While Alan Grant, professor of business and economics, is on a one-year sabbatical, Baker alumna Stephanie Brockmann will step in as an instructor of business.

“I am honestly just looking forward to being back in the classroom,” Brockmann said.

Brockmann graduated from Baker with a degree in business and a minor in economics. She went on to pursue a master’s in economics from Western Kentucky University and now works as an economics assistant for the federal government in the Kansas City region.

“My job is to research the communities in these states and identify what’s happening there and how that will affect the banks located in these communities,” Brockmann said.

Brockmann said she originally pursued a graduate degree with the idea of also gaining a doctorate in order to teach at the university level.

“I’m hoping to use this year as a way of deciding if that’s still where I want to go,” Brockmann said. “I taught some as a graduate student and I’ve always been comfortable in front of a class.”

Brockmann, who will be teaching three different economics courses in the fall, just hopes to make the material interesting to students.

“Economics is one of those topics that can get very mundane and lecture-ish when you’re just giving definitions but I always to try to bring something relevant into the classroom,” Brockmann said. “People don’t understand how much they use economics in the real world.”

Because Brockmann will only be at Baker for a year, she hopes to keep students in line with what they’ve already been learning but also bring in some of her real life experience.

“When [Grant] returns, the students will be able to pick up where they left off,” Brockmann said. “My expectation is just that the students walk out of the class maybe not so much dreading economics.”