Greg McLeod: 1989 NC Teaching Fellow

1989-1993, UNC Chapel Hill

I wasn't aware of many of the career opportunities that were available to me at the time, but I always felt like I would be a good math teacher as I enjoyed math and was good at tutoring others.

I also knew that it would've been difficult for my parents to adequately support three of us in college at the same time, so I felt the need to find a scholarship to cover my costs in order to take the burden off of them.

Further, having grown up a huge fan of UNC, it was a no brainer for me to attend there with the scholarship when they offered me a spot in the UNC Teaching Fellows cohort.

I taught high school and middle school math for a couple of years and then was recruited away to Corporate America where I did marketing, trade shows, and training seminars for a large technology company.

After getting burned out from all of the traveling, I returned to the Raleigh/Durham area to earn a master's degree in training and development from NCSU. While doing that, I joined Durham Technical Community College as a developmental math adjunct teacher and fell in love with the mission of the community college, the opportunities it provided to people who may otherwise not be able to pursue post-secondary education, and the rich diversity of people who worked at and attended community colleges.

After a few years, I accepted an administrative position at a community college in Florida and began work towards a Ph.D. I involved myself in many different areas of the college and learned a lot. During my time in Florida, I completed my Ph.D., and professionally I was able to get into the executive ranks of a community college serving as a campus provost.

With my wife wanting to return closer to N.C., I was able to get another campus provost position in Virginia and enjoyed that for three years.

After serving as a provost for seven years and as an associate provost for two and a half years before that, I felt it was time to pursue a presidency. Feeling like Edgecombe Community College would be a great fit for me and that Tarboro would be a great fit for my family, I applied and was offered the presidency. I have now been president of Edgecombe Community College since August 17, 2018.

I tried teaching middle school math one year, and it was so incredibly challenging for me. I didn't feel prepared and equipped to handle all of the non-academic issues and challenges that I faced. The school was an inner city school with leadership challenges and a majority of the students seemed not to care about getting a good education.

While my heart remained in education, my middle school experience and feeling of little support, made it easy for me to accept the opportunity to go to Corporate America when I did. Thankfully, I returned to education at the community college level and love it.

And while I do not have the opportunity right now to formally teach being a new president, I do look forward to teaching college math or student success classes again in the future perhaps in the evenings or as a guest lecturer.

You have to be purposeful and intentional in your efforts to recruit them. You have to actively reach out to them.

We need to do a better job at recruiting them early on and showing them how gratifying and rewarding teaching is and what other opportunities teaching can lead to. We may need to design joint teacher-ed programs with other college majors and include incentives to get them to consider teaching as a career.

There needs to be strong support groups and mentoring for them. There also needs to be appropriate professional development opportunities and programming targeted just for them.