UGBA 106

Marketing is the first official UGBA course I have taken in-person. In the past, I had taken UGBA prerequisite courses with massive student body sizes as well as other UGBA courses online, but never in person. Chou Hall and all its luxuries are a perfect illustration of the massive endowment Haas has. I have never taken a course where there are warmed towelettes for student readily available in the lecture hall. The Professor lectures with the luxury of three projectors and a personal TV in front of his lecture stand such that he does not need to constantly look back to refer to points on his slide. Each student seat is equipped with a plug, nice rolling chair, and even a speaker button that, when pressed, amplifies the voices of participating students. And to top it all off, the curriculum is hilariously simple compared to the engineering classes I need to take. The two 1.5 hour lectures I had weekly served as a break on Tuesday and Thursday evenings where I got to play some games, do some engineering homework, or simply watch sports highlights on my neighbor’s screen (yes I wasn’t even close to the only one slacking) without missing more lecture that I couldn’t catch myself up in 10 minutes.

This course was taught by Professor Wasim Azhar, who was a sub-par Professor at best. Interestingly, Prof. Azhar may have a background strikingly similar to mine as he mentioned on the very first day that he had originally studied to be an engineer and was also a former chess player who rated at 2100 at his peak. Nonetheless, I quickly realized our outlooks towards engineering were very different. Firstly, I asked him if he was ever interested in playing a casual game of chess on the first day of lecture which he promptly brushed off with “I’m busy”. Secondly, throughout the semester, I noticed he didn’t exactly have any passion for engineering, regarding the field as “boring, repetitive, and lacking any true space for creativity”. Sure, he may be right and I may come around to his perspective eventually, but for now I think that’s preposterous. I get the sense Prof. Azhar may have been a technically-focused individual in his youth out of external (perhaps parental) pressure, and eventually opted to switch to a completely separate field once given autonomy. Personal quips aside, Prof. Azhar simply did not seem as passionate or knowledgeable about the topic he was teaching as other Haas Professors I have had in the past. When teaching a topic as vague as marketing, substance comes from perspectives, opinions, and historical examples rather than hard facts. As such, mastery of hard facts is not enough to justify being a teacher of a course (unlike most STEM courses) without the complementary passion and perspective to offer. In this sense, I think mild-mannered Prof. Azhar comes up short in a course that dearly needs more energy.

As already mentioned, the topics of the course were vague, and though definitely tied to the common thread of marketing, cannot be easily summed up in another way. The course structure, however, was impressive. The course focused heavily on case studies and analysis of different companies using different marketing techniques. Emphasis on cases rather than slide points and “knowledge” is the right approach to this course in my opinion. Marketing is an art more than a science, so nothing truly objective can be taught. As well, I REALLY appreciated the class demographic. Instead of being surrounded by fields of drone-minded, likely-asian, number-driven engineering students (much like myself), I was exposed to a group of students from many walks of life. My own case group consisted of me (a Chinese-American California local), two international students from Spain, a French international student and former marine, and an Indian international student. Perhaps this diversity is a Haas thing more than a UGBA 106 thing, but if it keeps up, I’m not complaining.

As I am writing this conclusion, I get an email notification that my final grade has been posted. I expected to have performed rather poorly as I was on-track to get an A throughout the semester, but ultimately fell short as my transcript demonstrated. Since the final grade was temporarily hidden, I could only assume that was the reason. Clearly not. I did well. So I guess I should have participated more in this class throughout the semester then. I guess I shouldn’t have skipped 1 in 4 lectures to work on our cube-satellite. I guess I should have put my fluid mechanics homework away and tried to provide valuable in-class input. Oh well, my situation represents my bias towards one side of my education rather well :D.