Alex is a college professor and faculty member of the Dairy Science program at Virginia Tech. With a background in agricultural economics, Alex is most known on campus (and on his travels) for his personal finance course. Covering topics from credit card usage to retirement accounts, Alex has made it his mission to increase the financial awareness of students today.
Transcript
My name's Alex White, I've been at Virginia Tech for about 30 years now. I'm primarily in a teaching position, so I teach courses in the College of Agriculture, for the Dairy Science Department, and the Ag Economics Department. My courses primarily are finance-related, so I teach personal finance, I teach agricultural finance, and just general business management courses. Normally I'm here before 8:00. My first class is at nine o'clock, so that gives me an hour, hour and a half to prepare for the lecture. This semester, my class is all the way across campus, so I've got about a 3/4 of a mile walk to get to class, so I get my exercise on the way in. My class has 450 students in it, that's my personal finance class, and I spend probably 45 minutes per class teaching the material, asking questions, but I spend a good five to ten minutes answering questions from the students, during the class time. After class, I get a lot of personal finance-related questions. Students wanna know more about how they can set themselves up for their retirement, how they can use their credit cards more wisely, how they can straighten their budget. So I'll spend 10, 15 minutes after class answering those types of questions, then I run back across campus, start preparing for my other two classes that afternoon. So I'm in class basically from 8:30 till about 2:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and after that, then it's time to grade papers and start getting ready for the next lecture. The fun lectures sometimes are dealing with auto insurance. Somebody will say, "A friend of mine backed into a car "in the parking lot," so it's always the hypothetical friend there, but, "Who's responsible for this? "What's covered, what isn't covered?" And that's the really fun part about the personal finance course is it applies to everyday life. So once they start, once I break the ice and they start asking a couple questions, there are some days where all I do is answer questions from the class, I don't even get to my lecture. Somebody will ask, "What are five ways "to use your credit card more wisely?" And away we go.
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