-: 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.