Business Communication
I was skeptical about this 2 unit class going in, and after 15 weeks I am convinced of its lack of necessity. Don’t get me wrong, parts of this course were enjoyable, and I still appreciate the practice I got in collaborative projects and public speaking, muscles which are never flexed in engineering classes. However, I didn’t need a 2 unit course to teach me “soft skills”.
Professor Krystal Thomas was a one-of-a-kind professor. She lectured with clarity of prose, fluent articulation, and an admirably self-confident tone, without coming off as authoritative or rehearsed: a true master of Business Communication. Every lecture, I begin by completely doubting that she was improvising her words, fully convinced that a lecture of such smoothness must have been rehearsed. Nevertheless, about 20 minutes in, I start to question the possibility of memorizing this sheer amount of information. She never stops once to try and “remember” what she rehearsed, because clearly none of her lecture was. That was the most impressive aspect of the course. Of course, no professor is perfect, and in the case of Professor Thomas, I believe she was such a gleaming example of clear and confident communication that students felt intimidated. If perfection still leads to negative consequences, then it is not perfection after all. As well, a fellow classmate of mine pointed out that Professor Thomas liked to teach the class under the assumption that all of us would eventually go on to become consultants in the future, which is clearly not the case. Nevertheless, I have much respect for Professor Thomas, and I can see how she overcame the difficulties of being a woman of color in her field.
As for the curriculum, this is where my praise begins to dwindle. Each week, there was a 2-hour class complemented by a video and reading for pre-lecture. Each 2-hour class was split into a 1-hour lecture and a 1-hour collaborative case study. The 1 hour of lecture + pre-lecture content was unnecessary. I found this out early on and stopped watching/reading most of the pre-lecture content. I was only really attending the 1 hour of lecture out of necessity since attendance was mandatory. Reading about, for example, the elements of a business pitch, is never as useful as just giving your best pitch and receiving feedback, regardless of how damning the feedback for that first one might be. Imagine having a child read about the exact arm movement needed to swim, only to have them drown when you throw them into the pool.
Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, not every aspect of the curriculum was as pointless. The hour that followed every lecture was where the course contained most of its value. Every week, we worked with a different group of students on a case study pertaining to the week’s content. Getting used to working with a group of strangers is a skill that I needed to work on, and this was great practice. I tend to retreat into a hole of observation whenever I interact with a group of people I am not familiar with, choosing to sniff out who I am working with first. This means that for short-term projects where the group is formed and disbanded within, say the hour (which is an extreme case) or even the week (a more reasonable case), I have a hard time opening up to the group, and this ends up becoming detrimental.
Lastly, to cap the course off, small groups were assigned to create a pitch for a startup idea. Our idea was a Roomba that could perform carpet deep cleaning. Although I was constantly irked by the fact that most of these students were talking “big picture” stuff and definitely didn’t have the skills required to actually make their app or design their product, the chance to get up to the front of a class again and deliver a presentation was refreshing, something I had not done since high school.
Altogether, I would venture to say that this course was great when we were in the weeds, practicing speaking and collaboration. However, those moments were too small a proportion of the curriculum to justify the need for an entire course.
Food for Thought
In many Shark-Tank VC pitches, the entrepreneurs often forget one critical hitpoint when talking to investors : W.I.I.F.T. What does this acronym stand for?
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