Finance professor offers unique perspective on student success as former nontraditional student

Oleg Gurin stood out among the students in Dr. David Krause's Applied Investment Management class.

Only its second year, AIM enrolled about 20 students, mostly juniors and seniors from Wisconsin or the Chicago suburbs intent on a Wall Street career. But there was also Gurin, a 40-year-old undergraduate who grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. He'd just gotten his green card four years prior.

"Marquette never made me feel like I was different or too old to learn," Gurin remembers. "I give credit to my professors and fellow students for that; they treated me like I was part of the group."

Gurin will rejoin Marquette this fall as the newest assistant professor of finance. He spent the last 16 years of his career at Northwestern Mutual, climbing the ladder from convertible bonds analyst all the way to senior director of investment performance and analytics.

When Gurin thinks about how to structure his future classes, one theme comes to mind: real-world application.

"The more practical exercises that students can do, the better because that's what really prepares them for the future," Gurin says. "In my experience, students retain information much better if they can apply it to something, so I'm going to try and give them chances to do that based on situations I faced myself."

While at Northwestern Mutual, Gurin saw Marquette from a different vantage point, hiring Marquette Business students as interns and seeing them grow just as he had a decade earlier. It made him wonder if teaching might be a pathway to greater positive influence on the next generation of business students.

"I turned 50 years old in 2015, and at Northwestern Mutual, people start retiring at 55 if they have put in enough years at the company; it made me start thinking about what's next," Gurin says.

Krause recommended that Gurin start his doctoral dissertation if he wanted to get serious about teaching. That's just what Gurin did, spending the next seven years researching bond optimization at life insurance companies while working a full-time job and raising his two children, Sasha and Izek.

Others might have been intimidated by the prospect of spreading a Ph.D. over that length of time, but Gurin remembered a conversation he had with one of his wife's friends when deciding whether to get his undergraduate degree.

"One of my wife's friends said 'you're 38 now; by the time you finish your undergraduate degree, you'll be 42. I don't know if that's too old or not,'" he recalls. "That's when it occurred to me: I was going to be 42 years old anyway in four years. The only difference would be whether I had a degree to show for it."

While completing his Ph.D., Gurin also got his first experience teaching, signing on as an instructor of practice to teach both intro to Financial Management and Applied Financial Modeling. He used the opportunity to refine his teaching technique, experimenting with flipped classrooms in which students would watch lecture videos at home and work collaboratively on problems in class.

Upon his return to Marquette, Gurin will be surrounded by familiar faces, such as Professor of Finance Dr. Matteo Arena, who offered Gurin his first teaching role. Andrew DeGuire, the new James H. Keyes Dean of Business Administration, also worked closely with Gurin at Northwestern Mutual.

"We had a great working relationship when he was running the corporate strategy team; it will be nice to see him in the building every day," Gurin said.

With insurance and wealth management education as a growing part of the college's long-term plan and an AIM program that is stronger than ever, Gurin comes to Marquette Business at the perfect time for his expertise to add value to students' educational careers.

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