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I started with Mesa Community College in 1970. Hiring was very different in those days.
Dr. Riggs who was the president of Mesa Community College, was in my dad’s rotary club. He said to my dad one day, “do you think that Jo would like to teach for the college?”
I had been in teaching. I had taught at high school, I had left and was not teaching at the time. Long story short, I went in and interviewed with him and got the job. That was it. It was very different from our hiring processes today.
I came to work and was hired in August and I came in to teach a fashion merchandising program. I did not have any information at all about what I would be teaching until I returned the first week before classes.
On that Monday I was handed my teaching assignment with my textbooks, five different classes, four of them which I thought that I could probably stay one chapter ahead of the students.
One of them I knew I was way over my head when they said to me, “you are going teach fashion illustration.” Now, I had never in my life been an illustrator. Do I have the talents for it? No. I had no knowledge.
So, I muddled through it one semester with the help of a fashion illustrator I knew that taught high school where I had taught. Immediately the next year, another story that I won’t go into, before the semester was over I was department chair.
I immediately hired this person to teach it next. So, that was my start. For ten years, I mean for twenty years then, I served as a faculty member and in that day and age it was called the department of home economics.
It has gone through many transitions and now it is had different titles that we used. I was there for twenty years.
At that point, in 1990 Dr. Christian was president at the time, had decided that we had growth enough as a college that we needed to look at a different structure for the administrative support for the instructional departments.
We had one dean of instruction. By that point we were probably close twenty thousand students, and one dean of instruction was just stretched too thin.
He wanted to establish something new in our District that had never been there and that was an associate dean position. He came to me and asked if I would be willing to take on that role as one of the three associate deans.
At that point it would have been the occupational dean.