If you have ideals of one day becoming a university professor then it is always a good idea to look and learn from the very best. I was very fortunate during my time at college to be taught by the wonderful Andrew Curran Wesleyan professor and a fellow resident of New Haven, Hartford, CT. Mr. Curran is widely considered in these parts to be one of the very best professors that the university has ever seen and from my own experience I can honestly say that he was an integral part of how my university life and beyond panned out. So what is it that makes Mr. Curran such a great professor? Let’s take a look.

Never Too Busy

Although university is about encouraging young men and women to be more autonomous in their education there is still a need for support and guidance. Unlike many other professors this is something that was never an issue for the Mr. Curran and he was always available either in person or via email, to answer your queries or more accurately speaking, to point you in the direction of where you can find the answer.

Brought To Life

Another great talent of Mr. Curran is his ability to bring to life the endless pages that you will find in textbooks. There is of course no doubting the knowledge that you can gain from textbooks but let’s be honest, simply sitting and poring through page after page is terribly mundane. What the professor would do however would be to initiate activities based on what we were reading, in order to ensure that the knowledge became engrained into our minds. We would often have mock trials with a lawsuit that he had concocted or weekly debates whereby he would actively encourage strong rebuttals by way of retaliation. We didn’t know it at the time but he was in fact preparing us for the life which we all had ahead, achieving things that no amount of textbooks ever could.

Character Spotting

Mr. Curran was, and I am sure still is, one of the greatest judges of character that I have ever known, perhaps owing to the experience which he has had. The professor would know within a few weeks what kind of student you were going to be, he would be able to accurately assess what reaction you would take to negative feedback or a complaint and he would always be able to judge what people really had inside them. This ability to assess characters then helped him to motivate each and every one of us to become the very best that we could be.

These are just three of the main attributes which the professor showed us during our time learning from him. If you do wish to become a great professor then at the very least you must learn how to incorporate these characteristics into the way that you teach, and hopefully you will be as widely respected as Mr. Curran is.