Meet:
David Bodary is a Communication professor here at Sinclair. He was born in Detroit, Mich. and was an undergraduate at Eastern Michigan University and a graduate at Wayne State. He has worked at Sinclair Community College for 22 years.
Why he is interesting:
Bodary has a passion both for his job and his students. He cares about their lives and their success.
“I really like what I do,” Bodary said. “I really like the opportunity to work at an institution of higher learning. To work especially with young people but really anyone who is interested in learning. And that’s who shows up, right? I mean, for the most part. So that’s just a dream,” he said.
He didn’t always know that he wanted to be in communication. He was once a business major, but in his junior year decided that path wasn’t for him.
He said, “I sat through classes my junior year the first day and they were, to me, just not interesting.”
“I just wasn’t looking forward to the term. And I said to myself ‘I gotta do something different.’ So I went to a colleague at the college and said ‘I think I’m in the wrong major’ and she suggested communication.”
Teaching was always in his blood which was foreshadowed by a moment that happened in high school.
“I showed up on a career night and I went into a room expecting to hear a speaker talk about whatever it was, something in a career field, and the speaker didn’t show,” Bodary said, “And I’m the kind of person of ‘Well I’m just not gonna waste my time,’ so I went to the front of the room and I started talking to people. I tried to get an understanding of what other people were thinking and maybe that would help me decide what I could do and of course I didn’t realize I had become the teacher, right? And so I was doing what I would come to do,” he said.
Although this may not have been the career he imagined in high school, it is a job that he loves with a passion. He lives each day to make a difference in his students.
“How can you not be invested in student’s lives? It’s why we come to work and why I get out of bed. Right? Because I’m hopeful that something I can do this day is going to be useful to that student who then eventually put that to practice on others,” he said.
He likes to see his students walking at graduation and knowing that he has helped students achieve their goal.
“At graduation when we get to see our students marching at graduation, walking across accepting their diploma, receiving their diploma, those are the moments. That’s exciting,” Bodary said.
Bodary does not focus on the difficult parts of his job, but rather on the rewards that are part of being a teacher.
“There’s lots of tough parts about my job, but I’m not a person who dwells on those things,” he said. “I mean I see them as challenges, but not as terrible things.”
He loves to see the impact he makes in a student’s life and, according to Bodary, it makes all the hard parts of his job worth it.
“A lot of what I get from this is the intrinsic motivation,” Bodary said. “Realizing that a student I’ve worked with is moving on to a four year school and they’ve got a scholarship. Or that they’re graduating and now they’re taking a job.”
In his spare time, Bodary likes to spend time with his wife, children and his granddaughter. He plays hockey with a group of guys known as the “Huff and Puff.”
Laina Yost
Managing Editor