Six Professors You Should Know at Columbia Business School

Continuing our series of admissions insights clipped from Veritas Prep's Annual Reports, our in-depth insider's guides to 15 of the world's top business schools, this week we look at six of Columbia Business School's most popular professors. (Our Annual reports are absolutely free with registration, but we thought we'd share some snippets here to help get you started in your Columbia research.)

Every top-tier business school has its list of star faculty whom the students adore. The Columbia faculty is populated with many prominent business leaders, researchers, and teachers. Among Columbia students, there are a handful of professors who are considered a "must" to have for a class, due to their reputation both as educators and as experts:

Must-Have Professors at Columbia Business School

• Bruce Greenwald, Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management. Among Columbia's luminaries, few professors have reached the rock star or guru level of Finance Professor Bruce Greenwald. In addition to being the leading authority on value investing -- or, as the New York Times put it, "the guru to the wall street gurus" -– Professor Greenwald is an expert on productivity and information economics. The titles of his classes suggest the range of his interests: Value Investing; Economics of Strategic Behavior; and Globalization & Markets & the Changing Economic Landscape. Not only is he well versed on multiple subjects, but he's also a great teacher in the Socratic method -– students who are unprepared for class should be on high alert. Year in and year out, Professor Greenwald's classes are significantly oversubscribed, but about 650 students annually find a way into at least one of them.


• Michael Feiner, Professor. Michael Feiner, whose area of expertise is leadership and organizational behavior, embodies Columbia's emphasis on practice. Professor Feiner was a Columbia MBA who rose to become the top HR executive of Pepsico, before being lured to Columbia to captivate students with his insightful blend of theory and practice. Professor Feiner possesses a fearless ability to delve into disastrous, painful situations precisely because such negative object lessons can teach so much about how to manage people effectively. His book, The Feiner Points of Leadership, is a must-read on campus, as well as among alumni of the program.


• Laura Resnikoff, Senior Lecturer. Professor Resnikoff has a reputation for no-nonsense, focused courses that give students incredible access to leading players in the private equity field. She takes these relationships seriously, and instills that ethic in her students: if a class member is so much as a few seconds late to the appointed gathering time in the building lobby of a private equity firm, that student is out of luck, and might as well head back to campus. Those students who manage to make it on time are star-struck by the people they meet, and the ease with which student ideas are evaluated by experienced players in the field –- some of those ideas being nicely validated; others quite summarily shot down. Though not for the faint of heart, it is a situation many students clearly value, for competition to get into her classes is tough.


• Murray Low, Associate Professor of Management and the Director of the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center. Professor Low stands as one of the school's most adored teachers. Having started several successful companies himself, Professor Low now devotes himself to studying the context in which entrepreneurship occurs -– searching for causal links and debunking supposedly common sense links. He has helped to bolster the schools' reputation for turning out entrepreneurs who graduate both with viable business plans and funding, and who in turn circle back to help stoke the cauldron of creativity and process management back on campus.


• Gita Johar, Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business Professor Johar proves that not all beloved Columbia professors teach finance. She teaches courses on consumer psychology and cognition, and how these can be factored into marketing, branding, and advertising activities. Her seminars can entail highly specific "field trips," such as a trek to the Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue to look for subtle design clues and consistencies than enable Calvin Klein to charge 10 to 20 times the price of a utilitarian garment. Her youthful, low-key style is a large factor in her growing popularity on campus.


• Laurie Simon Hodrick, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics. Professor Simon Hodrick has a distinguished career bridging theory and practice. Selected as "One of Forty Under Forty" by Crain's Chicago (while she was a professor at Kellogg), Columbia lured her to New York both for her many prestigious fellowships and for her approachable, if demanding, teaching style. She has been awarded the Columbia University President's Medal for outstanding teaching, and students rave that what they learned about corporate finance and the market for corporate control from her has proved valuable over the course of their careers.

Today's blog post was clipped from our Columbia Annual Report, one of 15 completely free guides to the world's top business schools, available on our site. If you're ready to start building your own application for Columbia or other top MBA programs, call us at 1-800-925-7737 and speak with an MBA admissions expert today!