 "Photo: John Gilchrist")
A group of UT undergraduates climbed the treacherous slopes of Mt. Everest without ever leaving the classroom.
The Business Foundations Summer Institute, a nine-week-long summer class that combines five UT business foundation courses for a small classroom setting, split 35 students into six teams that competed against each other in a Harvard professor's computer simulation of the infamous Everest climb.
Student's tasks during the simulated climb, which took a few hours, included calculating the appropriate oxygen levels for their teammates, who made their way closer to the summit through the computer program. The students also had to provide medical attention to climbers and had to figure out strategic ways to avoid harsh weather.
Zoheb Noorani said he assumes the simulation was not quite like climbing the real mountain, but the challenges he and his teammates faced were similar.
"It was a good representation of the decision-making process," said Noorani, a mechanical engineering sophomore and member of the winning team. "You just have to look at it in a different way and take into account everyone's points of view."
Noorani said he wants to be a mechanical engineer in the future, and to assume a leadership role, he will have to learn how to work in teams.
The hands-on experience is the optimal learning technique, said Kristie Loescher, UT business lecturer and assistant director of the institute.
"Learning is much more of a function of your experience than of just what you read or hear on videos you watch," Loescher said.
Sections of the fall and spring courses taught through business foundations, a program that students from all colleges can apply to if they want to gain basic business knowledge, consist of about 350 students. The smaller summer program has a similar curriculum but provides activities geared toward smaller groups, such as the simulation, that larger classes cannot integrate into their daily schedule, Loescher said.
"It's hard to introduce students to a topic in those large classes, but with these small summer institute classes, we really give students the opportunity to experience what we talk about in class," she said.
Simulations used to re-create real-life situations are more commonly used in top-tier universities and businesses across the nation to teach students and employees how to handle different situations and pressures that may come up during their careers, Loescher said.
Case methods, the classic method of teaching situational issues, are commonly used in large classrooms and provide students with a problematic story they must solve, she said.
"The case method doesn't really prepare you for real-life interactions," Loescher said, "whereas the simulations really do allow you to not just solve a business problem, but do it within the context of real relationships."
She said the teams that said they were the closest and most friendly toward one another did not do as well in the Mt. Everest simulation, because they were not as self-critical as the other teams.
"That's a critical lesson you can talk about, but people don't get it until they feel it," Loescher said.
Students attending the institute go to class Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. from June 1 to Aug. 1.
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