Steffen Eriksen | Faces of FEB

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The Faculty of Economics and Business is a faculty with a great diversity of people who all have an impact, big or small, on science and society. But who are these people? Within ‘Faces of FEB’ we connect with different students, staff members and researchers of the faculty and give a little peek into their world. This week: Steffen Eriksen, an assistant professor at the department of EEF who recently won the Honors College Award for Best Practice in Teaching & Learning 2022.

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hello everyone! My name is Steffen Eriksen, and I am an assistant professor at the department of EEF. I am from Denmark, but I have lived in The Netherlands for about 11 years now. I always found it hard to answer these kinds of questions, because how much should I tell? You can always just Google me I guess. To save you the effort: next to my teaching and research, I am also the coordinator of the MSc Finance program, and I am part of the program board for the bachelor E&BE, and part of the Faculty counsel. When I am not giving students a hard time with their studies, I spend my time with my wife and kid, and otherwise I am out playing Pokémon TCG.

2. A while ago you won the Honors College Award for Best Practice in Teaching & Learning 2022. What does this mean to you?

I am so happy and proud to have won this award. The first couple of days after winning the award, I still found myself jumping around like an excited little kid. It is great to get recognition for the things you do. I have spent the past couple of years setting up and developing the platform I use for my teaching. I decided to go in a different direction as I found our current tools a bit lacking. I streamed my lectures on Twitch, and I would later upload it to my YouTube channel. Next to that, I also tried to use other software like Discord to improve my teaching, and I think it was a great success. Overall, I tried a lot of different things to see what worked, and what didn’t. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun!

3. What are your plans for the future, now that you have won this award?

I already have a lot of ideas that I will try to implement in the future. I have spent some time developing a video series, aiming to teach students and other interested parties Stata. I plan to continue creating videos for this series, but also to create a new series on the topic of Finance, related to the first year course in Asset Pricing and Capital Budgeting that I teach for the 1st year E&BE students. I hope that all of this will help as many students as possible.

4. Do you have any advice for your students about reaching your goals?

“Spring over hvor gærdet er lavest” is a sentence I always like to refer to. It translates to “Jump over where the fence is lowest”. It is often used negatively, as to choose the easy way out, or being a bit lazy. However, I like to interpret this a bit differently. To me, I see it as instead of putting in an unnecessary amount of effort/work to reach a certain goal, be efficient with the things you do. It doesn’t mean you should not try and do your best, but rather that you shouldn’t break yourself getting there. I hope this makes sense :D

I would like to end by saying thank you for taking the time to read this. Until next time!