When Dr. Dan Wait’s wife broke the news that her new job would force them to leave the sunny Bay Area of Los Angeles for Dayton, Ohio, he had no expectation of being able to find a teaching job. However, once he saw an opening for a biology professor at Sinclair, Wait eagerly jumped on the opportunity.
Wait just started his first semester at Sinclair as an annually contracted faculty member in August. While he is finding his way around campus like so many new Tartans, he is also finding a new and supportive community within Sinclair.
“[Sinclair] seems to have a surprising amount of resources and infrastructure that is purposely designed to help students. I learned about food pantries here, counseling and daycare for children, which is amazing to me,” Wait said.
He compared this to his own student experience at the renowned University of California, Berkeley. In a high-octane learning environment like Berkeley, students are very much on their own.
“At Berkeley, they had resources and that stuff sort of in the background, but it was student led. It was more students who take care of each other and themselves, and the administration would do some things. But it never seemed as purposefully made as Sinclair’s infrastructure,” Wait said.
Wait grew up in Los Angeles and spent most of his life making his way through the competitive world of high academia. After encouragement from elementary school teachers, his mother took him out of the notoriously bad LA Unified School District and enrolled him into a private school which cemented his path towards college.
“I was on scholarship [for the private school], so I felt the pressure [to go to college]. It was funny because I didn’t know where to apply, I didn’t know what major to apply for, so I kind of just ended up getting into Berkeley and picking environmental science and then switching from environmental science to integrative biology,” Wait said.
Biology called to Wait because of its possibility for variety.
“Biology is a weird one because you could either be like ‘Oh, you’re really smart because you do genetics or whatever’ or ‘You’re the guy in the corner who’s like, flipping stones to look at what’s underneath’. And I was dead in the middle, I liked some of the more kind of highfalutin academic stuff, but I also liked just going out and looking at things,” Wait said.
He took advantage of this variability and worked as a game warden while figuring out long term career plans. Though Wait always knew wanted to do something in the academic field, he was unsure of pursuing a teaching career at first. It was not until he began working as a teaching assistant (TA) at UC Berkeley that he considered teaching full-time more seriously.
“I found that I enjoyed doing the TA stuff way more than the research itself, and I kept just trying to get more and more involved in teaching and learning that aspect,” Wait said.
He likes the fulfillment that teaching provides and hopes to inspire students the same way his favorite teachers inspired him.
“I do want to give back. I want to give people the opportunity that I had or inspire some sort of interest in them that they maybe didn’t know they had, because they didn’t have someone there to just let them try,” Wait said.
One of the hardest things for any teacher is keeping students engaged in the classroom. To Wait, the trick is to create a space for open communication and collaboration. He stresses that being approachable and having mutual respect for each other is the first part of generating interest in any topic.
While teaching and working on his new house keeps him busy, outside of the classroom Wait likes to stay active by doing judo and reading as much sci-fi as he can. Since he has lived in sunny Los Angeles his whole life, Wait self-admittedly has never experienced a true winter. He plans to take advantage of his first Ohio winter by getting plenty of winter hiking in as well.
For Sinclair students just starting on a path that professors like Wait have already been through, he offers some advice.
“Look at the course catalog and find something that seems interesting to you and think about taking that class. If there are any clubs here that interest them, they should try it. Students don’t get the chance to or always have the courage to try stuff and then they may not know what they do and don’t like. Just don’t be afraid to try something new,” Wait said.
Noah Schlarman, executive editor
Checkout more posts by the Clarion:
- Letter from the Editor October Edition
- Dr. Dan Wait’s journey from studying at Berkley to teaching at Sinclair
- 2 Democrats, 1 decision: Dayton’s mayoral election
- From Samhain to sweets: Halloween’s haunted history
- “Too Old for Candy?”: When Trick-or-Treating Loses Its Spook
- Sam Stanley’s personal experience of being a WWOOFer
