Hey, hey, hey. This is Lisa A. And you're listening to Who's That Star? On LCC Connect at Lansing Community College. Who's that Star? Is a behind the scenes show where I sit down and talk with the employees at the college. This is an inside look at LCC where you will have a chance to learn about their passions, projects, what inspires them both at work and in their personal lives. I'm your host, Lisa Alexander. I'm so excited to get a chance to talk to all the people who make LCC great. This show is for you to get to know the people that work at Lansing Community College a little bit more and see what makes them tick. Are you ready? Okay. Let's go see who's today's Star. Welcome to Who's That Star. Today's star is someone who loves words. He knows more words and how to use them than anyone I know. He's an educator, writer and editor with an MA in English and History from Michigan State University. He also has an MA in English from Western Michigan University. He has published several dozen articles, chapters and reference entries on works of authors from Ray Bradbury to Shakespeare. He has also written and published three books of his own and is currently working on another. He has been an employee of LCC for 30 years in many roles. He has worked as a faculty and is currently in administration. He is one of the people that trained me to be such an awesome advisor. He has an eye for details and good at explaining processes. Hey, audience, are you ready to find out who's today's star? All right, Today's star is Rafeeq McGiveron. Yay, Rafeeq, we are so glad to have you here. You see how the audience loves you.

Oh, that's really kind. Thanks for having me, Lisa.

We are glad to have you. Rafeeq, you're one of my favorite people on campus. You're somebody that taught me how to be a good advisor and what to look for. And you really made me take it seriously. And so I want to thank you for that. Give you your flowers while you're here. You do an excellent job. You make sure that students understand what they need to get. And you taught us how to do that too. So thank you.

Well, thank you. And so, Rafeeq, smell really nice. Those flowers smell great. Thanks.

Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad to give them to you, Rafeeq, because you deserve them and you really do a good job. And so I, like I said, I appreciate all the stuff that you've done to help me. So I Want to get started? Rafeeq, how long have you been employed at LCC?

Well, it's been a couple minutes. It's been about 30 years. It'll be 30 in August.

Oh, wow. 30 Years. That's a long time. What brought you to LCC? How did you get started here at LCC?

Well, when I started at LCC, I had just finished my first master's and I was looking to teach English, and a friend of mine recommended that I come to LCC for at least a little while. And it ended up being that I love the place.

So here I am 30 years later.

30 Years later. I didn't think it was gonna happen.

Well, yeah, I mean, who thinks that you're gonna stay somewhere? You know, back in the day, you people stayed a long time in jobs, and nowadays that's not so usual.

So, yeah, it's kind of spooky.

Hey, well, that's good. No, you got a lot of history about LCC, and it means that you care about LCC. You stayed that long, so I think that's great. How long did you stay in your role as a teaching faculty?

Let's see. I was teaching for about nine years.

Okay.

And then kind of in the middle of that, I started doing some advising part time as well.

Okay.

Friend of mine said, hey, Rafeeq, there's this call in the email that says, why don't, you know, you come to learn to be an advisor? And I'm like, pete, I don't know anything about advising. He said, yeah, well, we're going to learn. Dude was right.

So you did that with someone else and.

Yep. Oh, cool.

And you last 30 years later? Pretty much. Well, you said in the midst, so.

That would have been 94.

Okay. So you were an advisor from 94 till 2015. Wow. So you spent a long time.

That's 20 years, Cal, right?

Yeah, 20 years in advising. And then you left advising? Well, at first, in advising, I really think that you did a great job in advising. What are some of the things that you learned in advising that you think helped you move on to your next role?

Well, part of it is being detail oriented. A program pathway or a curriculum guide tells a student how to start, get through, and graduate. So if I don't know the rules or I misunderstand how the thing works, it means I've told a student a way that's not going to get him graduated. And that is really scary. So you gotta, you know, know the little details, and you have to know the big picture of how students start and how you get them through and how they get graduated. And the folks in registrar's office helped me understand the importance of the college catalog because, you know, in advising, you look up to registrars because they're the people who are going to graduate a student. And so you'll ask them all these questions like, well, gosh, is this going to work? Is that going to work? Well, these guys would email me back and say, well, yes, Rafeeq. And the college catalog says, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Okay, well, after however many years of that, I'm like, huh, this college catalog apparently has all the rules in it, and it does. So, you know, just. And listening to people, the stuff like you're good at, You're a social worker. You know how to listen to people.

