The faculty and professional development department of Long Beach City College held its first graduation ceremony for their Faculty Diversity Internship Program on Wednesday.
The one-year program is for grad students, post-grad students and local residents who are looking to change careers paths to becoming employed as a faculty member at Long Beach City College.
This program is run by the FPD department, in conjunction with the human resources, and was designed to guide and assist those who want to pursue a career in teaching.
One of the main focuses of the program is to help diversify certain departments that historically are lacking in minorities.
“Our goal is to increase representation to accurately reflect the population of our students,” said Veronica Alvarez, assistant professor at LBCC.
Alvarez plays a key role in the program and is excited to see it get a second life, so that more people have access to jobs they otherwise would not have been able to obtain.
“The program went on for about 10 years, but it was a long time ago and it wasn’t fleshed out and developed like it is now. It’s a partnership with the academic senate under FPB and human resources.”
Those who enroll in the program are provided with everything they need in order to obtain either full-time or part-time employment as a member of the faculty, including being assigned a mentor who has experience in the department that they eventually hope to join.
These mentors are meant to provide insight into the daily responsibilities of someone in their position as well as share their teaching techniques for both synchronous and asynchronous classes.
At the end of the year-long program, mentors decide whether or not they feel their pupil is ready to become a valuable member of the school’s faculty and they can then sign off on their graduation.
Robert Garcia is a mentee who completed the program and hopes to begin teaching philosophy courses as early as this summer.
“When I went to grad school I knew what I wanted to do was go back and teach philosophy. I took my first philosophy class at a community college, LA Valley College, and I was blown away so I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” said Garcia.
“You can study a discipline, whatever it is, and you can kind of understand it and get how it works, but it’s a whole different story to try to reach students and teach it to them,” said Garcia. “Being able to get up to date with what’s happening in community colleges was really important to me because I went to community college in 1997 and it’s changed a lot since then.”
Before the ceremony started, there was a live performance by “Octopus”, a band made up of music students from LBCC, as well as a land acknowledgement to honor the traditional ancestral land of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples and a student speaker.
Fruit, sandwiches, drinks and other snacks were available for those who were in attendance.