Not so.

“It’s a huge honor,” said Spurrier, a professor of statistics who counts among his teaching awards no fewer than five USC prizes, including the Michael J. Mungo Teaching Award; the Outstanding USC Honors Professor, Sciences; the Amoco Teaching Award; and the USC Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award.

He’s also won the Governor’s Professor of the Year Award and the Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award. He was elected a Fellow in the American Statistical Association in 1992.

Spurrier is particularly gratified the Ada B. Thomas Award is student driven, adding, “It’s always good when you get awards that come from student nominations.” Three students nominated him, he said. He knows who one is, but not the others.

Most people think of advisement as the process of simply making sure students are signing up for the right courses to meet all their degree requirements and graduate on time.

That’s part of it, said Spurrier.

“But sometimes you also end up giving advice on life, as well,” he said. “Sometimes the students’ problems aren’t academic. There are other problems, so we try to use our experience in life to give guidance.”

This past school year, for example, a Carolina coed who had to undergo major surgery needed help keeping up with her classes while she was out, and then needed another helping hand in the form of legal advice when her insurance company refused to pay her medical bills.

“She was an excellent student and academics weren’t the problem,” said Spurrier. “But she needed a lot of advice handling her legal problems.”

Spurrier sees the role of an academic advisor as a critical job, noting that almost all the successful people he knows had a mentor early in their career, similar to the way he did as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Missouri.

“I like the term 'mentor' better than 'advisor,'” he said, “But 'advisor' is the one that is typically used.”

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