Tyra Banks Is Going to Teach a Class at Stanford Business School The supermodel is taking her instructional tough talk from the runway to the classroom.
This story originally appeared on Fortune Magazine
The model-turned-mogul will soon be a professor.
Supermodel Tyra Banks, known for her ruthless critiques on reality show America's Next Top Model, is taking her instructional tough talk from the runway to the classroom.
In May, the former Victoria's Secret model will co-teach a course on creating and maintaining a personal brand at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She'll instruct some 25 MBA students on how to use social and traditional media to communicate their strengths and how to endure the ups and downs of being a business leader.
Students of the class will ultimately share their "honed personal brand" through three platforms -- Facebook Live, local television and YouTube -- in an effort to jump-start their personal brand extension, according to the course description for Project You: Building and Extending Your Personal Brand. Her co-instructor will be management professor Allison Kluger, who previously worked as a producer for The View and Good Morning America.
Banks' newest role extends her reach into the business world. Banks, who serves as chief executive of TYRA Beauty, is reportedly set to serve as a mentor to entrepreneurs on a Shark Tank-esque TV show called Funded, and she's an investor in millennial career site The Muse. Site co-founder and CEO Kathryn Minshew told Fortune last year that Banks is passionate about finding "growing businesses that were relevant to young people."
And before she was a business school instructor, Banks was herself a business school student. In 2011, she talked to Fortune"s Pattie Sellers about enrolling in an executive education program at Harvard Business School.
"My career and my business has gotten to where it is because of my gut," she said at the time. "In order to take my business to next level, for it to scale… to leave a true legacy… I needed the book smarts, I needed the minds of those professors, I needed the education to get there. I do not think I could do it without the education."
Banks told The Wall Street Journal that she plans to be as no-nonsense as a professor as she is as a TV host. "If I see somebody not paying attention, I'm gonna call on them," she said.
No word yet on whether Banks' trademark "smize" will be part of the curriculum.
