Today we are IN THE CLASSROOM with a Colorado Mountain College psych professor teaching from a camper.
“My wife and I, we take our camper out a lot with our kiddo, and I’ve taught from some interesting spots,” Drew Mikita tells Krystal 93 news director Phil Lindeman. “From Moab in the middle of the desert, from the lot at a Phish show before a concert.”
Come summertime, Mikita’s classroom is anywhere he parks it.
“Sure, you’re not in the room together, where you can read each other and take inventory on what’s going on in class, but you can still be in an environment where we’re meeting you where you are,” he says. “I have students in my Zoom classes who are coming to us from Australia at, you know, three in the morning.”
This fall Mikita will be back on campus, where he’ll teach traditional in-person courses on health psychology and abnormal psychology. But he says these summer virtual courses have opened CMC to a whole new cohort.
“I love having dogs and cats and brothers and sisters and kiddos wandering through the screen,” he says. “I try to embrace those things and just have fun with it, and realize that we’re all showing up as best we can.”
Mikita was named 2024 CMC Faculty of the Year for Summit County, voted on by his peers. His favorite course: Positive Psych.
“It’s the study of happiness and thriving and positive human experiences,” he says. “It’s kind of a flip to what everybody has thought about the field of psychology for many years, which was very negative and diagnostic.”
Mikita is one of the first professors in the state teaching a new four-year program at CMC: the Human Services degree.
“We’re looking at, ‘What is it our communities need?’ and then modeling our programs on what those specific areas of need are,” he says. “I feel like we’re tasked, as instructors, with this heavy responsibility of preparing the next generation of mental health counselors, and while they’re not going to be clinicians when they walk out the door, just because of the educational requirements that takes, we’re putting people right into the mental health field, or we’re putting them into grad schools where they’re going to become counselors.”
The Human Services program graduated its first class this May.
Thanks for going IN THE CLASSROOM, proudly presented by Heavenly Times Hot Tubs and Billiards and the Summit Foundation Bright Futures Fund.