Supermodel Tyra Banks, known for her ruthless critiques on reality show America’s Next Top Model, is taking her instructional tough talk from the runway to the classroom.
In May, the former Victoria’s Secret model will co-teach a course on creating and maintaining a personal brand at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. She’ll instruct some 25 MBA students on how to use social and traditional media to communicate their strengths and how to endure the ups and downs of being a business leader.
Students of the class will ultimately share their “honed personal brand” through three platforms—Facebook Live, local television, and YouTube—in an effort to jump-start their personal brand extension, according to the course description for Project You: Building and Extending Your Personal Brand. Her co-instructor will be management professor Allison Kluger, who previously worked as a producer for The View and Good Morning America.
And before she was a business school instructor, Banks was herself a business school student. In 2011, she talked toFortune‘s Pattie Sellers about enrolling in an executive education program at Harvard Business School.
“My career and my business has gotten to where it is because of my gut,” she said at the time. “In order to take my business to next level, for it to scale… to leave a true legacy… I needed the book smarts, I needed the minds of those professors, I needed the education to get there. I do not think I could do it without the education.”
Banks told The Wall Street Journal that she plans to be as no-nonsense as a professor as she is as a TV host. “If I see somebody not paying attention, I’m gonna call on them,” she said.
