At Wharton, we have the phenomenal opportunity to take our professors to lunch around campus alongside 1 or 2 peers compliment of Wharton Undergraduate Division. As a freshman, I had heard about this program but hadn’t even thought about taking part in it, probably because I felt like student-teacher relations in college were more formal and distant, unlike the ones I had in high school where classes were much smaller and we did not have lecture-structured courses. Then, during my sophomore fall semester I took a marketing course on Creativity and Idea Generation with professor Rom Schrift, who proposes that creativity is not a ability limited to creative people, but rather a skill-set that can be trained and developed like many others. I absolutely loved this class, and in one of our group projects one of my upperclassmen friends suggested we should take him out to lunch. I was a bit hesitant at first, but given that professor Schrift was truly approachable, he encouraged in-class discussion and participation and made an effort to know everyone’s names, I thought, why not?
And so, my friend and I took professor Schrift to Baby Blues, a southern-inspired BBQ restaurant on campus. In a more informal setting, we got to know more about his background, the marketing research he had conducted, how he ended up in Philadelphia after growing up in Israel, etc. He also asked about our undergraduate experience, he asked us for feedback on his course, etc. It was fun and relaxed and certainly inspiring: not everyone has the opportunity to have lunch with renowned professors that might seem very busy but actually want to get to know the students, their experiences, their interests, etc. I could not believe I had taken me so long to realize how much of an opportunity it is to have Lunch & Learn and how little advantage I had taken of it! Ever since, I have taken multiple members of faculty to different restaurants on campus.