I'm.

I can listen.

You do. And you listen with a ear for what the student wants and try to get them there as quick as possible. And I think that's something that I learned from you. As, you know, as I used to go and knock on everybody's door, I would come by, you know, your door, and you would make sure that I understood that. And that was a lot of things that I think, like I said today, that makes me a good advisor.

You're a great one.

I need to know now where, since you left us in advising, what is your new role now?

My title is Academic Affairs Project Manager. So that means I manage projects. Some are large, some are small, and that's probably about it.

I think it's a little bit more than that. Like, I know you have a lot of people that email or call you in regards to, like, questions about how to process certain things, right?

Well, yeah. You know, really, Lisa, this job that I'm doing now is something that I have wanted to do for a long time. There were times back in the day in advising that I would have to follow a catalog rule that I really wasn't sure was the best. I would have preferred it to be something different. I wasn't sure it was best for education. And in my role now, I can have a voice in that. So if there's something that I don't think is right, I'm going to talk with the experts and see how we can fix it. So I'm also the provost's designee for student appeals. So if someone has an appeal, like they want to use a course that's not approved for a certain category, the provost's office is the place that can approve that or will not approve it. And so I have to take care of all of those. And one thing that's really important when responding to the student. It's easy to give someone something they want. That's great. I love that. And usually I just say that this is approved, et cetera, et cetera. The tough part is when you have to deny something.

I bet.

So in those, you know, I tell the student how I understand, and I wish it could be different, but perhaps it can't. I'll refer to our catalog rules. I'll link to them, I will quote them, and sometimes I'll tell the student, you know, this isn't a just because rule that we have because we're church. This rule, for example, comes from hlc, our accreditors.

Right.

The people that accredit our college think that an associate degree should be 60 credits. It can't be 59, for example.

Gotcha.

So when you're in a position like mine, just like with yours, when you give bad news, you have to believe in it.

Right.

You don't ever want to feel that you're giving bad news and then crumble inside saying, well, that's not really a good thing we're doing at LCC. No, you want it to make sense. And I'm really happy that I can do that.

Yeah. And I think that that's a good role for you, too, because, you know, you do want to make sure that you give the student the best opportunity. Make sure that if there's any way that you can make their requests happen, you'll try. But also on the other end, looking at like, we at LCC want our degrees to mean something. And so this rule has to be in place for this, that, and the third, or whatever. And so we need those watchdogs, as they say, or people that are gonna make sure that that's what the hlc, they're kind of like the watchdog. And you're making sure that we please the watchdog and be what they request. And so that's a good. That's a good role. And I don't think I could do it. I bet you could. I think that you do an excellent job doing that role. Tell me, what's your favorite thing about your current job?

Really? The student contact is my favorite.

You missed that, huh? Yeah.

It's not the largest part by any means. I have other things to do, but I like getting an email or a request from a student or an advisor. I like getting into the student record, examining everything, trying to. To do everything I can that's legitimate and helpful and worthwhile. And then Responding and telling the student what's what. And when I respond, it's in writing. It tells the student what's what and it tells them how to proceed. And I put that email in their record so that anybody can pull it up later and follow up.

Yes. Spa comment. You are the.

I am the sultan of spa.

That's right. You make sure. But it's definitely is helpful and you need to have that. But I think. And you also do trainings, don't you, for people in how to do spa comments and degree works and just some of our tools and things.

I haven't done degree works in a while because, you know, that's Zach's job. Zach is the degree works expert. But I do do banner training for employees. Not the self service kind of stuff which is so simple, it's just click, click, click. You don't need any training.

Banner?

