The end of a career

What I threatened to do last year, I did this year. Earlier this week, I submitted my letter of retirement from my faculty position at McCook Community College to the powers that be. That brings to a close a 35 year college and university teaching career, the last 21 years at MCC, that I stumbled on accidentally and one that gave me more personal satisfaction than about any other career I could have chosen.

I started my graduate work at Oklahoma State University back in the '70s. As all of my readers know, I've always been interested in politics so I entered the Master's degree program in Political Science and was hired as a graduate teaching assistant. In major universities around the country, graduate students teach the introductory courses and a student typically doesn't take a course from a tenured professor until their junior year. It was a little different in OSU's political science program in that the professor taught Intro to Political Science to all the students enrolled in a large lecture hall one day a week and then the class was broken down into sections of 20 to 25 students and the graduate assistants taught those classes the other two days of the week. I was empowered the first day I walked into a classroom I was in charge of knowing that the students expected to learn from me and I wasn't about to disappoint them. After that first day, I knew I loved teaching but my political science concentration was in Public Administration because I thought I wanted to be a City Manager.

After graduating with my Master's degree in Political Science / Public Administration, I started applying for jobs and got several interviews as a result. One job I was offered was the City Manager position in Rangeley, Colorado, but my wife didn't want me to take it because it was only a few miles east of Utah and that was too far away from her relatives so I declined the offer. That was the only City Manager position offered to me because I was applying for a wide range of jobs and was subsequently hired as the Criminal Justice Planning Director for the North Central Kansas Planning Commission in Beloit, Kansas. We lived there for a year before I was hired to be the Head of the Criminal Justice Department at St. Mary's College in Dodge City, Kansas. That was the beginning of my college teaching career and, except for a couple of detours, I've been doing that ever since. Now that I'm retiring, I plan on doing more traveling than I've been doing while working, especially to Arkansas to spend some time and attend some concerts and athletic events with my boys. But I'm going to keep my residence here because there are some people connections here I don't want to leave behind.

A college, regardless of how big or small it is, is a place where different ideas circulate much more so than in any other social or business environment. The conversations I have with my friends in social settings are much the same day in and day out as it is in most business environments because you tend to talk about what you do. Since everyone does something different in a college setting, there are always new things to learn, discuss and talk about. College also keeps you young because your clients, for the most part, are 18- to 21-year-old college students, often away from home for the first time and discovering what the world is like without hovering parents. Sometimes they learn good lessons, sometimes bad ones. Sometimes they're motivated to be the best they can be because they know their future is now in their hands and sometimes they do little or anything at all simply because there's no one around to make them. Some learn early, some learn late but everybody learns something. The biggest reward a college instructor receives is when they see the light go on in the eyes of one of their students and they know that the student 'gets' it. That only happens once or twice a semester but it happens EVERY semester and it's always fascinating to see where that inspiration takes them. Two of my Intro to Sociology students from McCook went on to receive their Ph.D.'s in Sociology from UNL and are now sociology professors, too. Nothing could be more rewarding than knowing that a student was inspired to make a career choice due at least in some small part by what he or she experienced in your classroom.

Even though former colleagues of mine have told me that every day is Saturday when you retire, I will dearly miss those moments of self-discovery realized by my students.