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Crousillac STORY SAMANTHA BARES PHOTOS JORDAN HEFLER DESIGN ELLIE PLATT
»When he’s not teaching, you can find Professor Crousillac in his
office where he even has a Pearl Jam poster hidden behind his door.
Biology professor Scott Crousillac’s favorite trick to pull on his students is passing as one of them before class. He said he sits in the audience, greets students and asks what professor is teaching the course. After insulting himself to these students, who blindly agree, he gets up, situates his belongings at the front of class and begins to lecture. The Baton Rouge native said he has given up trying to appear cool to college students, and playing his music at the beginning of class would be risky. He said concocting impressive playlists would be enormously stressful, and randomizing his iTunes could be downright dangerous. “Allegedly, there may or may not be some Taylor Swift on my iPod,” he warned.
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Music or none, Crousillac may have kept his cool factor intact, given his rave student reviews on popular website Rate My Professor. He is even awarded RMP’s exclusive “red chili pepper,” which denotes a professor’s hotness. “I’m flattered by it,” Crousillac said, “I don’t quite understand it.” He said professors are rarely as bad or good as they appear on RMP. Likewise, he said his “hot” status is a simple by-product of his relative youth and height (Crousillac clocks in at 6 feet 5 inches and is 34 years old). In his five years as a professor at LSU, Crousillac has come to realize his greatest joy is a relatively simple one: making biology easier and more interesting to students who may feel intimidated or terrified
studying it. “I love my job and … the place I am allowed to do my job,” Crousillac said, adding that he considers any other university a step down. Crousillac said his life-long, crippling fear of public speaking makes getting in front of an audience of 500-plus students terrifying, but getting through each class without having a panic attack gives him a thrill. “It’s my personal victory over myself,” he said. He said students comment on how confident he appears on stage, which makes him that much closer to conquering his fear. Crousillac keeps it cool with a simple mantra: “Make yourself look like you