Amy Vandaveer Novak

Novak earned a B.A. in English and Speech Communication from Texas A&M University, along with a secondary-education teaching certification, then worked abroad in London before coming back to Houston as a corporate recruiter at Reynolds and Reynolds. The recruiting desk sat next to sales and marketing hiring, and she later worked with Reynolds's sales force promoting software products across the United States, Mexico, and Brazil.

She kept one foot in the classroom early. While still in industry she began as an adjunct at Bauer, a side role she held for nine years. Between then and a full-time faculty appointment in 2008 she marketed and recruited for Bauer's Executive MBA, trained sales and client teams as training manager at Dovarri, a CRM startup, and sold advertising as an account manager at Texas Monthly. An MBA from the University of Houston in marketing and international business closed the loop between those practitioner seats and the courses she would design.

At Bauer she teaches Professional Selling, Personal Branding, Business Communications for MBA students, and an international marketing study-abroad course that has taken students to Paris. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute's M.S. in Sales Leadership Program, the graduate sales leadership track attached to Bauer's long-running Program for Excellence in Selling.

Her public scholarship on the same theme arrived in 2017, when she co-authored Strategic personal branding-And how it pays off in *Business Horizons* with Deva Rangarajan and Betsy D. Gelb. The paper's opening claim is blunt: people already have a personal brand from personality, experience, and how they talk with others; the work is managing that brand on purpose as careers change. Teaching awards followed the classroom craft, including the Program for Excellence in Selling Teaching Award in 2002, Bauer Teaching Excellence Awards in 2013 and 2019, and the University of Houston's Excellence in Teaching Awards for clinical faculty and group teaching in 2016.

By spring 2024 the mock-interview load in Personal Branding and the scale of MARK 3337, Professional Selling, had outgrown what partner reps could staff. Novak brought in Second Nature's AI role-play software and built networking, career-fair, interview, and job-negotiation scenarios students could run on their own schedule. The core selling course enrolls about 1,350 undergraduates each fall and spring; after early results looked strong, the same tool moved into Digital Sales and Sales Management.

In a Bauer College story on the rollout, she put the change in student terms: "Historically they only got one mock interview. Now we're able to build in all these different simulations that students can get access to and practice throughout the whole semester." On keeping pace with AI tools themselves she added, "They can't be deer in the headlights. Our job is to keep up with the times so that students get their return on the investment of their education." Bauer gave her the 2024 Innovation in Experiential Learning and Innovation in Instructional Design Awards for that launch. By early 2025 she was keynoting Texas Southern University's Southwestern Business Administration Teaching Conference on implementing AI role plays in mass and online sections, citing roughly 21,000 AI-driven role plays across that student cohort, and she has appeared on Second Nature panels with other university sales faculty on the same classroom pattern.

The same sales, branding, and communication material travels outside Bauer through executive education, training, and keynotes. Past clients on her Bauer faculty profile include Schlumberger, CenterPoint Energy, AIG, Exxon Mobil, CITGO, 3M, Ecolab, Mattress Firm, Insperity, and Houston ISD. In 2023 she opened the Houston Business Marketing Alliance's Interactive Strategies Conference with a talk on keeping a standard of excellence while the tools around marketers keep changing.

She also works with Bauer colleague Johannes Habel on evidence that repeated AI role-play practice tracks better performance in the program's live selling projects, and the pair have extended that measurement question to sales teams outside the university. The shared question is practical: whether screen-based rehearsal helps people sell when the conversation is real.