On December 6th, 2023, at approximately 11:30am, a man in a trench coat entered Beam Hall, the home of the Lee Business School at UNLV. As is the case with the vast majority of universities in this country, UNLV is an open campus, and this man was unchallenged as he came onto the grounds. He walked past room 104, where students in Finance 308, International Financial Management, were just taking their seats. It was the week prior to finals week at UNLV, and this class would be a review session for the final exam which would take place seven days later. The man got on the elevator, went to the 4th floor where business school professors had their offices, and opened fire with a 9mm handgun. He would end up murdering three professors and wounding a fourth before exiting the building amongst panicking and confused students. On the front steps just outside Beam Hall, he would be confronted by a University Police detective responding to the shots fired call, and he would be killed in a shootout.
This would upend the entire university, and create massive changes to the remaining schedule of classes for the students, not just in the Lee Business School, but across the entire campus. Three people were murdered, and I am always appalled when people take a tragedy and try to make it about themselves when they were only peripherally involved, if at all. However, this did have a major effect on the penultimate semester of my university experience, particularly as I was scheduled to present my culminating research project in Economics to a panel of judges at the Undergraduate Research Symposium just three days later. The topic of my research paper was, “The Determinants of Gun Violence in America.”
I get ahead of myself though. The 2023 school year started 11 months earlier in January, and I was once again enrolled in the maximum allowable six classes. As a double major, I had so many required classes that I didn’t have any true electives to take during my entire time at UNLV. 120 total college credits are required to graduate, and I had well over 100 credits of required classes to go along with the 29 credits transferred from CSN, so any easy classes I might have had were still required classes, and those were all in my past. While some of my classmates were taking classes like Beers of the World, Bowling, and Intro to Kayaking, the very types of classes that had formed my negative opinion of a college education in the first place, I was force-feeding myself with the maximum allowable class load of study-intensive Finance and Economics classes just to meet the stringent requirements that accompanied the double-major.
My spring 2023 schedule consisted of four live classes and two online classes. The live classes were, Business Law (BLW 302), Intermediate Macroeconomics (ECON 303), Intro to Econometrics (ECON 441), and Money and Capital Markets (FIN 312), while my online classes were Intermediate Managerial Finance (FIN 303), and Investments (FIN 307), the latter of which, although an online class, had a mandatory scheduled lecture time where attendance was part of the grade, and would turn out to be taught by the worst professor I ever had.
Business Law was an interesting class, taught by a lawyer, and covering a very wide array of business legal topics including, labor law, contract law, and business case law. The instructor was stern and no-nonsense, his eagle-eyes identifying students using their cell phones during his lectures in the 100-seat auditorium like, well, like an eagle spotting a mouse in a large field of hay. He would stop the lecture and refuse to start again until the student put down the cell phone, an absolutely ridiculous show of unjustified irritability that would be very uncomfortable to witness, particularly for those of us on laptops playing Angry Birds.
This instructor was diligent about cheating, one of the very few I ever encountered. I’m going to talk more about this in a bit, but to prevent cheating, he would make two versions of each test, and then religiously ensure that no two students with the same version sat next to one another. He had two assistants in the room who would help him watch over us test-takers, and then he would check each person’s identification when we handed in the tests. I never had another class where a professor checked identification, and I had actually always thought that was strange, particularly in high-level classes where attendance isn’t required. You teach students for five or six weeks and start to get to know their names, and then on test day, a totally unknown person shows up and takes the test and you just accept that test without confirming who they are? It always seemed to me to be a situation rife for cheating, particularly with classes such as accounting which, unless you’re specifically an accounting major, wouldn’t be a class where information would build and you would suffer later by having an expert take your exam for you.
Anyway, there was another version of this Business Law class that was online with this same professor, and he actually caught more than half the class cheating on one of the exams. I never found out exactly how they did it…some version of taking the exam together from the same room, probably the library, where they all got exactly the same wrong answers. Being a lawyer which is a profession where integrity is burned into their psyche throughout their careers, this was a big deal to this instructor, and he called each of them in individually for interviews/interrogations. Many of them were failed out of the class or had to retake the exams with penalties. Again, this sort of diligence to combat cheating was incredibly unusual, and quite refreshing. Much more on this in part four.
