Alvin Chen: BSc Teacher of the Year
In commemoration of Alvin Chen’s reception of the 2022 BSc Teacher of the Year Award, I interviewed him about his history, experiences and views as a teacher.
Within his undergraduate program, Alvin studied business with a variety of options available to him after graduation — studying for an MBA, initiating a startup or even going to law school. For advice on his decision, he approached some faculty members who pitched their professions in academia. They told him about the various perks that came with it, for example, on the research side, there was a lot of flexibility, while on the teaching side one could make a great impact. He then stated that “the combination of the two things, sort of, spoke to me.” He chose to teach finance specifically because of a combination of skills and interest. He said, “I found that I was kind of interested in economics, interested in political science and I had some kind of knack for mathematics.” He was thus advised that teaching finance would be a good combination of his skill set.
Alvin never taught formally before coming to SSE due to the fact that, when he pursued his PhD, he was on a scholarship that had no teaching requirement. He has, however, moonlighted as a tutor for several years, therefore teaching at a university in front of hundreds of students was a new experience to him. I then asked him whether his experience with smaller classrooms impacted his style of teaching, he replied that, “during the lectures, probably not, because there you want to try and speak to the majority of students. So, where I think having done a lot of the one-on-one tutoring helps is where you have individual questions from students.” His experience helps him present the same material in varying ways to help students understand the concepts better.
One question that I’ve always had about teaching at universities is about teachers’ research. I have always had the presumption that teaching and research would clash both with time-management and on an intellectual level, however Alvin corrected my presumption, saying: “I think the two actually complement each other quite well, [and] the fact that I do research and know what’s happening at the forefront of finance research, I think that actually makes the teaching job easier.” He gave an example of a student having a question about how ESG issues relate to finance. Being up to date on financial research, he is able to consider the studies that have been done on the intersection between ESG and finance, alongside the things we do not know a lot about — where there is considerable room for exploration on the students’ part. He also states that there is usually a disparity between theoretical concepts in the books and reality, therefore, understanding large-scale studies can allow for a deeper understanding of these differences. This has allowed Alvin to bind his teaching material closer to reality.
Alvin’s research is also quite interesting. For example, he has done research around best practices when composing firm purpose statements; as well as, how one should address the principal-agent problem when drafting contracts for lower-level employees.
Alvin mentioned that some of the key traits that teachers should have is the ability to communicate ideas very clearly and “if you get that first part right, there is not much else left to teaching.” Sometimes even this trait is hard to achieve in large classes, since out of 300 students there will always be around a dozen who may not understand some concepts. In such a scenario, it is crucial to have the patience and creativity to think of alternative ways of presenting the same material to them.
Alvin also has some goals and aspirations for the future with regards to teaching. He mentioned that he looks at the comments that students leave at the end of courses and considers whether there is something he can do to improve. For example, he made a lot of games within the lectures in Finance I, some of which worked very well while others less so. Therefore, he plans to take these observations and comments into account and adjust the course. He supplemented this by saying, “moving to the second-half of my tenure as an assistant-professor, I hope to settle on a set of things that I do in class that work, and I’m not sure I’ve gotten there just yet — it’s always an ongoing process, always tweaking — but I hope to get there soon.”
In the last part of the interview, I thought that it was beneficial if I asked Alvin to lay down some advice for newer teachers at SSE. The following is the advice he had to give:
“One part of advice is the preparation and what I mean by preparation is the following: you kind of go in and you have a class, you’re structuring the class, you’re thinking about lectures, you’re thinking about the homeworks and whatnot that you’re going to assign. But, in the background, what you want to keep in mind is: what is the main point of the course? What is the key set of ideas that the course is meant to deliver and can you organize the course in such a way that everything feeds into accomplishing that goal?”
He talks about an example from his corporate finance class where he mentions that financial frictions are important since they make operations harder to carry out, thus, the way we create value in finance is by finding out how to resolve some of these frictions. He then structures the course by teaching about one particular friction, how that friction makes life more difficult, and how to resolve it. According to him, having such a framework in mind will make running any course much easier.