Michael Tomlin
| School: | CSU Long Beach |
| Department: | Business |
| Location: | Long Beach, CA |
Overall Rating
rated by 1 student
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One of the worst professors I've ever seen. Since the first lecture, it's clear that this professor is different. His lecture style is strange, at the beginning he divides the course into veterans and rookies and asks each one of them if they have informed themselves about the course before. He asks if someone is a leader in this class, after that you have to justify yourself and he classifies you as not leader capable. Tomlin teaches 2 lectures about the textbook in the beginning, after that not anymore. The main part of the lectures revolves around him. The man worked at Fox almost 20 years ago and still pretends that it was yesterday. After a quarter of the semester more and more case studies come up, these are still quite well designed at the beginning and you are given a lot of freedom, so you had the task to create different promotions on a certain topic in 25 minutes. At some point he gives us case studies that he has lived through himself. This is where his main character weakness comes into play, for him there is only one "right" solution of these case studies and that's the solution he himself came up with 20 years ago. He doesn't allow other solutions - that's marketing - there is NOT only one solution here? Sometimes he interrupts the presentations of the case studies and crosses out the results of the students that were written on the white board with a red marker and laughs while doing so. Sometimes he doesn't even let groups finish and just laughs at them during the presentation. Teaching something like this at a university should be forbidden! It is to his credit that he works with real companies like Disney, so we should promote a boy band and hand in the results, Disney will use the submissions and choose a winner (actually the presentations take place in front of Disney Executives, but this was cancelled because of coronavirus). However, there are no grading criteria for the projects. The exams are multiple choice and a few simple essay questions, without reading the chapters you fail because the exam does not relate to the lecture at all. During the Corona crisis Tomlin was also too incapable to continue the lectures, because he seems to be unable to record a video or set up a zoom meeting. Weak for a professor. No cell phones are allowed during the lecture, if you are a minute late, you have to answer to the whole class and Tomlin will pillory you. What is this, the Dark Ages? He creates a general fear and the atmosphere during the lecture I never felt as really good, one just hoped not to be picked up by him. Once he brought 2 guest speakers with him, but they were very strange, if you answered their questions correctly you were rewarded with $5 dollars (no joke), after that there was a case study. The presentation ended in a kind of role play, where one of the guest speakers took the role of taking down the presenter and completely demoting his idea. Sometimes there were really good ideas, but you were not allowed to have your say. The learning effect of these guest speakers is still puzzling to me today and was not explained. For Tomlin, however, the whole thing was very satisfying, as he saw his students being put down by a 6"6 tall man, who proudly tells us that he has been rehearsing this role for 10 years (wow, congratulations). Due to the corona virus the second presentation was dropped, but this one should be even more work. If you really should decide to take this course, you have to be prepared for a lot of reading, some case studies (the approach is not bad, but since there is only one solution for Tomlin, pointless), attendance and a lot of work in the group presentations. The way to become a veteran with Tomlin is hard, I would not go this way again and expose myself to this arbitrariness. |
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