Greg Westover teaches the New Visions: STEM program at RPI – a program he graduated from in 2011.
After graduation, high school students often find themselves in fields they didn’t expect. For Greg Westover, an unexpected career track brought him back to a familiar location – the New Visions program he graduated from in 2011, as well as the campus where he completed his undergraduate program.
As a senior at Ichabod Crane High School, he attended the New Visions: STEM program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) with the hopes of becoming a researcher. Through the program, he realized that career wasn’t really what he wanted.
“I had this glamourous idea of what it was like to be a researcher in a laboratory working on cutting edge problems,” he says. However, after shadowing some researchers he started to feel pulled in a different direction. Westover found that he’d rather be doing the technical work and testing in the laboratory than the actual research, and attended RPI for Materials Science and Engineering.
Westover is currently completing his Graduate studies in Education at Clarkson University Capital Region Campus (formerly Union Graduate College). He does admit this wasn’t a totally unexpected career path. He says planned on becoming a teacher someday, but after working in the field for a number of years first. So what led him back to his old classroom?
As Questar III prepared to launch the New Visions: Medical program, Tammie Borland (the previous STEM teacher) was selected to teach the new program, and a search for a new STEM teacher began, though Questar III was not actively seeking to recruit a graduate of the program to fill the position.
“Quite a while ago, Greg had dropped by and shared that he was planning to pursue his Master’s in education. Recognizing that he would make an excellent educator, I strongly encouraged his decision,” Borland says.
According to Borland, Westover had an inclination for teaching. He could often be seen explaining topics to his peers when the class worked in groups, or spent time working through challenging homework problems. He also excelled at Physics 1100 and 1200 courses, which are exceptionally challenging.
“Greg was an excellent student of physics and also worked at Rensselaer as a teaching assistant in Physics, so the New Visions STEM students will be privileged to have his expertise at their fingertips. Most of all, Greg seems to get joy out of seeing others learn and succeed – one of the most important qualities of any great teacher,” says Borland.
When the instructor position opened up, Westover applied. After a rigorous search and interview process, it was clear that Westover was the right choice to continue the excellent academic outcomes of this program of the New Visions: STEM program as well as moving the program forward.
Westover says his goal for the program is to get his students to develop a love of thinking like an engineer – even if they don’t end up working as an engineer. The process of thinking through any problem to find the most practical solution is a skill he says they’ll use forever, in any field.
In explaining what “engineer thinking” means to him, he says that being an engineer is basically taking incredibly complex things, like a car, and making it simple for the general consumer to use.
His other goal is to help his students find what they want to focus on after high school.
“At this point, they’ve been told they’re good at science and math and they like science and math, but you don’t [just] do science and math in the real world.” He says it’s more about finding what fields or problems interest them and giving them an idea of what those fields are really like.
Being back at RPI and in his old classroom is a unique experience, but not as odd as one might expect, he says.
“I want to say it’s weird but it’s really not. It’s really actually surprisingly natural.”
Westover says having attended the New Visions program and completing his undergraduate degree at RPI gives him an invaluable understanding of the program as well as many connections to campus professors and other local opportunities to bring into the program.
Along with thinking skills, Westover hopes that he’ll also develop his students’ ability to present their work on a professional level. He says that while the expected knowledge is scaled back slightly from what one would find in college or the real world, that doesn’t mean the final product should be.
“They might not have designed a plane, they might have designed a desktop clock, but that clock should be presented at the same level as one would present a turbine for a 747.”
For more information on our New Visions programs for high school seniors please visit our website.