The class titled Investments was one that should have been incredibly useful and very applicable to any sort of career in finance. It covered such topics as portfolio management, bond-equivalent yields, variance and standard deviation of portfolios, yield curves, the Sharpe ratio, duration and modified duration, the dividend discount model, and so many more important concepts. Unfortunately, the professor was horrible. Bottom three that I ever had easy, possibly the actual worst. He taught by reading from his notes in a thick accent and circling slides over and over until his scribbles crossed out the information you needed to learn. You were required to download the lecture slides the day of class…if you missed them, he deleted them, which served no purpose other than of a punitive nature toward anyone missing the lecture. He discouraged questions and made fun of students who did brave his wrath by interrupting him with a question. This material was dense and difficult, and he taught it as if this was a master’s level class, expecting students to absorb his words and understand his rambling, despite his lack of any teaching ability. He’s the only professor I ever saw have under a 1.5 rating on ratemyprofessors. He’s also the only professor I ever went to the chair of the Finance department to complain about. He curved exams, like most of the bad professors, for the simple reason that he was incapable of teaching the material. One of the exams we took required a 19-point curve to get the class mean up to a C-average. When your class average is in the 50s, that is not on the students, that is on you as a teacher. Sadly, I would experience much worse than this in my final semester here, but up to this point, this professor was the worst I’d ever seen.
Thanks to the curve, I got an A in this class, but I mourned the loss of information I thought was vital to a finance career, and it definitely required me to go out on my own and learn much of the material this class was supposed to teach me, lest I fall behind in later classes that built on this information. It’s sad that professors like this are able to achieve tenure at universities. I understand that good professors are hard to attract, and that administrators cannot always rely on student evaluations to rate professors as that would become manipulatable and hurt the sanctity of objective educational standards, but when professors such as this one get through the cracks, it is bad for all involved.
Both of my economics classes were incredible, and I found that I enjoyed the sub-field of macroeconomics more than its sister, microeconomics. Econometrics is the field of regression analysis, and this class continued my first immersion in this field from Statistics II. This class was taught by a phenomenal professor who also happened to be the vice provost. He is an absolute savant in the program R, an analytical regression program similar to STATA, which is the one I would become the most adept in as I moved forward. I would come to love conducting regression analysis on data, and this class was my first experience in that amazing sub-field of economics.
I finished the spring semester with perfect As, and my streak continued. I decided once again to take four classes during the summer sessions as I still had several business school requirements to get through, and, as I might have mentioned, I’m not exactly a spring chicken. I wanted to pound out classes as fast as I could, and these remaining business school classes were a thorn in my side. I didn’t want to take them, I had no interest in them, and yet they were required classes, so I had no choice. The only thing I could do was limit the pain by taking the super-condensed versions of them offered in the summer session, five-week long classes instead of the normal 4+ months. I enrolled in Tech and Innovation (IS 330) and Principles of Management and Behavior (MGT 301) for the first 5-week term, followed by Marketing Management (MKT 301) and Operations Management (SCM 352) for the second 5-week term.
I had no memory of taking IS 330 while writing this, and had to go back to my folder to see what it was. It was filled with nonsense like creating “empathy maps” and designing a new cell phone application. The kind of nonsense class that someone getting a marketing degree—the third worst, and mostly worthless degree offered by a university—would love. I hated it and was thrilled to only have to suffer the agony for five weeks instead of four plus months.
