By: Dayna Wilmoth, senior
10/24/2007

Brian Shepherd may not seem like your traditional undergraduate student, and in fact, this is not the first time he has gone to college.

He graduated for the first time from Friends University in 2000, with a degree in organizational management leadership. As an owner of a real estate business this was helpful to him, but after having run his own business for 20 years he decided to make a career change. Teaching seemed to be an obvious choice. He is passionate about education -- his own as well as others’. He also loves history and politics, so it comes as no surprise that he is a history and government education major.

Shepherd was born and raised in El Dorado. He was the mayor of El Dorado until about six months ago. He even ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket with a friend, even though he has been a lifelong Democrat. They knew they didn’t stand a chance, but he says it was still a great experience. With tongue in cheek he mentions that you don’t really get to know someone “until you have traveled around with them, listening to them lie.”
 
He has been involved in local politics and held various jobs over the years. He thinks his experiences in the “real world” have given him a more rounded education, but he stresses the importance of a college education. When he and his wife were starting out they were both determined to go to college, so they began by taking as many classes as they could afford at Butler Community College each semester.

These days Shepherd tries to immerse himself into his studies at Friends. He wants to take advantage of the opportunities the school has to offer and enjoys taking part in school activities. He went to China this summer with a group led by Friends history professor Dr. Guangqiu Xu, which he says was an amazing experience. Shepherd is also the president of the History/Political Science Club, where he served as secretary last year. The club was involved in the Homecoming parade.

“We had a lot of fun with that,” he said. The club will also be hosting a movie night; it plans to use the new big screen TV in Casado.  

Shepherd said getting an education should be fun.

“People need to lighten up,” he said. “Education does not have to be boring and miserable.”

He wishes he could convince more of the younger students on campus of that. He said that Friends is a great place to go to school. With very few exceptions, he said, all of the students he has met here are intelligent and happy.

In a way, he already feels like a teacher, he said, and he enjoys helping his fellow students understand what they are studying. Along with that he said he is impressed with the faculty here, and that is one reason he enjoys Friends so much. The collective level of knowledge is incredible.

“The professors here are as good a group as I’ve ever seen,” Shepherd said.

He thinks that he will teach at the college level someday, but for now he is focused on teaching in a high school.

“I always say I like kids better than adults,” he states with a smile.

People have warned him that he might not like the bureaucracy associated with teaching in high schools, and he chuckles as he explains that his “inability to not say what I think” could be a problem. Even so, he is eager to teach in a high school. He is inspired to teach history that students may not be learning in high school, to fill in the gaps, and he wants to give students more than the basic understanding of history before they reach the college level
 
He starts his student teaching next fall, and most likely will graduate in 2009. He has not added it up lately, but he guesses that he has somewhere around 200 hours of college credit. He said graduation may seem a long way off, but he knows it isn’t. Last time he was in college he studied in the accelerated learning program, but this time he enrolled as a traditional student because he wanted to enjoy college life, and that is what he plans on doing.