Faculty Honor
Project Access Fellow
By Anders Stachelek
At the start of this semester, I was selected to participate in the twelfth cohort of Project ACCCESS that is sponsored by AMATYC. Participants were selected not only based on their academic achievements and persuasive personal statements, but also on the support offered by the potential participants community college. For this reason, this award is not just an honor for me, but also serves as yet another testament to the strength of our community here at Hostos Community College.
For anyone who has not heard of AMATYC before the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges has been in existence beginning in 1974. Since its inception this organization has held annual conferences to bring together community college mathematics faculty from across the nation to compare strategies, share research findings, and discover new technology and resources. Last year, the 40th annual conference held in Nashville, Tennessee had a significant impact on me, not only in motivating me to devote even more time to reassessing and redeveloping my teaching practices, but also enabling me to reaffirm my research focus and teaching pedagogy. It also reinforced my desire to become more involved with AMATYC.
This desire led me to my participation in Project ACCCESS (Advancing Community College Careers: Education, Scholarship, and Service). This project was created in 2004 to support early career faculty at two-year colleges and continues to do so today. As part of this project, I will be attending both of AMATYC’s annual conferences, one to be held in New Orleans this year and the other to be held in Denver in 2016. My participation in this project provides me the opportunity to quickly grow in my career during the next two consecutive years, both through what the project provides and through what I (hope to) bring to this project.
This project also enables me to share the work we do in mathematics here at Hostos Community College at a national level. I am very honored to have been selected and cannot wait to participate in this project starting this November in New Orleans.