- Top Stories
- Knowledgebase
- Speakers
- Conferences
- Multimedia
- Research News
- Media Mentions
- Stanford Business Magazine
- Features
- Knowledge Network
- Columns
- Class Notes
- Past Issues
- Search Stanford Business
Study Groups Keep Alumni Brains Limber
When Chris Tilghman, MBA ’04/ MA Education ’05, was a student, he loved study groups. “I showed up here and said, ‘This community is awesome. How do I preserve this opportunity to learn?’” The answer: Tilghman started a program that allows alumni and doctoral students to learn from each other.
The Community Study Group program, which now is organized by the Business School’s Lifelong Learning department, offers six-week courses in which one or two PhD students meet with a group of 12 to 18 alumni to explore a given topic—most recently, “Power, Status, and Social Hierarchy.”
Tilghman, who is director of higher education marketing at InsideTrack, a college coaching service, said the new model addresses important needs. “Alumni get access to cutting-edge research. Students get access to working business people. The quality of the exchanges is generally rich.”
Kimberly Rios Morrison, a PhD candidate, said the program helped her expand her abilities as an academic. “Teaching the MBA and Sloan alumni gave me a better sense of how I could further my students’ professional growth while making sure they thought critically about the subject matter,” she said. “I am currently on the academic job market, and because a few of the schools that I’m applying to emphasize both teaching and research, I couldn’t be happier that I decided to lead a study group.”
Tilghman said he keeps coming back for “the little flashes of insights, learning something new, seeing something in a different way. It is such an intellectually rich environment. You don’t find that everywhere. When you do, you want to mine it as much as you can.”
Learn about upcoming study groups at the Lifelong Learning web page.