Today we are IN THE CLASSROOM with Doctor Justin Pollack at Colorado Mountain College. He’s a naturopathic doctor and the self-described “-ology” guy – as in biology and physiology – but he wasn’t always the -ology guy.
He was almost a river rat.
“I was trying to decide between natural medicine and being an outdoor educator,” Pollack tells Krystal 93. “I was an outdoor educator, kayak instructor, and then when I finished my naturopathic medicine degree, I was a resident for a year and got a lot of experience through that. Today I just love it.”
For a decade he split time between the classroom and his private practice. It made him better at both.
“They informed each other so well,” he says. “Some of the people who I grew up really idolizing taught, they practiced, they wrote books.”
Today, his wife runs their business, Backcountry Apothecary on Main Street Frisco. The two practice naturopathic medicine through their clinic, Mountain-River Naturopathic Clinic, while Pollack is teaching full time. Over two decades has watched the CMC student body evolve.
“It used to be a lot of people who were older than me coming back to school,” Pollack says. “They had already gotten their degree. They’d been in the workforce, and then they wanted to go back and maybe become a nurse or something like that. Now we’ve got more traditional age people.”
CMC was recently given the Federal Hispanic Serving Institution designation. More than 25% of students there are Hispanic. And he loves teaching all sides of CMC’s growing community.
“Students, nurses and paramedics, EMTs, people on search and rescue,” he says. “All kinds of people who went to CMC and remember me from there, when I wrote them a recommendation, and it’s just fun to see them become professionals out in our community.”
The CMC nursing program is top-ranked and highly competitive. Fewer than one in five students who apply are accepted.
Like most full-time faculty at CMC, Pollack is wrapping up soon with summer classes.
“It’s really neat that a small, little college like Colorado Mountain College can put out such great graduates,” he says.
Thanks for going IN THE CLASSROOM, proudly presented by Heavenly Times Hot Tubs and Billiards and The Summit Foundation Bright Futures Fund.