Well, kind of. But the back office banner. The banner admin pages. Yes. I train in academic history and I train people in spockament and people in departments who need to give prerequisite overrides. I train in that as well.

Right.

And I believe I've done that since 2008. That's when we shifted from Oracle for that three year period back to banner.

Oh, so that was a. You did that in your role as an advising. But they sometimes carry that over into your new position because who else is.

Going to do it?

Or are you?

I mean, because you want somebody who does it. Like there was a time that we had some trainers trained, you would give them the pack and they would train people and that's okay, but they don't actually use it. So they're just reading a pack. Now I want somebody with boots on the ground teaching me.

And it makes a difference too because somebody has that experience. So you can be like this is a little workaround or this is what I found that works well. So yeah, I think that's pretty good. Okay, I have another question. Does your job make you feel happy and fulfilled?

Well, yeah, man, that's why I'm here.

You could be here for the money.

Yeah, the money's okay. They pay us every two weeks. It's actually very kind of them. But no, I really enjoy what I do.

And I think that goes back to looking at the student's experience and making sure that they get what they need and that you really help the employees to make sure that we give the students what they need.

And I, I love getting an email from advisors. You know, I love that there's one on My desk right now, it's open. I hit windows lock. I'm gonna come back and answer it. It's a good one.

Good.

Love it.

So what is the. What's a career highlight you're most proud of?

Well, this is kind of a minor thing, but a couple of years ago, I was the one who spearheaded the consolidation of our general education schema because we have the Michigan Transfer Agreement, which is made for transferring. It's a very wide list of courses. It requires nine courses. Courses in nine categories, very wide list. And we used to have core, which was five courses in five categories, and that may transfer, but may not have to. So we would have students doing an MTA degree and they would take some really worthwhile courses and they'd switch and go to do a core degree. Most of the courses didn't overlap. So you could take a couple courses. Oh, they'd be great for Michigan State, Eastern, Central, Western, whatever, but, oh, they're not on our core. Well, I didn't like that. Logically, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So I worked with advising. I worked with registrars, I worked with the Senate leadership. I worked with Senate, I worked with the provost. I worked with everybody, and I spent a lot of time working on this. And I'm glad to say now that any course that you take from the gigantic Michigan Transfer Agreement, if you change your mind and do a different kind of degree, it's still going to count. And it sounds like kind of a minor thing, but to me, it's big.

It's not.

It brings these two separate things which overlapped a little. It makes them overlap completely. They're all in one great big happy striped tent, and it makes the student's journey easier.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, as an advisor, I think that was a great change because like you said, it could be two or three classes that a student took an MTA that didn't work for core, and then core, they had to take those additional classes. So you saving them, you know, time and money by doing that. And everybody will say that's great because who wants to take additional classes when you don't have to? So I think that that would be a wonderful career highlight. And I know there's a lot of people that would thank you for that. I want to ask you, maybe not necessarily work, or it could be work related. If all your needs were met, time and money were not a factor, what would you spend your time and energy doing?

I think I would do a lot of reading, a lot of writing, because sometimes it's hard to fit writing in, but, you know, it's a thing I do. I would do a lot of walking. I would do a lot of road tripping.

Okay.

And I believe my gal would have me do a lot of outdoor work on the farm.

I think that probably is very, very true. You will be definitely doing a lot of work on the farm. You talked about writing. Tell me a little bit more about your writing. How I know you're an English major and like I said, you love words, and I think you do. I don't know if you think you do, but I think you love words.

I agree. I agree.

So tell me about what got you interested in becoming an author. What are some of the books that you've written?

You know, I guess I've always written. I mean, certainly I've always read. I believe that the first story I wrote, I was probably in. I don't know, I was in elementary school for sure, that I just wrote. And in high school, I was writing stories, sending them to science fiction magazines. They all got bounced. But one of them actually the added. Usually when you get a rejection, it says, dear contribute you. Thank you for your submission, but, you know, we really don't care. So go away and, you know, hopefully we'll hear from you someday. Again, thank you. But this one, she actually typed it up to my name, listed the story and said that she liked it. But. And she listed the but. And that meant a lot to me.

