Adult Student Life Club Meets the President

On Nov. 5, PVCC President Frank Friedman met with members of the Adult Student Life Club (ASL) to discuss, well, anything they wanted.

“Nothing is off limits,” said Denise McClanahan, PVCC’s Outreach Manager, as she introduced Friedman. McClanahan is the staff advisor for the ASL Club and she arranged the Q&A for adult students to have the opportunity to address issues that concern them and make recommendations.

Instead of addressing the students standing up, Friedman pulled up a chair and invited the students to have a conversation with him. He wore a friendly smile as he relaxed into his chair and asked everyone to introduce themselves. Every student there was over the age of 25 and many of them had full-time jobs and children. As part of their introductions, they mentioned their fields of study and goals for life after PVCC.

The students brought up several topics including the nursing program, course evaluations and online classes. There was even a complaint that there is nowhere on campus to buy aspirin or Band-Aids. Friedman addressed each concern with practical suggestions and explanations. Whenever recommendations were made, he welcomed them and said they were good ideas. “We want to be the best we can and we’re always searching for ideas to be better,” Friedman said.

Most of the members present that evening had been out of school for many years before attending PVCC.  The club caters to students over the age of 25 and offers them opportunities to interact with others who can relate to their situation. According to McClanahan, the ASL Club is “student driven.” She says that she tries to arrange meetings that the students will enjoy and that she always wants to know what the students want to do. The club was launched in June of this year, and the Nov. 5 meeting was its sixth one.

The student contact for the ASL Club, Gina Edwards, said “For a community college with so many adults in the program, [McClanahan] has put together so many awesome programs….She is very open to ideas.”

“I really wanted to start this club … when I first started [at PVCC], but I had to wait until I became the manager, so it came to fruition in June,” McClanahan explained. “It’s been a really good way to add kind of a … benefit value for the adults that are coming to school here; they really need a place to connect. So that was the whole point of this club.”

Because they are students who also have their own families and full-time jobs, it is rare for all the members to meet at once; only eight were able to attend that evening. McClanahan said, “We’ve had over 50 people come here at least one time.” Students in the ASL Club have already enjoyed a social, a presentation from Todd Parks about time management and a presentation from Bill Pratt about financial planning.

The Adult Student Life Club has a unique schedule that works around the availability of its members to attend. McClanahan said that the next meeting will not be until Jan. 2016 because many of the students will be focusing their time on final exams. The club usually meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.