Twenty-five Years
Today is the first day of the Fall 2025 semester at San Diego City College. It also marks the beginning of my 26th year as a full-time community college professor.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been a professor for twenty-five years. I’ve been lucky with my jobs. My first tenure-track position was at Mesa Community College, right out of finishing up my doctorate at Arizona State. Over the course of my seven years there, I built their astro program as their first ever full-timer in the position, I earned tenure, and I helped to design their current science building, with its planetarium. I liked my colleagues and my students, and I enjoyed still functioning as a visiting faculty member in the physics department at ASU.
But it was in Arizona.
My husband and I wanted to return to California. He’s from Southern California, I’m from Northern California, and we met while undergrads at UCLA. Arizona never felt quite right, and we never intended to stay as long as we did. California is home. I was grateful to get an astronomy/physics position at San Diego City College. (Was the fact the campus is within walking distance to Comic-Con a factor in my decision? I’ll let you guess.) Believe it or not, the fact I had worked on a building committee before helped me clinch this position, because they were just about to embark on the design process for a much-needed new science building. Our faculty worked closely with the architects, and we have a building with great science labs, a science courtyard, an observation deck, and a planetarium. I’ve earned tenure, spent some time as department chair, served a semester as an acting dean, headed an important campus committee, and mentored new faculty. And our students are the absolute best.
When I first expressed interest in community college teaching, some of my grad school profs were concerned I was “selling myself short.” But being an adjunct while in grad school solidified my love of teaching, and if you love teaching, community college is the place to be. Do I miss research? Yes. Would I miss the emphasis on teaching more? Also, yes.
What has changed over the past few decades? Well, the No Child Left Behind Act has led to the deterioration of math and writing skills. (Anybody who blames online teaching during the early days of the pandemic is pushing an agenda and not to be taken seriously. Ahem.) Somehow more and more bureaucratic work is trickling down to the faculty due to the tech advances that were supposed to make things easier. And I’ve never had to spend time preparing to protect my students from roving masked bounty hunters until the past few months, a development that is enraging and terrifying on multiple levels.
But the students remain the same: eager, determined, ready to shine. It is my privilege to be their professor.
For more of my musings on teaching, check out this post.
