Professor of humanities James Arvanitakis turned from banking to aid work to university lecturer

I lose count of the number of times he uses the word "awesome" when we meet for lunch on a Monday in a tucked away Chinese dumpling joint in the city.

I arrive a few minutes ahead of him, and stumble over the pronunciation of his Greek surname when I tell the staff at Lynne Shanghai Cuisine that we have a booking for Arvanitakis. But they know who I am talking about and as I am ushered to a table in the bustling restaurant, the waiter tells me that my lunch partner is a VIP.

Arvanitakis is a connoisseur of dumplings. He is also a professor in the humanities at the University of Western Sydney, and head of The Academy, the university's leadership program. And he is one of the best university teachers in Australia.

The former banker turned aid worker who eventually became an academic won the prestigious Prime Minister's Australian University Teacher of the Year in 2012, the same year he won an an equally prestigious Australian Research Council grant to look at the changing nature of citizenship and young people.

It was a "crazy insane" year, he says, and it catapulted him from a senior lecturer to a professor in demand on the national and international speaking circuit.

We have started to cover plenty of territory before our attention even turns to the menu. After a few false starts, a waiter who is very pleased to see his VIP guest hovers over our table clearly wanting to take our order. I leave the decisions to Arvanitakis.

He goes for his favourites: sizzling diced beef fillet in special sauce, glazed sweet and sour pork ribs (which turn out to be a brave choice for lunch with a stranger) and, of course, steamed pork dumplings and shrimp and pork wontons. We stick with tea and tap water.

"I hope that isn't too much," he says. "I hate waste."

Academia was not Arvanitakis's first calling. He struggled his way through school at Randwick Boys' High, just made it to the end of his undergraduate geography degree at the University of NSW and turned to banking to make money and travel the world. It was the ultimate wog dream, he says, and his parents were so proud.

"Mum and dad wanted me to go to uni, especially dad. They wanted me to study something like commerce or law or medicine," Arvanitakis says.

But university was a foreign beast to the working-class family from Sydney's south-east and when Arvanitakis enrolled, no one in his family quite knew what to expect.

"It was the day before university started and I was outside with dad talking about what I needed to take to my first day of uni. He had no idea but mum was inside cooking up lamb, because that's what Greeks do, and mum said 'take your passport because that way you have proof of who are' and then she packed me a Tupperware dish full of lamb so I could make friends," he says.

"The next day I walk into this lecture room and I sit down right up the front, I got my notes out and had my passport and lamb in front of me and two things happened that were really weird."

The first strange thing was that a girl sat next to him. "I totally freaked out," he says.

"When I was young I had a rare form of cancer so I spent a lot of time in hospitals and I went to an all boys' schools so I didn't know girls. The only girls I knew were my cousins, and your cousins aren't really girls."

But the strange events did not end there. "I thought I was in a maths class but the lecturer said 'welcome to advanced Asian cinema'. I laughed, I thought it was a joke. I'm a wog, we watch cinema we don't study it," he says.

"I was the only person who laughed. And the lecturer said, if you are in the wrong class, leave now. So I sat there and had to make the decision. Do I sit here or leave. So I just sat there for an hour, taking notes and sweating profusely because I was sitting next to a girl.

"It was a lesson that never left me and I often think about it with my students. I think about them in first year and think, that could be me."

Arvanitakis spends a lot of his time trying to make the adjustment to university life a little easier for first-year students.

"Last year I gave 21 keynote addresses, I had this insane time and it was exhausting but it was also really awesome, and it made me think about what makes a good university," he says.

"What I figured out is that university is a strange environment. It's a culture shock. It likes visiting another country but the problem with academics is that they are like Australian tourists overseas. They speak slower and louder because that's the way they think people will understand."

The former banker, who sported the flashy lifestyle and ego to match in the heady days of the early 1990s, stumbled into academia after an epiphany on a Bolivian mountainside.

"To be totally honest with you, I ended up taking on that banker personality. At the time people were talking about sensitive new age guys (SNAGS) but I described myself as a CHOP – a chauvinistic, hedonistic, opportunistic prick. So I wasn't a SNAG, I was a CHOP," he says.

I ask him if he was happy, expecting him to say no.

"Yeah, I was happy. I was an immigrant working-class kid, with my own office overlooking Darling Harbour, with my own assistant, forecasting interest rates, earning good money, buying shares, having dinner in fancy restaurants," he says.

"My parents were proud, I wore a suit," he says and he pauses to show me on his smartphone the one and only photo he has of himself from his time in the corporate world.

"It's a very embarrassing photo but you can see I was a very serious young man. I was very, very serious."

Not long after, aged 28, Arvanitakis decided he had had enough of the banking world. After being obsessed with how rich he would be at retirement, he realised he needed to make a break.

He quit his job and went overseas, where his life and philosophies changed forever.

"It was when I was overseas that I had this epiphany where I saw child labour in the mines in Bolivia. During my time in finance, I had become a total free marketeer but when I was in Bolivia I realised that this was the end product of my politics. It was a pretty tough time. I literally sat on the side of a mountain and sobbed. It just changed my life and everything with it."

He eventually returned to Sydney where he worked with organisations such as Amnesty and AidWatch. He also did his PhD in history, philosophy and environmental studies at UNSW.

Only several years later, his innovative teaching styles – tutorials using open phone lines for students to text-in questions, flash mob dances to explain chaos theory, and YouTube videos discussing the history of sociology using SpongeBob Square Pants – saw him named the best university teacher in the country, an award he was "shocked" to receive.

"I see myself as the ninja student who goes around looking for the ultimate master. I go around looking for the great teachers and so over the years I have amassed all these tricks from watching some awesome teachers and some really bad ones too. I am the ultimate education ninja," he says.

Arvanitakis may well be somewhat of a celebrity at Lynne's, but the restaurant has long since cleared out and the kitchen staff are ready for their break. The manager politely tells us that the restaurant is closing and we need to leave. We didn't make it through all the food, so Arvanitakis asks for a doggy bag. He hates waste, after all.

"My colleagues often say to me, I can't believe how patient you are with the first year kids but I think about my first day at uni with my Tupperware dish of lamb and think, that could be me."

"It doesn't matter if the kid comes from a tough background or a good middle-class background, starting university is a really, really big culture shock."

Life and times

1968 Born in Surry Hills, Sydney

1985 Sits the HSC at Randwick Boys' High

1990 Graduated with an applied economic geography degree from UNSW, started working in finance

1999 Decides to leave finance and travel the world

2000 Experiences child labour first-hand in Bolivia and decides to pursue aid work

2006 Awarded his PhD

2012 Named the Prime Minister's University Teacher of the Year and awarded an ARC grant