Course in "Creativity and Personal Mastery" Offered This Fall

Brookville, NY - Everyone has a week to live. Do you treat people differently? Are you more forgiving when the waitress brings you a Coke instead of a Diet Coke? Are you patient while weaving through the ropes in line at the bank? How does way of thinking affect your relationship with your parents, partners and siblings?

These are just the kind of questions Dr. Srikumar Rao will be asking students at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville this September when his out-of-the-box course titled "Creativity and Personal Mastery" will be offered to undergraduate students in the Honors Program. Much more than a course with reading assignments and term papers, Dr. Rao aspires to actually change students’ lives for the better.

Total immersion exercises - featuring insightful questions like those above - are an integral component of the class. So are journals that could end up being hundreds of pages long, cataloging emotional tenors and mood swings. Other unconventional learning experiences include blindfolding students as they talk with colleagues so they have no visual cues to bias opinions. Students will be taught breathing and visualization exercises used by top-notch professionals in fields from medicine to athletics to the United States Special Forces.

The course outline alone stretches over 50 pages and, like the line for the roller coaster, is dotted with warnings that cause concern but also heighten the anticipation. The work will be strenuous, Dr. Rao warns, but rewarding. "It is the hardest and easiest course most students will ever take," he says.

Dr. Rao quotes Albert Einstein: "The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Then, Dr. Rao notes, this course is "an exercise to collectively raise the level of our thinking."

The course was developed at Long Island University and has been offered on the MBA level at Columbia and Northwestern universities. This fall, Dr. Rao is once again offering it to undergraduates. Classified as a marketing class, students will learn to enhance their creativity in a variety of personal and professional settings. Students who complete the course will be able to clearly define and hopefully achieve their life’s goals.

Dr. Rao received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and is the Louis and Johanna Vorzimer Professor of Marketing at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He has been a contributing editor for Forbes, Financial World and Success and writes regularly for other international magazines. Dr. Rao is currently writing a book on marketing strategy.

For more information contact the C.W. Post Public Relations Office at 516-299-2334 or pr@cwpost.liu.edu