R. Dan Reid
Associate Professor of Decision Sciences

There is never a time when you stop learning.

Dan Reid would know. He and his wife, Bev, are avid ballroom dancers. They started with group lessons four years ago after a New Year’s Eve party left them sitting out while everyone waltzed. And really, it’s quite fitting that the couple should be tearing up the dance floor. They first met at a USO dance in California, six weeks before they decided to get married.

“It’s no different than a gymnast sticking a landing or a diver making the perfect water entry,” Reid says as he tries to describe the joy of dancing with his wife. “When you hit all the beats, you know it and there is no feeling in the world quite like it. I try to share that with my students; that it doesn’t matter if everyone says you danced great or if I give you an A or a B or a C. You have to judge yourself against your own standards. I tell them you never stop learning, you never stop having opportunities. If you don’t try, you can’t succeed.”

After 11 years in the Air Force as a Polish linguist, including a stint teaching at a cryptology school, Reid went to work on his Ph.D. at the Ohio State University. He wanted to be a teacher, a good teacher, and he knew that meant having experience.

“I took a break from my Ph.D. to work in the industry,” he says. “It was not a popular choice with my advisers, but I knew I wasn’t ready to go into the classroom and be what I wanted to be. I wanted to be someone with real-world experience.”

That work break also led Reid to realize the long hours and high pay of the corporate world were not an acceptable trade-off to spending time with his family. He has been a professor of operations management at UNH for 15 years.

“As a professor, I think I have an obligation to try to instill some values in students. We deal with questions like ‘If your boss tells you to do something wrong, would you do it?’ There’s more to life than just learning the book. The book stuff is the easy stuff. I like to think that I stretch students. I’m more concerned that I make a difference in some kid’s life than whether they go into business or not.”

Reid’s former student, Kjersten (Odman) Darcy, says he did make a difference.

“I particularly appreciated that he always sees his students as individuals,” she says. “He never seemed to view us as simply a group of people he was going to instruct for a block of time each Tuesday and Thursday.”

Reid’s impact is not only being felt by students at UNH, but undergraduates studying operations management around the world. After years of complaining about the lack of good textbooks on the subject, he joined forces with a colleague to give writing one a try. The result is Operations Management, published in 2001.

“The number one difference in our book is that students can read it,” he says. “Especially undergraduates. Some of our colleagues look down at it for that reason, but we thought undergraduates were the most important group to reach.”

—Erika L. Mantz,
UNH News Bureau