Right.

You know, that was a professional person and, you know, it's kind of close. So I never made it like that. But once I got my first master's done a couple of years later, I was teaching at LCC and I discovered during my teaching of English 122, writing about literature and ideas that sometimes you'd be talking about a story in class and you'd realize, well, wait a minute, here's an idea about this. I wonder if anyone's ever said this before. And so you do some research and you realize, huh, nobody has. So a lot of the early stuff that I wrote came out of things that I was teaching at LCC, which was cool. And I kind of like science fiction. So I'm, you know, medium familiar with the works of people like Ray Bradbury or Robert A. Heinlein, the fellow who wrote Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, for example. So I've written about them. I was asked a number of years ago to edit a collection of chapters on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. And they had this project, but they didn't have a volume editor. So I did this. Now, I always thought that an editor was just the person that fixes the commas and stuff. Actually, though, when you see a book, it says comma, add on the spine. What that means is that's the person who solicits all the authors. So that's the person who stands there electronically in a tuxedo on the street corner with a sign in their hand, hoping that enough people, enough professors and scholars are going to come to the party. And then you have to decide, you know, what is the person planning to do? Is it going to fit this book? And then you are the point person for every question they have, whether it's how long is the thing, does this work? Does that work? Can I do this? When am I going to get paid? You're the point person for all of that. Then you write a bunch of what we call in the business apparatus. There's an introduction. Somebody has to write that. That's the editor. Somebody does the stuff at the back. Often you can do a chapter or two yourself. Someone has to summarize all the chapters in the beginning. Chapter one is about this. Chapter two discusses such and such. Sounds really simple, but, man, it's a lot of work.

No, it doesn't sound simple to me at all, actually. And I never realized the roles that the editor did. I didn't know me either. I just. Like you said, I thought it was grammar.

Yeah.

And so I didn't understand all that. So that's. That's interesting. And you've done that with several different projects.

I've done it three times. I've done it for a collection on Fahrenheit 451, for a collection on the works of Robert A. Heinlein, and then for a collection on the works of Ray Bradbury. You know, not just 451. And each one of these is for a company called Salem Press, which is part of a larger organization called Gray House, which is part of a venture, very large organization called ebsco. And those are the people who run the library databases that we subscribe to.

Oh, really?

It is a huge, huge corporation.

Wow.

Yeah. And when I. But I did attend to the commas as well. So I was the person to make sure that all the grammar was correct, to make sure that none of the style was too crazy. And at one point, my. My series editor, as I was submitting everything, she said, wow, either these people are all really great writers or you've really gone over this carefully. And I'm like, well, yeah, I'm not gonna give you crap.

Right. It's my job.

It's my job.

I get it. So that's more of the nonfiction aspect of your writing. What about the fiction? Have you wrote any fiction?

I did do a book in 2014, and back in the day, when I was working on it, you and I were talking about it, like, every couple of days. I'd bring in some ideas, and we'd go back and forth.

I know. I was excited about that. Like, I really was a part of it.

Yeah, you really were. That novel's called Student Body. It's about a graduate student who has a little fling with an ex student, which is not supposed to be done.

Exactly.

Married. And, you know, if this comes out, it's going to look really bad, potentially career killing. And so there's. There's politics, there's murder, there's sexuality, there's family, there's duty. It's. It's a very interior novel. You know, it's not a bunch of glass breaking and guns drawn.

Yeah.

You know, car crashes. It's all in your head. You know, I liked it a great deal. It got some play on WKAR and on the lsj, and, you know, I liked it. There were some good reviews. It sold. It sold some copies, and you can.

Still get it through.

It's on Amazon. Student Body. And most recently, my partner, Martine Rife, who's a English professor, had a sabbatical, and she was working on the concept of memoir. Now, I never knew the difference between memoir and autobiography, but, you know, she told me, an autobiography is your entire life. A memoir is focused on part of your life.

Okay.

