10-13-2026
In a recent Daniels Insights post, PhD alumni Ed McGavin and Ranga Nuggehalli called on business education to rethink the problems it gives students: Move beyond neat, fully specified exercises and toward immersive real-world challenges, complete with imperfect data, competing assumptions and no obvious path forward.
The Mitch Daniels School of Business has already shifted toward experiential learning that immerses students in the kinds of healthy struggle they'll encounter in their careers.
Consider the honors thesis course taught by Mario Crucini, professor of economics, an undergraduate research assistant mentor, and director of the Center for Inflation and Price Research. In a traditional assignment, students may receive a prompt, a data set and a prescribed method for reaching an answer. In Crucini’s course, they begin somewhere much less comfortable: with their own questions.
On the first day, students bring three to five topics they find interesting — ideas prompted by the news, their coursework or questions they cannot yet answer. Then comes the hard part. Together, student and professor narrow those possibilities based on what makes a meaningful research question, what evidence exists and what data can actually be obtained.
“It’s research for a reason,” Crucini tells students. “It’s search and research and research again.”
That process deliberately introduces the kind of ambiguity students will encounter after graduation. A promising idea may prove impractical. The available data may be incomplete, inconsistent or incapable of answering the original question. An initial model may need to be rethought. The outcome is not simply a finished paper; it is the experience of learning how to make progress when the right next step is not handed to them.
Crucini’s course is modeled in part on the kind of thesis experience that shaped his own path. As an undergraduate, he researched a potential free-trade area between the United States and Canada, work that helped lead him toward graduate study and a career in international economics. Later, while directing Vanderbilt University’s honors program for 15 years, he saw how sustained research mentorship could help undergraduates understand the work of discovery from the inside.
Students, he says, often see classroom material only after it has been vetted, tested and presented as established knowledge. Research reveals another reality: Faculty members and graduate students do not have all the answers. They debate, revise, test assumptions and confront uncertainty. In the honors thesis course, students learn that process, working closely with Crucini through repeated one-on-one meetings as they develop a project from concept to data analysis, writing and presentation.
The course is intensive, especially because Purdue students complete the three-credit experience during their final semester. Yet Crucini has been impressed by what they accomplish — and by how much of the value comes from the struggle itself.
"So they start off in their kind of anxiety and frustration at the beginning, as there should be." Then, Crucini reminds them, “the journey, not the destination, is where the learning happens."
That is the broader promise of experiential education at the Daniels School. Whether students are conducting research, collaborating with organizations or tackling complex business problems, they are being asked to do more than apply a known formula. They are learning to frame the question, find and assess the evidence, adapt when the work gets messy, and communicate a defensible conclusion.
Those are the habits business leaders need when real problems refuse to arrive with clean data and answer keys.
"I also stress to students, if you're working in a production environment with any level of independence, you're probably going to be doing or overseeing most of these activities in a holistic sense," says Crucini. "It's good to have that integrated experience."
