Associate Chair, Department of Marketing
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Even before Dr. Hank Boyd traveled to Hua Hin, Thailand to advise business leaders in Southeast Asia or to lead a group of MBA students in Cape Town, South Africa, he was on his own journey and unsure of where the road would end. Now, as a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland, he also teaches at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG). Boyd has decidedly ventured down a road which has no end – the life of the mind. Well on his way, he continues to grow from his experiences inside the classroom and the corporate environment.
“I think that teaching is something where you feel like you are moving in the direction of mastering it, but you never fully master it,” Boyd said. “So, for me, it’s an endpoint I know I’ll never reach where you say ‘I finally have it’ and that way I have got to keep going and I’ve got to keep up.”
Hank Boyd took his first steps in academe at Princeton University as an undergraduate chemistry major stating he was “too entrepreneurial” in the lab. “I blew up a few things,” he admitted. Boyd then decided to apply his keen intellect and gift of gab in another realm – business. He subsequently pursued his MBA in Marketing from the University of California at Berkeley and then obtained his Ph.D. in Marketing from Duke University.
It was during the latter part of his self-exploration that Dr. Boyd realized he wanted to be an academic. He had always been enamored by the idea of teaching. As a child, Boyd would often visit the University of Maryland, College Park, where his mother was earning her doctorate in Counseling Psychology. The precocious boy would stand in the middle of a large lecture hall and pretend that he was a spellbinding professor in front of a captivated audience. Many years later, Boyd accepted his first teaching position at University of Wisconsin-Madison where he would also eventually earn his J.D. in Intellectual Property.
Beyond his academic credentials, Hank Boyd brings to the USG campus his diverse array of career experiences. His areas of expertise include biotechnology, consumer behavior, business consulting, pharmaceutical sales, advertising and marketing research. His research has been published in notable journals and his opinions have appeared in national publications such as The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. He has worked as a pharmaceutical rep at Merck, an economic forecaster at IBM and has consulted at firms including ExxonMobil, Verizon and SAIC.
Dr. Boyd’s diverse resume mirrors the character that prospective students will find at USG. This institution of higher learning attracts a student body dedicated toward advancing one’s career.
“I think they would find that this [USG] is a very intellectually challenging institution. I think they are going to find a wide array of classes that are available so they can take on various pursuits, but I think what’s neat is that the students they will be working alongside will have real like experiences and that’s something they can tap into. And that’s something you may not find at other institutions.”
“Students are thirsty for applicable, real-world knowledge,” said Hank Boyd who aims to avoid traditional lectures and instead encourage discussion and problem solving sessions geared toward contemporary issues. How to strategically market a local DC band or the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa are the kinds of topics he uses to engage critical thinking on the part of students.
Dr. Boyd is always eager to inject his lessons with cutting-edge material from own consulting endeavors. As he grows professionally, so do his students. On a recent project, he traveled to Thailand to serve as an executive education consultant in which he taught an intensive marketing workshop to industry leaders in the Oils & Lubricants division of a Fortune 500 multinational company.
“So when you look over your life and you think ‘where will the road take me?’ I had no idea. I could have never imagined that someday [I’d] be working for this major multinational corporation and be in Thailand teaching executives from various parts of South East Asia. It was really an amazing sort of event that happened.”
In the end, regardless of where the road of life might take him, Hank Boyd will remain a professor at heart.