Management 301 was more nonsense involving abhorrent business concepts such as the six forces of the general business environment, the four approaches to ethics and values, Kohlberg’s theory of ethics, the corporate social responsibility pyramid, polycentric and geocentric management approaches, Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions…it was five weeks of memorizing nonsense and attempting to regurgitate it for the test and then blocking it out of my brain forever. Perhaps my terrible attitude toward this type of instruction is why I got an A- in this class? Gasp. Yup. The 4.0 dream died by mutilation this summer with my first ever sub-A grade. By the way, what the fuck even is an A-? Why does this grade exist? Not all professors have this grade. Many don’t give minus and plus grades. I earned a 92.5% in this class. Why isn’t this an A? This nonsense pisses me off.
It wouldn’t matter in the long-run though, because I was going to do even worse in the next summer session. MKT 301 and SCM 352 were taught by the same professor back-to-back, so I had to spend three hours a day with him, five days a week for five weeks. He was a good instructor, but the problem was that he was a lecturer, not a professor. This meant that he had no leeway to adjust the curriculum—he had to teach what they made him teach. That meant that we went over a chapter each day, Monday through Thursday and then tested on Fridays. That meant memorizing a great deal of information and then taking a publisher-provided test, which tend to be rather more difficult. Because it was a live class and, as a lecturer, he didn’t even have the option to curve the grades, it was an incredibly difficult test each week, made even more difficult by the fact that both classes had almost the same schedule. So, I would be trying to memorize eight chapters of information in four days between the two classes. This was incredibly difficult, and my grades suffered. I managed in A in SCM 352, but got my first ever B in MKT 301. Have I mentioned how much I hate marketing? Did I mention it’s the worst degree offered in business school?
Entering the fall semester, I was forced to have amnesia toward my first non-As of my college career, putting them behind me and moving forward with my best foot. The good news was that the majority of the nonsense business school classes were behind me, with only the capstone class remaining. The other good news was that after consultation with an advisor, I learned I had only nine required classes remaining, which meant that I could split those up five and four. My semesters of maximum classes had come to an end.
I enrolled in five classes to start the fall semester 2023. Might as well leave my final semester as the easiest with only four classes, the normal class load that most students take. I enrolled in the business school capstone class, Global Business Strategy (BUS 498), Industrial Organization (ECON 455), Seminar in Economic Research (ECON 495), International Financial Management (FIN 308), and Student Investment Fund (FIN 425). Even though I still had a couple of economics courses to take, I had taken enough to take the capstone class which was Econ 495, so I would be taking two capstone classes this semester. The finance program at UNLV doesn’t have a capstone class, so this would be the last of those for me.
Global Business Strategy was probably the most interesting and enjoyable business school class I took, mainly because the professor was fantastic. For starters, his class was not mandatory and he posted the lecture notes online, so you really didn’t need to attend. Which meant that I never did. The material dealt with international business issues, and it was interesting. The projects were interesting, the final project was a group project, which I normally abhor, but I somehow found myself in with an amazing group of intelligent go-getters, and I really enjoyed our final project which was a business plan to bring Grey Goose vodka to the Saudi Arabian free trade city of Neom. One of my fellow students was Saudi, and he wore the full regalia for our presentation to the class. It all sounds like the type of nonsense I would typically despise, but for some reason, I really enjoyed it.
The Student Investment Fund class was phenomenal. Taught by one of the best instructors in the finance department, this class required an interview with the professor in order to enroll. He only took 24 of the best finance students for this class, and not having had him for any previous classes, I had to make sure that I impressed during the interview. I was lucky enough to get in, and it was an incredible experience. Somebody, many years ago, donated $100k to the school to start this program, and it’s been going ever since. The students manage the money as they would in any wealth management career, investing in equities and mutual funds as they see fit. The money is real, and when I entered the class, the total funds were just over $400k. We would pitch buy, sell, or hold presentations to the class, the class would vote, and if 70% or more approved the initiative, the professor would make the trade. We were assigned to sectors that matched the S&P 500 sectors, and we were solely responsible for managing the funds allocated to that sector. It was real-world wealth management, and the class became a socially cohesive bunch, including the old man of the class. (That’s me.) Pitches would come with often rousing and animated discussions, all moderated expertly by the professor, who would chime in with advanced finance instruction if we missed something, or were operating under false information. He otherwise stayed out of all discussions and deliberations. He let us succeed and he let us fail, and it was an amazing experience, not to be missed if you happen to be a finance program student at UNLV, or anywhere else that has a similar opportunity.
