Aimee Hamilton has spent plenty of time thinking about the impact a person leaves behind. She refers to it as their “wake.”
Her time at the Daniels College of Business has caused her to think about wake more literally.
For years, Hamilton has joined the Executive MBA program on its signature sailing experience, helping new cohorts navigate team dynamics and challenges in San Diego Bay. It’s a distillation of her passion for studying how people work together.
Now, as Hamilton looks back on 14 years at Daniels, ahead of her retirement, she’s thinking about a different wake: her own.
“I think about all the students that a career touches. And all the colleagues that a career touches,” she said, leaning on Container Store co-founder Kip Tindell’s idea of a wake. “I’ve been touched by other people’s wakes in wonderful ways. And I would just hope that people have been positively affected by my wake as well.”
Hamilton jokingly describes academia as her “fourth or fifth” career, depending on how you count. She started as a research technician after graduating from Harvard University, became a retail management trainee at Jordan Marsh and then worked for a small, family-owned business.
Those experiences sparked her interest in business, specifically around decision-making. So, she went back to school and got an MBA from the Yale School of Management. She’d parlay that into a decade as an investment banker before a move to central Pennsylvania.
There, she’d work for Penn State in its alumni development office, supporting leadership gift initiatives. It reminded her how much she loved academia and reignited her passion for research, her first job out of college.
She’d get her doctorate in management, studying how people manage to collaborate, work through roadblocks and get things done. That’s when she came to Denver and Daniels.
“When I came in, I already had the gray hairs to have a little bit of that professorial presence quickly. Unearned, but quickly,” she said.
Hamilton would hit the ground running at Daniels, teaching across every level and most programs, chairing the Department of Management and leading during the COVID-19 pandemic. She looks back fondly on the work she did with her colleagues on the curriculum, ensuring that students are prepared for a world that’s constantly changing.
That’s never been more evident than in the age of AI.
“How can we how can we help them adapt to that and help them use those tools in a way that is useful and not a substitute for their own critical thinking and decision-making skills?” she said. “So that’s been a real labor of love for me in the last few years. How do you incorporate that into your teaching and help prepare them?”
Hamilton also reflects fondly on the EMBA sailing experience, saying that “so many wonderful things happen” in that class and on that trip. It also serves as an ideal setting for her to teach and learn about team dynamics. Sailing is foreign to most of the EMBA students, meaning they have to learn to work together while learning to sail. It raises the stakes and gives Hamilton an ideal situation in which to share her knowledge.
“I’ve really enjoyed spreading the gospel of team dynamics [at Daniels],” she said. “It’s a really important theme to me that carries through my teaching and my research.”
Hamilton is stepping back from full-time teaching and sliding into an adjunct role in her retirement. She’ll still be present on campus and will continue to conduct research but will use her added free time to travel and see her family. She’s interested in self-guided walking trips in Portugal and Spain and hitting the links in Scotland.
She’ll miss her colleagues, many of which she said are very dear to her, but is glad to maintain a presence at Daniels in retirement.
“I’m really glad I’m going to still have some touch points, because that would be really hard if it were just goodbye.”
She’s leaving a wake but not quite sailing away yet.