Statistics has a reputation as one of the toughest subjects a business student will ever take, full of interval estimates, hypothesis testing and other concepts that rarely show up in everyday conversation.
Despite that reputation, or maybe because of how he handles it, Dr. Alan Chow of the University of South Alabama has been voted Best Local College Professor, an honor decided by area alumni, students and educators. Chow is an associate professor of marketing and quantitative methods in the University of South Alabama’s Mitchell College of Business, where he teaches courses in business statistics and analytics.
He holds four degrees and has published research on volatility measures in equity returns and alternative methods of statistical comparison, work that sits firmly in the realm of advanced quantitative analysis. The gap between that research agenda and the anxiety most students bring to a required statistics course is exactly the territory Chow has spent his career working.
Most people can rattle off mean, median and mode without much trouble, but Chow’s courses go well beyond that, moving into territory that trips up even strong students. He said he has learned to meet that difficulty head-on rather than pretend it away.
“I try to take a topic that’s not most people’s favorite and make it, maybe not enjoyable, but at least endurable,” Chow said. “A lot of students ask: ‘When will I ever use this?’ And my answer is: ‘I teach this material because, at some point in your career, you’re going to need maybe 10 percent of it, but you won’t know which 10 percent until you actually get there.’”
To get students through that uncertainty, Chow leans on humor and reframes the subject as applied mathematics rather than abstract math, a distinction that matters to business students who often arrive on campus assuming they are simply not math people. Small shifts in framing, he has found, can change how willing students are to engage with difficult material.
The reframe is more than a teaching gimmick. Business statistics is, at its core, mathematics aimed at decisions — whether a marketing campaign worked, whether a process has changed, whether a pattern in the data is real or noise. Students who freeze at the sight of a formula can often reason their way through the same problem when it is dressed as a business question, and Chow’s approach builds from that starting point.
The timing of the award also speaks to a broader shift in business education. Analytics has moved from an elective niche to the center of the business school curriculum, as employers across every industry ask graduates to interpret data rather than simply collect it. Professors in quantitative fields now sit at the crossroads of that demand, and the ones who can teach the material without losing the room have become among the most valuable faculty a college of business can keep.
From Industry to the Classroom
Chow came to academia after a career in industry, joining the University of South Alabama faculty in 2003. He is a second-generation professor, following his father into teaching statistics, and said that background shaped his approach to the job early on. Building relationships with students and understanding what each one actually needs, he said, matters as much as the material itself.
“You really have to be thinking about the students and their success, and success in my classes doesn’t always mean making an ‘A,’” Chow said. “For some people it’s making a ‘C’ and continuing on. It’s important to realize that everybody is trying to make it through this. As long as they’re doing their share, I’m willing to do mine and work with them any way I can.”
That philosophy has carried over into mentorship outside the classroom, where Chow has worked with students navigating not just statistics but the broader challenges of a business degree. Colleagues and former students point to that willingness to meet people where they are as a defining trait, one that likely factored heavily into his selection for the award in its debut year.
For a working professor, the industry background pays dividends in the classroom in ways students notice without naming. Examples drawn from real workplaces — how a quality-control check actually runs, how a marketing test is actually read — carry an authority that textbook examples rarely match, and they answer the “when will I use this” question before it is asked.
A Family Trade, with a Rivalry Attached
Chow’s father taught at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the family has long-standing ties to Louisiana State University, where Chow earned two of his four degrees. He said he grew up cheering for the LSU Tigers and still does when the Baton Rouge school isn’t facing off against his current employer.
“Occasionally, we’ll play LSU in baseball or basketball and people always ask me who I’m going to be pulling for,” Chow said. “I always tell them: ‘South Alabama gives me a check every month, and every year LSU asks me for one.’ That will square your allegiance up quickly.”
These days, Chow said his loyalty is squarely with the South Alabama Jaguars, regardless of the opponent. For a professor whose job is convincing skeptical students that hard, unglamorous work pays off down the line, it is a fitting stance, and one that has clearly resonated well beyond his own classroom.
The golf-course joke about paychecks lands with students because it captures something true about the professor-student compact: loyalty runs in the direction of the people investing in you. It is the same principle Chow applies to his classes, where the students who show up and do their share find a professor willing to meet them more than halfway.
Why Teaching Statistics Is Hard — and Why It Matters
The subjects Chow teaches sit at the heart of the modern business degree. Statistics courses feed directly into marketing research, operations management, finance and the analytics tracks that business schools have added over the past two decades, and the concepts students meet in his classroom — sampling, interval estimates, hypothesis testing, regression — reappear in nearly every course that follows.
That is why the required statistics course carries such outsized emotional weight. It arrives early, it demands a kind of precision most students have not practiced since high school algebra, and it stands between them and the major they chose. A professor who can lower that wall without lowering the standard changes outcomes for far more students than the ones who earn top marks.
The Mitchell College of Business, where Chow teaches, anchors the University of South Alabama’s business programs and serves a student body drawn heavily from the Gulf Coast. Many of its students balance coursework with jobs and family obligations, which makes the pragmatism of Chow’s message — you will need some of this, and you cannot know in advance which part — a practical fit for the population it serves.
His research, meanwhile, keeps a foot in the discipline’s demanding side. Work on volatility measures in equity returns touches the same quantitative territory that finance professionals use to price risk, and studies of alternative methods of statistical comparison speak to how researchers choose the right tool for the data in front of them. Professors who stay active in that work bring current practice into the classroom rather than teaching from a static set of notes.
The honor itself — a Best Local College Professor award decided by area alumni, students and educators — is a measure of reputation beyond campus. Awards of this kind are rarely won by the easiest graders; they are won by the professors students recommend to younger friends, the ones whose classes are remembered years later as hard but worth it.
For Chow, the award and his teaching philosophy point the same direction. The material is difficult, the audience is skeptical and the payoff is deferred — and a career spent making that combination survivable, with humor, honesty and a willingness to meet students where they are, is exactly what the honor is designed to recognize.
Awards voted by the people who actually sit through the classes carry a particular kind of signal. Students know within the first few weeks which professors prepare, which ones answer emails, and which ones treat a struggling student as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be taught. When alumni and educators join students in the voting, the result usually reflects years of that accumulated reputation rather than a single memorable semester.
The quantitative methods side of Chow’s title also points to how much the discipline has changed since he entered it. Spreadsheets and statistical software have automated the arithmetic, which has shifted the teaching challenge from computation to interpretation: knowing which test to run, what its assumptions are, and what its output actually licenses a manager to conclude. Professors who came to academia from industry, as Chow did, tend to emphasize exactly that interpretation layer, because it is the part of the job their former colleagues actually used.