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A Mentor Inspires Research
Career: Frances Frei,
Associate Professor, Harvard
Business School
Frances Frei, C'85, GrW'96, had a secret when she became
a Wharton PhD student in 1989: She hadn't yet given up
her dream to become a college basketball coach—a plan
she never admitted to her adviser Patrick Harker, now
Wharton's Dean.
"I had friends getting PhDs in other disciplines," she says,
"and I knew of a Division I college basketball coach who had
a PhD, so I thought, ‘Well, if he can do it, I can too.'"
Indeed, Frei, 42, is the first to admit that her path to
becoming the widely cited and award-winning Harvard
Business School professor that she is today began modestly.
"I felt completely over my head in the program," she recalls.
"But one of the gifts that the Wharton PhD program gives its
student is the gift of high expectations with the understanding
that it's safe enough to find yourself and make your way
through. That's its genius, because we all come out better
than we possibly could have if we had just been in a program
where we could easily excel."
Frei, a lifelong athlete and Penn basketball player, began to
doubt her plan during her second year in the program, when
she injured her knee while playing pick-up basketball. "I had
this crisis of having to give up this lifelong view of myself as
an athlete," she says, and make the switch to academics, a
change she says terrified her. "At that point in my life, no one
knew me as an academic. They only knew me as an athlete.
It taught me a lesson about giving up my current version of
myself to achieve greater things."
Today, Frei often calls upon the difficulty of this time
in her life when teaching business students at Harvard, encouraging
her students to have the courage to push away
long-held views of themselves and be open to new ones. Now
an associate professor at HBS, Frei developed a second-year
elective on Managing Service Operations, a course that focuses
on creating service excellence. Her research focuses on
developing strategies to help firms be deliberate about their
service design with a particular emphasis on the critical role
of customers. As Frei often tells her students, "If it weren't for
those pesky customers, service firms would have a much simpler
time delivering excellent service."
Frei, 42, grew up on Long Island the youngest of six children.
Her mother communicated self-reliance and generosity
with no strings attached, making for a "safe environment to
experiment," Frei says. Although she wanted to attend Penn
as an undergraduate immediately after graduating from high
school, she didn't get in, so transferred as a sophomore from
Brandeis University. She majored in math at Penn's College of
Arts and Sciences because she was good at it, she says, playing
basketball her entire three years on campus and serving as co-captain her senior year.
While getting her master's in engineering at Penn State's
Great Valley graduate campus in suburban Philadelphia,
Frei took her first class in mathematical modeling and was
hooked, seeing, for the first time, a useful application for
math. A PhD in Operations and Information Management
at Wharton, where theory is tied to practice, she reasoned,
seemed a logical next step.
She joined the University of Rochester's Simon School of
Business after completing her PhD, then went to Harvard as
an assistant professor at HBS in 2002.
In all, Frei published three research papers and four book
chapters with Harker, including her first research project as a
PhD candidate. Harker, who himself was a Penn athlete who
played football during his undergraduate days, was perhaps
the perfect academic mentor for Frei in temperament as well
as research interests. "Pat is not one to coddle," she says. "And
that again is a privilege. There is an unstated confidence he
has in you that you feel when he tells you to go do something
or figure something out. I now embody that and it permeates
every pore of my being. It's a gift to have high expectations set
for you, and I learned this at Wharton generally and from Pat
in particular."
Nancy Moffitt, a former editor of the Wharton Alumni
Magazine, is a frequent contributor.
Wharton Doctoral Programs: Intellectual Fuel for World Business
Supplying other universities with world-class researchers
is part of the Wharton's core mission: to create and disseminate
critical business knowledge. While Wharton's
undergraduate and MBA programs have inspired many
alumni to pursue PhDs or teach what they have learned as
adjunct instructors, Wharton’s doctoral programs are the
School's primary engine for producing the educators that
influence business practice through the world's schools of
management.
Wharton has produced more than 1,500 doctoral
alumni teaching and researching at least 150 universities
worldwide, as well as government, think tanks, and
private industry. In recent years Wharton alumni have
taught at all top-rated U.S. and international business
schools, including schools of management in Africa, Asia,
Australia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and the
Middle East. According to Dean Patrick Harker, raising
the level of other business schools does not create competition.
Instead, it spreads the availability of business expertise,
multiplying the number of managers, entrepreneurs,
and workers worldwide who build companies that become
trade partners and global allies for Wharton alumni.
Says Dean Harker, "There is an insatiable demand for
business knowledge. Half the world's population is just
emerging into the global business economy—in my lifetime,
Wharton alone could never educate enough people."
Wharton doctoral programs offer unique resources for
research, collaboration, and connections to real-world business
practice. Students benefit from a breadth of faculty
and peers for interdisciplinary insight, learn research early
in the curriculum, collaborate on current faculty research,
and measure research questions against real-world issues.
Programs offered in Accounting, Business &
Public Policy, Ethics and Legal Studies, Finance,
Health Care Systems, Insurance & Risk Management,
Management, Marketing, Operations & Information
Management, Real Estate, and Statistics.
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