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Statistically
speaking, Frandsen will tell you his gifts for financial analysis
are pretty common among the number-crunching set. Where his story
differs is in how he followed a love for numbers onto a path that
zig-zagged through high-level sports coaching, corporate life and
the ivory towers of academia before finding his true mission in
life-teaching undergraduates at Juniata College.
"I've always been comfortable with
numbers," Frandsen recalls. "As a kid, I knew the batting averages
and fielding percentages of every Cincinnati Reds player from 1970
to 1980."
When Frandsen, who grew up in State
College, Pa., began swimming competitively in at the Bellefonte
YMCA, he found an outlet in which statistics and record keeping
play a crucial part in tracking progress and performance. Frandsen,
who was a youth YMCA state champion in the breaststroke, continued
to compete all through high school.
But college beckoned and he enrolled
at Penn State. "In my first meeting with the adviser for the finance
program, he told me 'Accountants report history, finance people
make history,'" Frandsen says with a smile. "Of course, I chose
finance."
As an undergraduate, he kept a toe
in the coaching pool, working with swimmers at the State College
YMCA and at the local high school. In 1983, Frandsen accepted a
coaching internship at the Nashville Aquatic Club, renowned for
producing Olympic champion Tracy Caulkins. At the end of the internship,
he had three job offers.
He took jobs coaching with the Colorado Rapids, a Denver-based swim
club, and the Knoxville, Tenn. YMCA team. "I made $12,000 coaching,
about half of what I would have made in a finance job," Frandsen
says.
By 1985, Frandsen returned to State
College, ostensibly to start his corporate career as a financial
management trainee at HRB Systems Inc., but really to be close to
Sharon Thompson, who was living in State College. The couple has
been married 15 years and have two daughters Janie, 11, and Kate,
8. While working for HRB, he earned his M.B.A. from Penn State in
1990. "After my MBA I started to coach again and I realized that
coaching had been the most rewarding work I had done," Frandsen
says.
Teaching seemed a natural application
of Frandsen's skills, so he started teaching as an adjunct instructor
at Penn State. Realizing that he had to have a doctoral degree to
attain a faculty position, he enrolled in the doctoral program at
the University of Texas, Austin. After completing the coursework
for his doctorate, he became a finance manager for Nortel Networks
Inc. Frandsen's real-world business experience, an asset he shares
with most of the business faculty, has been directoly applicable
to his teaching.
"It a much more intense environment
than I was used to," Frandsen says of his Nortel experience. "One
day I was scheduled for a day conference at Southern Methodist University
and stepped onto their campus and said 'This is the kind of place
where I want to be.'"
He decided to approach his advisers
and ask for their support in seeking a teaching job at a small institution.
Although several advisers and many faculty members at Texas advised
against trying to write and research a doctorate while working as
a teaching faculty member, the university gave its blessing to Frandsen
to pursue a job opening at Juniata in 1999.
"He is so incredibly organized that
it's great to work with him," says Bill Thomas, assistant professor
of information technology, who teaches the Innovations for Industry
course with Frandsen. "He always comes up with thought-provoking
questions for them to make them think harder about their decisions."
"Our kids are good and they bring
a hunger for opportunity that I didn't see in students at larger
institutions," Frandsen says. "What I really wanted to do is teach
at a place exactly like this." |
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