Spring Break
A day in the life: Finance Professor
Jesus Butler
Issue date: 6/1/09 Section: News
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His name is Stephen Pruitt, and he's a professor of Finance at the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration.
He says his favorite part of the job is face time he gets with students.
"It's the interaction with the students that I like best," Pruitt said. "Just the ability to have these great interactions with a classroom of people, to have some impact on their lives, try to give them the information that they need to survive and prosper in this world we have. That's just real important to me."
For Pruitt, teaching his students goes beyond simply doling out the financial formulas they'll need to understand for success in the business world.
"Now the formulas, that's important stuff, we've got to make sure people come out of here with competence in respect to that," he said. "But if that's all I've imparted, then I've failed at my job, in my opinion. There's so much more to life than formulas, and so few people actually figure that out until it's too late."
Pruitt has no shortage of life experiences to draw from to inspire his students. He grew up in Indiana and went to Purdue University after graduating high school in 1975. However, college was just a backup plan for what he really wanted to do - music.
"With music, I was actually intent on being a rock star up and through my junior year of college," Pruitt said.
His band, Never2Late, experienced success all across Indiana with their Kansas and Rush influenced classic rock sound, but, unfortunately, they never broke through to the mainstream.
"We did not have a really good lead singer," Pruitt said, before admitting, "I was the lead singer."
Once he realized his chances of making the big time with music were slim, Pruitt quit the band. He continues playing music, however, and has since put together his own recording studio in his basement and reunited with former band mate and California-based guitarist Geoffrey Lawrence Wilcox to record new original music (though, he described his current sound as something closer to Boston or Aerosmith).
You may be asking, how did an aspiring rock star end up as a Finance professor? According to Pruitt, it all started when he went to Ohio State University for his MBA after graduating from Purdue. It was there he met Gailen Hite, a Finance professor who inspired him to do more with his life than take the path of least resistance.
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