Review: Kevin Walsh, IDIS, Leavey School of Business
At a glance
- Workload: Light
- Teaching Style: Guest lectures, some interactive sessions
- Interest in students: Unclear
- Relevance to outside world: High
Overall Professor Rating: 3-4 (hard to tell due to so many guest lecturers)
Overall Course Rating: 4 (but them guest lecturers are good!)
IDIS 612 is an interesting course. It’s basically all guest lecturers, but they are good ones, as Professor Walsh knows a LOT of people in some seriously powerful positions. I recommend the course to anyone wanting to take a qualitative and, in all honesty, easy course while taking another, much harder one in the same quarter. You get a lot out of it, while not beating yourself up with two difficult courses.
The Review
This is the latest of my reviews on the professors I’ve had while an MBA student at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. There are lots of sites out there that provide feedback and rates – ratemyprofessor is the most notable. The SantaClaraMBA Yahoo group also has a big database of comments and lots of additional information in its message archive. That database can be a bit hard to wade through, and the comments are short and often just link to other threads, which are themselves pretty short and superficial. Only here can I write as much as I want 🙂
I review professors from a variety of perspectives. First, I explain the context(s) under which I took the class. Time of year, time of day, etc. Then I talk about the quality of the class and the professor, and finally about the professor as a person. After all, we are trying to learn about our interactions with people, so knowing that side of a teacher is critical, too. So these would be interactions outside the classroom, etc. I also just write whatever it is that I think is relevant or will be helpful to others. That is my overall goal.
This review goes way back to Fall 2008, so just last quarter. It’s a bit later than I had hoped to do, as is obviously the one for IDIS 696 Social Benefit Entrepreneurship, which I also took last quarter and will write in the next few days.
The facts
I took IDIS 612 in Fall 2008, Mondays and Wednesdays, 5:45-7 (this is the new first slot in Leavey’s 2-course-per-night schedule). Professor Walsh is an adjunct with significant ties to Silicon Valley and a number of high-ranking executives, from start-up CEO’s to marketing presidents at large companies.
Them’s the facts (slim as they are). Now read on for the review.
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