Teach Students to Think Through Problems — Not Google Them

Aswath Damodaran holds the Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education and is Professor of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business. He has published prodigiously, authoring several prominent textbooks on valuation, finance and investing, and he has frequently been named “Professor of the Year” by graduates of NYU’s M.B.A. class. Those feats do not fully capture his impact, though. Outside academia, he is known as Wall Street’s “Dean of Valuation,” as his opinions about companies have a way of influencing the way the world sees them. Additionally, his insistence that videos of his teaching remain freely available allows him to serve students all over the world, at a scale rarely conceived or accomplished by most classroom teachers. We reached out to him to learn about how he deploys his considerable talents. What we found was someone who does many things by doing one thing very well. His output, whether in the classroom or on his blog, begins with pure passion for teaching and ripples outward from there.