Jennnifer Graves Wins the 2024 PACCAR Award

This year’s UW Foster School of Business PACAAR award winner, Professor Jennifer Graves, knows that even the most dedicated students aren’t always punctual for an 8:30 a.m. class. So, she started doing something different.

“I invite students to email me a question, and I kick off many of my classes spending the first few minutes answering one of the questions,” explains Graves.

Graves says the questions begin with general topics. Typical inquiries are icebreakers such as “What restaurants should we go to in Seattle?” or “Where are the best hikes?”

However, as Graves establishes a bond with her class, the questions evolve into asking for advice on much more important matters.  “‘When’s the best time to have a baby to not harm your career?’ or ‘How do you handle this sticky situation?’ I found that those short discussions connected me with my students in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. Students started showing up earlier to class, and some told me they worked hard in my class because they didn’t want to let me down.”

PACAAR Award is one of the school’s highest honors

This personal connection to her students earned Graves one of Foster’s highest teaching honors, The PACCAR Award. Voted on by MBA students, the award was established in 1998 by PACCAR Inc., a Fortune 200 global technology company based in Bellevue, Washington.

“She shows genuine interest in educating students — not only ensuring that we understand the class material but also contextualizing the lessons and skills into situations we’ll find in our careers,” wrote one Foster MBA student in nominating Graves for the award. “I feel better prepared to contribute and lead thanks to her commitment.”

Foster Dean Frank Hodge says Graves is an outstanding educator because she combines an engaging and caring presence in the classroom with superb teaching skills.

“She is phenomenal at teaching the fundamentals,” says Hodge. “And her students are interested because she’s passionate about what she’s teaching. She’s very personable … She brings that combination together, which is how you get the optimal teacher.”

Graves makes the mathematical personal 

Graves teaches statistics and project management in Foster graduate programs and personal finance and operations in undergraduate programs. A rigorous, in-depth curriculum distinguishes her classes, but she humanizes the material to make it more relatable.

“I like to take the mathematical concept and apply it to personal things,” she says. “For example, when describing normal distribution, I have students think about an adjective that describes themselves. And then, I have students think about an instance where they embodied that adjective and another instance when they did not and put it on a continuum. That helps them describe themselves with a little more grace as well.”

Graves’ own example that she shares with the students comes from her life outside the classroom. “I try hard to be a good mom. So, I’ll use good mom as an adjective to describe myself.” But no parent is perfect. “On average, you might be a good mom, and there’s going to be times when you embody that and times when you don’t. It’s all a continuum the majority of instances cluster near your adjective but in rare moments you’ll deviate further away from your adjective And that’s normal distribution! Using these kinds of metaphors can help students remember the concepts and apply them to something they care about. It provides a human connection.”

Graves furthers her connections with her students by finding moments for one-on-one conversations, which often happen through phone calls on her commute home from campus. Those sessions can cover whatever is on the students’ minds, from questions on specific material to comparing job offers. “The calls have been huge in terms of getting to know my students,” she says. “I want to know what’s going on in their lives. I was in their shoes a little more than a decade ago (Graves holds an MBA from Harvard University), so I remember how overwhelming an MBA program can be.”

A distinguished private sector career 

Graves also incorporates her experience from the private sector into her teaching. Before joining Foster, Graves worked as a consultant at Bain and Company. She also held a prominent position at Starbucks as head of store inventory and field analytics for the coffee chain’s 10,000+ stores in the US and Canada. She also co-led the Seattle office of Keystone, a strategy and technology consultancy.  Sharing her first-hand experience provides students with real-world examples of critical business concepts and how class topics interact.

“Having been a strategy consultant, the industry knowledge I have is very interdisciplinary.  Operations and finance go hand in hand, and statistics is just to solve a problem. In my operations class, when we talk about inventory in terms of finance,” she explains. “How does reducing inventory make a business more money? And if you free up working capital, why is that important? How would holding too little inventory upset marketing?  So, I merge the topics and (teach) the art of doing these things in real life.”

Like many respected Foster professors, Graves is a published author. But it is telling that one of her most notable works did not appear in an academic journal but rather was a children’s book written in collaboration with her late grandmother. Jervis the Best tells the story of a boy who feels he needs to tell tall tales to make friends, which Graves illustrates in dramatic pop-up illustrations.

“It is one of the most vulnerable and meaningful things I’ve ever done,” she says. Graves held readings at Barnes and Noble locations and elementary classrooms, providing what she found to be a tremendous opportunity to connect with children. The book serves to help teach an essential lesson, one that she notes has only grown more important and timelier as of late.

“The book is about how your true self is your best self,” she explains. “All the lies are pop-up pages, and it’s meant to help young kids understand the difference between a lie and the truth.

Prior to receiving the 2024 PACCAR Award, Graves also received the Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Teaching (2024), the Undergraduate Professor of the Year Award (2023), Daniel R. Siegel Service Award (2023), and the Lex N. Gamble Family Award for Excellence in Case Development and Curriculum Innovation (2023).