Ticket to Motivation, Education & Intoxication with Ben Torsney
While I was getting my Masters in Tourism and Hospitality Management at Temple University, I had a graduate externship with Student Activities. These roles were offered as 20 hour a week paid positions for full time graduate students throughout the university. My role was to oversee all of the Student Organizations on campus. You’ll hear more about this later on this season when I interview a former student leader.
My second year of grad school I would share my office with the new Greek Life graduate extern, this week’s guest Ben Torsney. This 24 year old kid showed up from Pittsburgh to get his Masters in Education.
We joke, but in all seriousness, we probably wouldn’t have been friends had we not been paired together, but our friendship was meant to be. Even though I’m older than Ben, we both had a LOT of growing up to do that year, and I know we really helped each other achieve that goal.
Ben and I have remained friends over the years, and as you learned in his partner Lauryn’s episode, he, Lauryn and I spent almost every Saturday “virtually” together on the same quizzo team from March 2020 until the Spring of 2021.
You’ll hear in this episode how Ben had reached out to me last summer about my graduate thesis. He thought I asked an interesting question about people’s motivation to attend beer festivals. He himself also studies motivation, so with a little work, Ben and his colleague co-authored my now published paper “Ticket to Intoxication: Exploring Attendees’ Motivations for Attending Craft Beer Events” in the Journal of Leisure Studies.
Additional Topics Include:
👨🎓 Difficulty of Pandemic Professorship
🏀 Mutual Interest in the Study of Motivation
👨🎓 Using Rap & Hip Hop as a Tool to Discuss Class, Race, Homophobia, Masculinity & Femininity
🏀 Dissecting and Understanding the Concept of Resilience
👨🎓 Everyone Needs a Class in Interpersonal Communication
🏀 The Feeling that we Lost an Entire Year
Thanks so much for listening, and enjoy the following episode, “Ticket to Motivation, Education & Intoxication with Ben Torsney”.
About Ben:
Dr. Ben Torsney (he/him) holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from Temple University and is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies Department. Ben’s research is focused on college students’ engagement in schoolwork at various units of analysis; John Henryism, a form of high effort coping as a response to environmental stressors; college students’ willingness to take environmental action; and the motivation of pre-service teachers to enter the teaching field.
This former “wannabe basketball player” is also a father to a great little girl and a partner to a wonderful lady.
Connect with Ben via email ben.torsney@gmail.com.
Follow BTV on Instagram and Facebook for all updates and releases.
A byVesta Production.