International Financial Management was really all about currency trading, and I found it very interesting, though quite a difficult class with a lot of dense information to learn. This is the class that was in session when the December 6th shooter opened fire. More on this in a minute.
Econ 455 was taught by a new professor to the school, and he was excellent. Another difficult class with a lot of dense material, but one I thoroughly enjoyed. Econ 495, the economics capstone class involved a final project using regression analysis. Students had to choose their topics, compile their own data, and run their own unique regressions. The build-up to this culminating project involved regression analyses using data provided by the professor. Incidentally, he was the same professor I had for Statistics II, which was my true introduction to regression analysis, and I wasn’t a huge fan of his. I respected him, and I thought he was quite knowledgeable and a nice guy, but as an instructor, I did not like his style. He was a tech philistine and taught by using a notepad and markers which he would project onto the screen, almost never looking up at the class. There was little-to-no interaction with the students, no attempts to be personable in any way…just start the lecture right on time, draw on the notepad the entire time, and end right on time. Anyway, he had a lock on this capstone class, and so there were no other options.
All my classes were going well right up until some bastard murderer who was mad that he didn’t get a job (by the way, kudos to whomever made the decision to not hire this guy. That was prescient of you.) decided to kill a few professors on December 6th. I wasn’t in class that day. I felt comfortable with the material for International Financial Management, and didn’t think I needed to be there for the review day, so I skipped. It wouldn’t have mattered had I been there—he wasn’t targeting students, he was targeting professors, the tiniest glimmer of a bright spot on a horrible day. While I look more like a teacher or a staff member than a student, the murderer had a plan, and I would not have been in danger even had I been there. Nonetheless, I felt fortuitous to have decided to skip that day.
This was pandemonium, of course, and the students all overreacted, if that’s possible in such a situation. Someone started a petition to make UNLV a closed campus. (This would be nearly impossible, BTW.) Another started a petition for administrators to denounce gun violence. (Huh? WTF is this going to do? And who doesn’t already denounce gun violence?) And, just about every single student in my Discord groups began immediately pretending that their lives were in danger, that they saw the gunman in the parking lot before he entered the school, that they were minutes away from death, that they’ll never feel safe on campus ever again, etc, etc.
I know that people cope with tragedy in different ways, and I understand that people desire to pretend that they were involved in some capacity more than they were in any sort of newsworthy event. It’s human nature, but I find it appalling and annoying nonetheless. People died, and I felt that students were more concerned with trying to finagle their way out of final exams than caring about the deaths. For the school, the timing was horrible. Finals were the next week, and they had to make some difficult decisions. While I don’t agree with the decisions they made, I do recognize that it was a very difficult spot to find a fair and compassionate resolution.
What they ended up deciding is that finals would be canceled. Professors could offer completely optional final exams that would be taken online (campus would be closed for the remainder of the calendar year, Beam Hall, the home of the Lee Business School where the shooting took place would be closed to students for the following semester as well.) and these finals could only help grades, they couldn’t hurt anyone who chose to take them. All assignments that had a due date after December 6th were canceled, and whatever the students’ grade was as of December 6th was his final grade if there was no optional final exam. Professors also had the ability to bump students up a grade if they felt the need or desire. Students who were failing at the time, or getting a worse grade than they desired, would be given the option of taking a pass/fail for the class so that no grade would negatively impact their GPAs.
