Finance professor honored with lifetime achievement award for excellence in education

by Chuck Gordon

After Lisa Schwartz earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1996, she was encouraged to find a position at a Research 1 institution.

"I always knew I enjoyed the teaching aspect, but your Ph.D. professors try to convince you that you're going to get bored teaching the same stuff year after year," she says.

She's been anything but bored during her 26-plus years at Wingate, teaching finance with energy and passion and innovation, and keeping up to date in an ever-changing industry. Last week, Schwartz was rewarded for her devotion to teaching when she received the Jean L. Heck Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Financial Education from the Finance Education Association, an organization that focuses on teaching institutions rather than research institutions. She earned the award at the FEA's annual conference in San Antonio. The Heck Awards were first presented in 2018, with one of the initial honorees being Dr. George Kester, a 1968 Wingate graduate and emeritus professor of finance at Washington & Lee University.

Schwartz received the honor in large part because of her devotion to the conference itself, having attended 20 years in a row and volunteered in any number of ways to make sure it runs smoothly. But her devotion to giving Wingate finance students the best possible education is just as strong.

"She has a great rapport with the students and is always willing to help them, inside the classroom and outside the classroom," says Dr. Sergio Castello, dean of the Porter B. Byrum School of Business. "She's very engaged in research and serving the Finance Education Association. She's dedicated her life to this."

"I ended up at Wingate just by luck and then found out, 'Wait! This is really what I want,'" Schwartz says. "I wouldn't say that I was seeking it out, but it found me."

Schwartz jokes that she was the "dinosaur" dragging herself to a session on artificial intelligence at last week's conference, but she's been forward-thinking as a professor. In 2012 she created the Finance Lab, from where she now teaches all of her senior-level courses. Another Wingate professor had suggested that the University establish a "trading room," but after discussing the idea with faculty members from other universities at the FEA conference, Schwartz pushed the idea of launching the Finance Lab instead.

"They said, 'Your kids aren't trading. This isn't Wall Street,'" she says.

Instead, Schwartz devises interactive, hands-on assignments that require a lot of participation from all students. In the lab, she can project any student's computer screen onto one of several TVs at the front of the room, helping the students learn from each other and stay on task, and helping her pace her lessons well.

"They have to work along with me," she says. "It's a very different environment than a regular classroom."

When she established the Finance Lab, Schwartz implemented the use of Capital IQ, a software platform from S&P that helps users in the industry place proper valuations on companies and industries. She learned about Capital IQ and StockTrak, another software program her students use, at the FEA conference.

"I do try to keep relevant and up to date," Schwartz says. "I don't work in the industry. I just read all the time. I do everything I can to keep myself up to date. And then you go to the conferences to keep your skills up to date."

Her success with the lab has helped her more than double the number of finance majors at Wingate, to around 120. For years, she's taught extra classes in order to meet demand.

"She was the finance department for 20-plus years," Castello says. Last year, he hired a second finance professor, Dr. Zhiyan Wang, to ease some of Schwartz's burden.

Schwartz does less research with students than she used to, preferring to let the younger faculty members get their turn with summer research grants, but she still has the energy to command a classroom - or lab. And she wouldn't have it any other way.

"It's obviously always about the students," she says. "We do it because we want to be involved with students. We want to interact with students. We want to be engaged with our students. We don't want research assistants teaching our classes for us. We don't want to be locked in an office somewhere publishing papers. We want to be in the classroom. We want to be engaged in that education process.

"I was laughing at the conference: 'Nothing says you're old like getting a lifetime achievement award.' But I guess it's been a lifetime. It's been my academic lifetime that I've been involved with this."

Sept. 25, 2024

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