I have one of the best Digital Media professors. Dr. Kamerer seems to have made it his mission to ensure that every student who passes through his classes will get a job. He works very hard to give us marketable skills and goes above and beyond the call of duty of a normal professor.

So it was pretty awesome to get a chance to go on a field trip with him and my digital media class. It’s a Tuesday night class, from 4:15 – 6:45 p.m. There’s about 8 of us in the class, and it’s all Seniors. This means that he can afford to be a little more loose with the class structure.

Last week (before Thanksgiving break) people were asking if he was going to cancel our Tuesday night class since Thanksgiving break started on Wednesday. He answered a student’s the question by saying, “Yes, we’re having class on Tuesday… [pause, looks around room] … OK, be honest now, how many of you are just not going to be here whether or not we have class?”

A few raised their hands, and so he decided that he’d plan an “alternate” activity to explore the week’s topic, mobile technology.

The next week we went out to explore some mobile apps and field test them at Macy’s and ShopTop. We checked out ShopKick and SCVNGR. I liked SCVNGR a lot more, but we overall decided that both of the apps took us out of the shopping experience, and until they were buttery smooth, they detracted from customer engagement.

But the cool part was just wandering around Water Tower Place on Michigan Avenue and going through stores with our smartphones DURING CLASS TIME. Even cooler was that about an hour and a half into our two and a half hour class Dr. K asked us how we felt about going to a nearby grill for burgers and fries.

So the last half of class was us eating burgers and fries at a place near campus, on his dime, before he left to catch his flight to Kansas for Thanksgiving. The rest of us stuck around and had some good classmate bonding time. It was a heck of a night.