For me, and I suspect for most students, this had a huge impact on the semester. I mentioned earlier that my capstone project for the Econ 495 course was a regression analysis into the determinants of gun violence in America. Great subject, eh? Very topical choice, as it would turn out. Remember, this was a capstone course in economics. The culmination of the economics program. The opportunity for students to show that they learned something over several semesters of economics instruction. The professor had also generously back-loaded several assignments, moving the due dates to the last day of class to give us ample time to work on them. This meant that as of December 6th, we had turned in exactly one project, the remainder had been pushed back. And now, the edict had come down that any assignment due after December 6th was no longer due. The professor sent an email telling us that as these projects had been originally due prior to this fateful day, he still expected us to turn them in. Somebody must have complained though, because the next day he was forced to send a retraction, and the tone of the email left little doubt as to his feelings about the matter. Our economics capstone course would be graded on a single introductory project turned in months earlier. Kind of a travesty, really.
Some of my fellow students hadn’t even begun working on their final projects yet, and they were, of course, elated. I myself was dismayed. I had already put dozens of hours into my final project, and I had derived some very interesting results. I had volunteered to present my findings at the undergraduate research symposium, and I had been really looking forward to it. Even had they allowed this to proceed, would I have wanted to present “The Determinants of Gun Violence in America” to a group of professors who had just lost colleagues to gun violence? Doubtful.
I was currently getting an A in every class, and so I had no need of the optional final exam offered by my Econ 455 professor. However, I’m a complete suck up, I guess, because I took it anyway. I just really like to know if I’ve learned the material or not…
My business 498 professor pretty much just gave everyone in the class an A which left no need for him to provide any optional final. The Finance 308 professor bumped everyone up a letter grade and didn’t offer a final exam. I already had an A, so this did nothing for me. Finance 426 was finished anyway, there is no final exam in that class. The only thing remaining was this econ 495 final project, and I REALLY wanted to finish it. I was very interested in the conclusions, and I wanted feedback on the process. The problem was that I still had quite a few hours of work to do on it, and I didn’t want to do that work for no reason at all. I emailed the professor and asked him if I still turned it in, would he give me feedback on it? He had no reason to say yes, this would only be extra work for him, but he generously agreed, and told me that if the work was good, he would help me get it published. Elated, I spent the next week finishing the regressions and compiling the data, and then submitted it to him. I was bummed to not be able to present it to the symposium, but excited to actually complete a full regression analysis using data I’d compiled myself. *BTW, this paper is available here on my blogsite if anyone is interested in reviewing it.
After the shooting, UNLV canceled all finals except those in the Boyd Law School and the medical school. Those were finals that couldn’t be canceled, and so they made exceptions for them. I thought they also should have made exceptions for capstone courses. How do you grant a degree to someone in a field where they essentially didn’t complete the capstone course? This was especially true in my economics class where so many students never completed a thing other than the very first project. They are going out into the world with economics degrees, and many of them have never done a real regression project. There are other classes that required this type of work, but nothing of the nature and depth of the project for the capstone class. I thought that UNLV should have also made the decision to still require capstone work to proceed, but, as I mentioned, I certainly understood the difficult spot in which they found themselves.
| Class | Code | Credits | Grade | Cumulative GPA |
| Business Law | BLW 302 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Intermediate Macroeconomics | ECON 303 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Intro to Econometrics | ECON 441 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Money and Capital Markets | FIN 312 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Intermediate Managerial Finance | FIN 303 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Investments | FIN 307 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Tech and Innovation | IS 330 | 3 | A | 4.0 |
| Principles of Management | MGT 301 | 3 | A- | 3.990 |
| Marketing Management | MKT 301 | 3 | B | 3.945 |
| Operations Management | SCM 352 | 3 | A | 3.950 |
| Global Business Strategy | BUS 498 | 3 | A | 3.951 |
| Industrial Organization | ECON 455 | 3 | A | 3.952 |
| Seminar in Economic Research | ECON 495 | 3 | A | 3.954 |
| International Financial Mgmt | FIN 308 | 3 | A | 3.956 |
| Student Investment Fund | FIN 425 | 3 | A | 3.958 |
In the final installment of this series, I’ll talk about my final semester at UNLV, the rampant cheating that takes place on today’s college campus, and admit to you how I came very close to looking like a complete jackass by beginning to publish this series of articles prior to the release of my final grades.
Author Rick Fuller 
Published by