Students and professionals mingled during the “Professors for a Day” event, hosted by the College of Business and Economics. Among the speakers for this two-day event was Senior Vice President of Global Commercial Banking for Bank of America Steve Block.

“I’ve been in commercial banking over 25 years,” said Block. “Commercial banking really means working with companies and business owners to help them achieve their dreams and goals.”

As an attendant of this event for three years, Block is a professional at being a guest professor. He has been a part of the advisory board for the Business and Economics College for just as long.

Block has been with Bank of America since 2008, during what some would consider one of the roughest points of the recession.

According to the senior VP, he largely deals with the company side of banking. When banks want to expand their business, buy equipment, obtain real estate loans to buy new buildings or build a new building, they go to Block to receive those types of loans. “My companies that I currently bank range from a low of $50 million dollars in sales to, I have a billion dollar company,” said Block while introducing what his job entails.

During the class, Block had students separate in teams and gave them a real life scenario to see how they would work together and come up with a solution for a specific situation. Half of the class pretended they were from Apple and had $150 million dollars in revenue, while the other half of the class pretended to be shareholders of the company.

Block wanted to give students the opportunity to interact with each other and open up. It was also a chance for them to experience real world situations and demonstrate what they can do, and how to use these skills once they graduate.

Erin Goldfarb, the event coordinator, says the college brings business professionals into the classroom to teach outside of the book, and expose students to great networking opportunities.

“We invite our alumni back into the class, but we have professionals from all different industries,” said Goldfarb. “From Goldman Sachs to marketing professionals from LegalZoom, to consultants.”

According to Goldfarb the school had 95 business professionals on campus throughout the event.

“That means almost every single classroom had a speaker in it,” said Goldfarb. “I think that’s pretty successful in itself that we’re reaching that many students.”

Students were able to hear stories and messages from alumni as well as CEOs that attended the event.

Block hopes students to take away from his lessons, is that life is about getting involved, working together with colleagues and doing critical thinking to resolve difficult situations.