Mark McDermott

For Mark McDermott '95, high school teaching has been a perfect way to combine two loves -- science and working with young people. McDermott currently teaches general chemistry, applied biology, and chemistry at West High School in Iowa City. He also coached girls' basketball for several years.

"It is always nice to see kids develop as the year goes on," he says, "both academically and in other areas. I always enjoy teaching biology and chemistry in back-to-back years because I get to see kids develop over the course of two years."

McDermott is now halfway through a doctoral program in science education at the University of Iowa. He hopes to teach science education at the college level "to help prospective teachers develop their skills."

He says he especially valued the education faculty at Cornell, which at the time consisted of Gayle Luck and Dick Peters. And he appreciated Cornell's "small classes which allowed for lots of discussion and dialogue and also allowed us to explore issues relevant to us."

"I also felt like the way education courses were taught gave us a broad view of education and did not try to oversimplify the profession," he says. "I received an education that gave me an appropriate amount of pedagogical knowledge for teaching science, along with a 'big picture' idea of what education should be all about."