by Katherine Grayson
The Southern Vermont College community welcomes Stacey Hills, Ph.D., who has recently returned to the area with hopes to enhance the business division by adding a new marketing major and taking over as division chair.
Professor Hills is currently teaching courses in accounting, marketing fundamentals, and branding and communication strategy. She will also be teaching an online course over the summer called understanding customers and markets.
Professor Hills is, without a doubt, very enthusiastic about the subject of marketing. During an interview, she stated, “I like that marketing uses information from a lot of different places—history, science, economics, art, psychology—and that every area and type of business can have a marketing component.”
She added, “What’s not to love about a field where watching television, going shopping and attending events could all be counted as research?”
Professor Hills, originally from South Glens Falls, NY, recently spent 10 years living in Logan, Utah with her husband, Doug Hills, a skillful digital comic book artist. Together, they have a nine-year-old daughter, Brady.
Her education started at Russell Sage College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in Economics & International Studies in 1995. She received her master’s in Product Development with an economics concentration in 1997, and a doctorate in Management with a marketing emphasis in 2004 both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Starting in 2002, Hills worked as an Assistant/Associate Professor of Marketing at Utah State University and also became Co-Director of the Huntsman Scholars Program until she moved back to her home state of New York in 2012.
She also published a marketing textbook titled The Marketing Fundamentals Field Guide, which unlike many others, is meant to be written in by its users.
Hills mentions, “I hope that if someone buys my book and completes the activities, they’ll have something to keep on their shelf that they can always go back to.” She has plans to work on a new version of the book over the summer.
Having worked at larger schools, such as Rensselaer and The College of Saint Rose, Professor Hills looks forward to an opportunity to work with a more close-knit atmosphere, “I like the challenge of working across disciplines to create new and better classroom experiences for students. It’s really hard to do that on a campus of over 20,000 students.”
Currently, Hills is working on many new projects with the business department. She aims to create a new marketing major by the fall semester. Other projects include working with her marketing fundamentals students to help improve the Campus Store inventory and appeal. Her branding class is competing in the Google Adwords challenge, allowing students use marketing skills with small businesses in the community. Hills plans to continue developing more projects like these.
The existing Business Division co-chairs, Professors Jeb Gorham and Charles Crowell, are now working to transition Stacey into being the new division chair.
Professor Gorham is very pleased to welcome Hills aboard. He said, “Stacey is a great asset to the Business Division. Her expertise in the area of marketing really raises our division’s level in terms of offerings in this area and will allow SVC to offer a new concentration to add value to the business degrees currently in place.”
One of Stacey’s marketing and accounting students, Haley Omasta, expresses her positive outlook regarding Hills, “She seems passionate for what she does in a way that is almost infectious. I think that she is a good addition to SVC. She is helpful and knowledgeable. She is current and able to relate to students, which seems to be a staple here.”