So she did this really interesting memoir on how her mother worked at a community college as a secretary and how that informed Martine's life. And she did a bunch of apparatus work, a bunch of historical work. And so the point of the sabbatical was to work this into teaching, to help students do this type of stuff. So I thought, wow, well, I'm a dad. Maybe I could do a memoir on dadhood. So I did that, and that was fun for me. And actually, it was about the size of Fahrenheit 451 and had a bunch of family pictures in it. I self published that on Amazon also. So that was back in 2020. And then I took this course called Cultural Portraits by this professor named Rife. And I got the idea in class one day to do a book on family humor. So I did a book of eight generations of. Of humor in my family.

Oh, wow.

And to me, it was interesting. Now the back, the back blurb says, abandon all taste, ye who enter here. So if you look on Amazon, you look up my name and you'll see. Have you ever been to an Irishman shanty? Midwestern family's humor across eight generations. When you use the look inside function, if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the index. And if you look through that index, you will decide whether it's appropriate for you to read that book or not.

Right. Okay. You're giving them a little warning that makes me want to read it. Now. I'm like, okay, I'm about to go look that up. I think that that was one of the fun part of working, coming to work. You know, we work, but we got a chance to. I felt like, okay, I'm really, I'm an author's assistant. I'm really doing a great service here with bouncing ideas. But yeah, it just showed me about the process of writing and I learned a lot about it. So, Rafeeq, do you consider yourself an introvert or extrovert?

Well, I think I'm an introvert, actually.

You do?

Yeah. I mean, I'm extroverted with my friends, but you know how a lot of people have a bajillion friends or they walk into a party and they're gonna greet all these people they don't know and hey, how are you? Tell me. I'm not really that kind of person. I'm a little more reserved.

No, I can get that too. Because I think, like, I think I have traits of introvertness. Right. I need a break. I don't need. I can't be around people all the time. I need to woo sa and go in my own quiet place and, and just take a deep breath and, you know. Yeah, I get that. So I could see that happening. And what are some of your hobbies? I know writing. What's something else?

Oh, yeah, writing and reading. I do like to walk. I do like to take road trips. I like to just sometimes drive around on the weekend and, you know, go see stuff, get an ice cream or something. And I. I'm becoming a little more. A little more outdoorsy in terms of the outdoor work.

Oh, okay.

So last weekend I put up, you know, 150ft of fence which included pounding 9T posts by hand, hand crimping all the wire and hanging a couple of gates, and blah, blah, blah.

See, that's work to me. It kind of sounds like you Enjoy doing that though. Like seeing something completed or.

It is neat. I hung these pair of eight foot gates on the driveway and they looked pretty good. And then one was running downhill just a teeny bit. So I was able to tweak it back up and I'm like, man, that looks good.

Yeah. Yeah. Your details go back to that. Okay, well, Rafeeq, we're going to get ready to end it shortly, but I wanted to ask you one more question. And I like this one. I don't know, I may start asking it to everybody, but what life lessons have you had to learn the hard way?

That's a good one. And that's the thing we say in my family, the hard way. Like you're walking around. Oh, I almost found that nail. The hard way, right. Walking around in your bare feet. Part of it's listening, part of it's looking at the whole context. You know, don't just, you see one thing that catches your eye in a problem, don't just jump in and grab that. Look at the whole context. There are other things going on. You got to get the whole picture. So I think that's, I think that's the thing for me. Don't rush in too fast. Make sure you got the whole picture.

I think that right there is definitely a good way to end this interview. Rafeeq, I want to thank you for taking time to come on who's at Star. Today we learned about what your role is at Academic affairs and we also had an opportunity to look at the things that you've done in your writing and how you trained great advisors and you were a great advisor yourself. So again, thank you for coming and audience, we look forward to having you come back to find out next week Who's That Star? You've been listening to Who's That Star? I'm Lisa A. And you can listen to this episode of Who's That Star? and other shows from LCC Connect anytime online at LCCconnect.org. Thank you for listening. Catch me next time to find out Who's That Star.