Dr. Hall has been a member of the HPU family for 11 years and now serves as the Dean of the Phillips School of Business.
What do you do in your role?
I help our business faculty fulfill our mission to prepare students to become tomorrow’s business professionals, and I also engage students in our mission.
How do you contribute to HPU’s mission to ensure every student receives an extraordinary education in an inspiring environment with caring people?
I start with the caring people aspect. Students cannot easily make connections with material until you connect with them. I like to come to class early to get to know students better. I also respond to their emails outside of office hours and I look for ways to be inspired by them and share their successes to build a supportive and inspiring environment in the classroom. These inputs, plus a dash of subject matter expertise creates the output of an extraordinary education.
How do you help students develop life skills that they will use to achieve lives of success and significance after they graduate from HPU?
I tell my students to treat my class as a company they are working for. If you build the life skill of professionalism now, it will come off as a natural habit when it really matters.
What do you love most about working at HPU?
The HPU culture creates a feeling of growth and flourishing. I get to work with faculty, staff and students who are flourishing every day, and that encourages me to do the same.
What are you most excited about for the upcoming academic year?
Offering a new Excel course which includes a certification opportunity for our business students to signal Excel proficiency for their first internships.
What’s one thing you want students and parents to know?
That receiving an extraordinary education is not a passive activity and takes personal responsibility to receive it. We are co-producing it, so student contribution matters too.
What’s one way you generate creativity or productivity?
I try to keep a clear head and not have the same thought twice. I have a trusted system of using Microsoft Outlook to capture actionable thoughts, appointments and tasks as soon as they come in. This frees up brain resources for creativity.
What is your favorite quote?
“People don’t care about how much you know, until they know how much you care.” – Theodore Roosevelt
What is a creative way you’ve adjusted to support students during the past year?
I love Microsoft Teams. This product continually drives innovations in remote work that allowed me to be creative and support students via the chat function and quickly use tags, emojis, gifs, etc., to engage students inside and outside the physical classroom. Students who experienced a period of quarantine found it easy to transition in and out of remote learning.