New video series gets to know McMaster faculty ‘After Office Hours’

Do professors get upset? Do they think about the past or worry about the future? Has the person at the front of the lecture hall ever cried over a failed test or a subpar grade on an essay?

A pair of third-year McMaster students and roommates, Stephanie Wan and Julia Cai, wanted to find out. Their new video series, After Office Hours, examines how and why various faculty members entered the challenging world of academia, and offers a rare glimpse into the professors’ personal lives and interests.

“We see them as amazing researchers or teaching from the front of a lecture hall. At times, we’re meeting them during their office hours,” said Wan, a student in the Arts & Science Program. “We don’t see them as ever having struggled with a test or feeling vulnerable like we do. And, of course, they did.”

Wan and Cai, who studies Biochemistry, shared their idea about “demystifying academic life” with Karen Wang and Anqi Shen, both fourth-year Arts & Science students. Soon after, the team officially launched After Office Hours.

Armed with a camera on loan from The Silhouette (Shen is an editor at the undergraduate student newspaper), they began filming interviews during the summer. The project has continued throughout the fall term, with interviewing and editing taking place when the team is not in class, writing papers or studying.

The learning curve has been steep. Not only had the four never worked together, but they also had little experience in multimedia.

“We’ve learned so much,” said Wang. “When a video gets posted, I feel a real rush of adrenalin. I feel pride in our work. We’ve heard some really interesting stories, and things we didn’t expect.”

So far, a number of McMaster professors from the Faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Health Sciences have shared their stories. Many students have been requesting their own professors for a future episode.

The team is hoping to release one video feature per week until the end of the school year in April, with a break during the winter holidays. Once Shen and Wang graduate in the spring, Wan hopes other interested students will join the team so that production can continue into 2015.

In addition to the YouTube channel, After Office Hours is also available on Facebook and Tumblr.

Watch an episode below featuring Louis Greenspan, a professor emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies: