Fate and Happenstance Play a Major Role in Professors Destiny

Fowler College of Business Professor, Patrick Smith

When Patrick Smith was a freshman in college, he thought he would eventually become a computer programmer.

But life had other plans in store for him.

Through many twists of fate, Smith ultimately became a real estate professor in the finance department at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University. 

Smith grew up in the Hudson Valley area of New York but moved across the state to attend the University at Buffalo (UB), where he enrolled as a computer science major. “After the first semester of classes, I knew it was not the right major for me,” he said. “I decided to switch my major to finance because it offered attractive starting salaries and a high degree of flexibility in terms of industries and opportunities.” 

A Stroke of Luck

Rather than return to the Hudson Valley during the summer after his freshman year, Smith stayed in Buffalo, where he applied for work at a temp agency. “Through a stroke of luck,” he was assigned to work in the revenue recovery department at UPS. His temporary position turned into a permanent part-time job and he continued to work at UPS through the completion of his bachelor’s and masters’ degree programs at UB. 

Smith also held a number of internship positions at UPS that utilized his technology skills. “Much of my work in the internships centered around automating processes and reporting functionalities,” said Smith. “Although I did not enjoy my computer science classes, I ended up spending a great deal of time building desktop applications and my supervisors noticed that I had a knack for breaking down complex tasks in a way that either created efficiencies or conveyed information in an easily digestible format.” As fate would have it, these skills would come in handy for Smith in his ultimate career choice.

An Injury Changes His Life’s Plan

After completing his MBA in 2005, Smith accepted a full-time position in the company’s regional finance department in Syracuse, but he did not stay there long. “I had great coworkers and loved working at UPS, however, I decided to join the Peace Corps in early 2006,” he said. “I had committed to, and started, a two-year assignment in Honduras.” 

Fate would intervene once again and Smith would find himself leaving Honduras within one month of his service with the Peace Corps after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Upon returning to the U.S., Smith took a position with Becton Dickinson (BD) in their Franklin Lakes, New Jersey headquarters as a supervisor in the business intelligence department in August 2006. 

Smith was at a crossroads in his life. “My original plan was to enter a Ph.D. program after two years in the Peace Corps,” he said. “I was unsure about what I wanted to study, so I hoped my time in the Peace Corps would inform my decision. But since my best-laid plans went awry, it took some time to figure out what I wanted to study because all I knew was I wanted to branch out and study something other than finance.” 

While Smith was deciding where and what he wanted to study, the global economy descended into the financial crisis in 2008. It was this crisis that piqued his interest in real estate. As luck would have it, he “randomly found himself typing ‘Ph.D. in real estate’ into an internet search one day.” This random search ended up determining his ultimate destiny, and after five years at BD and nearly a decade in the corporate world, Smith left the private industry behind to earn his Ph.D. at Georgia State University. 

“I am very fortunate to work at a university and in a department that views real estate as an integral part of finance.”

-Patrick Smith, SDSU Finance Professor

Coming to SDSU 

Upon graduating from Georgia State in 2016, Smith found himself in a different kind of job market. He realized that there weren’t that many business schools that have a focus on teaching and researching the real estate industry but he found SDSU’s Fowler College of Business had that commitment. “I ranked SDSU as one of my top choices that had open positions during my job search,” said Smith. “SDSU is one of the few universities that offers a real estate major and has an active real estate center (The Corky McMillin Center for Real Estate).” 

Smith started his academic career at SDSU’s Fowler College of Business in the fall of 2016 as an assistant professor and in 2020, he earned tenure and was promoted to the position of associate professor.  He still uses some of the skills he developed during his days at UPS to build algorithms and machine learning applications designed to analyze real estate data for use in his peer-reviewed research. 

Although fate had a hand in changing his ultimate career destiny as an SDSU real estate professor, Smith finds that he enjoys some of the same ideals he pursued during his corporate career. “The best part of my job is that I get to continue working on challenging projects —similar to my time at UPS and BD,” he said. “However, I now have complete autonomy over what I work on and research. Words cannot describe how important that is to me.”