Some Streams Connect Us All: Meet Adjunct Professor for the Spanish BBA Cristian Salazar
If anything speaks to the reach of online learning, it is the rich diversity among faculty members of the Spanish BBA—among them, Adjunct Professor Cristian Salazar, who has helped shaped the program’s course offerings in Information Systems for the past year from his home in Valdivia, Chile.
Salazar, who has over 25 years of teaching experience spanning undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, is a civil engineer with a specialization in computer science and information systems. “I didn’t arrive at college teaching by chance. Rather, it became my dream halfway through my undergraduate career, and something I propelled myself towards,” he says.
“My teaching expertise is in information systems, workplace technology, and organizational and consumer behavior,” explains Salazar. He believes online education is a transformative force in the hands of disciplined, dedicated students such as those at Empire State University. As for bilingual approaches to education, Salazar comments: “being bilingual allows you to explore worlds and cultures that would be impossible to explore without that second language.” The Spanish BBA, which rests on these two pillars, is sure to be a meaningful pathway to a business education as relevant abroad as it is in the United States.
Having studied technostress—the health impacts brought about by daily use of technology—in depth for his doctorate, Salazar is suited to the medium of online teaching and endeavors to help students navigate technology in a way that is helpful and sustainable while earning their degrees. “One must always have technological empathy,” he states, explaining that much of the technology we rely on for work or school has not yet been fully developed, and as such, can pose challenges to users.
From his office window in Valdivia, Chile, Salazar can observe the lush green of the world, and in the distance, a smooth river. “To me, this river is like the links between information. It connects my wish to work online with the ability to share learning experiences,” he says. Salazar’s unique background represents a facet of the business administration landscape of Latin America—one of many that the Spanish BBA students will learn from.
Salazar believes that the program generates real opportunities for its graduates, priming them to confidently integrate into their labor markets — “This degree aims to build competencies to manage organizations in difficult times,” he says, highlighting the double-edged sword of innovative technology, which is replacing human labor in some areas and yielding new businesses to develop in others. Salazar’s involvement in the first Spanish-language educational endeavor of the SUNY system is a career development he finds fulfilling.
“Information technology and artificial intelligence are key skills that every person must master in today’s society,” Salazar replies when asked what advice he has for incoming students. He welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the academic development of international students through accessible higher education in the Spanish language.