Originally published in Carroll Capital, the print publication of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. .Ģż
Jeffrey Pontiff always looks forward to his next poker game, especially the ones he plays annually in Las Vegas as part of the Financial Research Association conference. āItās a real rush,ā the Seidner Department of Finance professor says of the poker tournament, a standout event of the conference Pontiff cofounded. He could tell you stories of the two times heās won the competition, beating finance academics from around the world, or perhaps the time a University of British Columbia professor learned how to play the game the night before, only to take the top prize.Ģż
Professor and James F. Cleary Chair of Finance Jeffrey Pontiff
He likens poker to playing a game of chicken. āAre they going to swerve left or right? And you have to think about the probability of them swerving [at all],ā says Pontiff, who is also the James F. Cleary ā50, DBA H ā93 Chair in Finance. āPoker is like thatāif you always bluff, you will lose. If you never bluff, you will lose.ā Heās gotten the hang of the game over the 30 years heās been playing, but it still finds ways to surprise him.
Plenty of Carroll School faculty members have hobbies they enjoy off the HeightsāPortico Professor Christine Rojcewicz loves to surf, Accounting Professor Douglas (DJ) Stockbridge likes studying old maps, just to name a coupleābut some are also choosing to explore the ways their personal hobbies and academia weave together.
āA mentor once said to me, āread outside your field, thatās where the interesting stuff is,āā says Sandra Waddock, the Thomas J. Galligan Chair and Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility. āSongwriting [for me] is part of the interesting stuff.ā Waddockās longtime love of music became a way to āreadā outside of her research field of system transformation and corporate citizenshipāshe has even released two albums of original folk songsābut that doesnāt mean the twoĢżworlds donāt overlap. She parlayed her regular jam sessions with local musicians into a paper, ā,ā published in the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion.
Sheās not the only one taking this tack. Henrik Hagtvedt, chair of the Marketing Department and the Michael A. Gooch Family Faculty Fellow, studied art in addition to management, and worked as a painter for yearsāan experience that helped inspire his book Money and Marketing in the Art World, released last year. Juan Montes, an associate professor of the practice in the Management and Organization Department, drew on his experience of climbing the treacherous Kangshung Face of Mount Everest to illustrate building organizational resilience in research he published with colleagues in Organization Science and Harvard Business Review.
Assistant Professor of Finance Angela Ma
So do these skills show up in the classroom too? Absolutely, says Pontiff. āI think a lot of the skills that a good finance professor has are skills that good poker players have,ā he explains. He looks to pass along these skills to his students as they consider their future careers. āImagine someone whoās an equity analyst who not only has to figure out what somethingās worth using formulas and numbers, but also might get an assessment of what the future of this company looks like by a twitch that the CEO has whenever he talks about future revenue projections.ā
Angela Ma, an assistant professor of finance, started taking ballet lessons at the age of four, even training with the prestigious Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle for a summer in high school. āPart of my teaching philosophy that comes from dance is that you try to rehearse and thoroughly prepare beforehand so that it kind of gets into your bones,ā says Ma. āHaving an intuitive understanding of the material makes it such that you can have productive spontaneity in a live performance, like in the classroom.ā
When a particular lesson isnāt clicking with students, she is able to change up her choreography on the fly, but she also sees the value of uncertainty that students might feel, over everything from financial concepts to their future careers. To her, uncertainty is necessary for curiosity.Ģż
Associate professor of the practice Juan Montes climbing Mt. Everest.
āItās like being a novice or an amateur at various things,ā Ma saysārecently she has been trying out salsa and swing dancing. āThere is not just one thing we can do in life.ā She adds that in a different universe she might have been an investment banker or a ballerina, but in anotherāthis universeāāIām really grateful to be teaching and doing research.ā
In Montesās classes, heās just as likely to share stories of his mountaineering adventures as he is to talk about his time as a consultant, the CEO of a salmon production company, or the governor of the Los Lagos region of his native Chile. āStudents, especially this generation, demand things that have meaning. Having a good life, a good salary, a good position, is very important, but everybodyās searching for meaning and meaningful things to do,ā he says. āIām not saying that you need to climb Mount Everest, but you need to find out what your Everest is.ā
