the
New Orleans INFORMS meeting. If you are interested in the teaching of management
science and operations research in institutions of higher education, we
invite you to become an INFORMED member. Our agenda is to facilitate communication
between members of INFORMS with the intent of improving the teaching of
MS/OR. To this end, we will use four primary means: conference sessions,
a homepage, a mailing list and OR/MS Today.
At some of the past INFORMS meetings, education sessions were scattered
in different clusters, and in some cases were scheduled at the same time.
To facilitate attendance by members interested in the teaching of OR/MS,
we will organize clusters of education-related sessions in INFORMS meetings.
We organized the first INFORMED cluster for the Washington meeting. It contained
a total of eight sessions on a variety of education-related topics, and
many of these sessions were very well attended. To those of us accustomed
to speaking about our exotic research to an audience consisting of the three
other speakers in the session, an audience of 50 or more was a welcome change.
INFORMED's Vice President of Meetings Tom Grossman (Faculty of Management,
University of Calgary) is responsible for organizing INFORMED clusters at
future INFORMS meetings. Tom has completed the cluster for the Atlanta meeting,
and is now working on the San Diego meeting. If you would like to make a
teaching-related presentation in San Diego (May 4-7, 1997), contact Tom
([email protected]