Biology professor Scott Crousillac’s favorite trick to pull on his students is passing as one of them before class. He said he sits in the audience, greets students and asks what professor is teaching the course. After insulting himself to these students, who blindly agree, he gets up, situates his belongings at the front of class and begins to lecture.
The Baton Rouge native said he has given up trying to appear cool to college students, and playing his music at the beginning of class would be risky. He said concocting impressive playlists would be enormously stressful, and randomizing his iTunes could be downright dangerous.
“Allegedly, there may or may not be some Taylor Swift on my iPod,” he warned.
Music or none, Crousillac may have kept his cool factor intact, given his rave student reviews on popular website Rate My Professor. He is even awarded RMP’s exclusive “red chili pepper,” which denotes a professor’s hotness.
“I’m flattered by it,” Crousillac said, “I don’t quite understand it.” He said professors are rarely as bad or good as they appear on RMP. Likewise, he said his “hot” status is a simple by-product of his relative youth and height (Crousillac clocks in at 6 feet 5 inches and is 34 years old).
In his five years as a professor at LSU, Crousillac has come to realize his greatest joy is a relatively simple one: making biology easier and more interesting to students who may feel intimidated or terrified studying it.
“I love my job and … the place I am allowed to do my job,” Crousillac said, adding that he considers any other university a step down.
Crousillac said his life-long, crippling fear of public speaking makes getting in front of an audience of 500-plus students terrifying, but getting through each class without having a panic attack gives him a thrill.
“It’s my personal victory over myself,” he said. He said students comment on how confident he appears on stage, which makes him that much closer to conquering his fear.
Crousillac keeps it cool with a simple mantra: “Make yourself look like you belong, and you will.”
Crousillac said he came to LSU for graduate school after earning a degree in liberal arts at Northwestern University with no idea what he wanted to do. He soon found himself looking forward to the one day a week he worked as a teaching assistant for biology labs.
He went on to earn his doctorate in the subject and take on a full-time teaching position at the University in 2008.
Crousillac considers music just as joyful of an experience as teaching.
“The cruel joke for me is that I was blessed with an amazing love and appreciation of music, but I was cursed with a remarkable lack of musical talent,” Crousillac said.
Crousillac doesn’t care for classical or jazz music, and said he prefers music more soulful than techno or death metal.
His favorite artists include Led Zeppelin, The Flaming Lips, Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys, and his favorite song of all time, he said, is “Anna Begins” by Counting Crows.
Crousillac said he is never without a song playing in his head.
