Miguel Reid (B.A. 1998, M.A. 2000) Associate Professor Riverside Community College
Miguel Reid (B.A. 1998, M.A. 2000)
Associate Professor
Riverside Community College
For the past 16 years Miguel Reid has been a tenure-line Associate Professor of English and English as a Second Language (ESL) at Riverside Community College (RCC).
It wasn’t a direct path for Miguel between completing his master’s degree in English at CSUSB and landing a tenure-track community college teaching position. For several years, he criss-crossed the SoCal freeways as an adjunct (i.e., part-time) teacher at various colleges simultaneously. He spent a lot of his day commuting but gladly accepted this inconvenience because he “knew that it was an investment.” And the investment paid off. These early teaching years allowed Miguel to establish an impressive breadth of classroom experience.
After five years of adjunct teaching, Miguel was hired by RCC as a full-time Associate Professor of English and ESL. At RCC, he teaches first-year composition and ESL classes on writing, grammar, reading and oral communication. His favorite course is an elective ESL pronunciation class where he admires how motivated his students are to engage with the material. Miguel’s administrative duties include the on-going development of the department’s curriculum. He most recently partnered with RCC’s Applied Technology Department to design a new ESL course that addresses the specific English literacy needs of auto mechanic students.
Miguel is proudest of his work that combines his teaching and mentoring of RCC’s students. In 2011, he helped establish The Umoja Project that specifically supports the retention and degree completion of African-American students. As Miguel comments, the overall goal is for African-American students to feel integral to the college community. As part of this project, he has developed English classes with a hip-hop theme.The Ujima Project has now partnered with the California statewide organization Umoja which shares Ujima’s objectives but allows for networking across college campuses in California.
Reflecting back on his time at CSUSB, Miguel recalls “something that changed me is that my professors were very supportive, very informative, and they cared.” Miguel adds that the faculty support readily available at CSUSB is rare and that many of his colleagues did not have similar experiences in their degree programs. The CSUSB English faculty were instrumental in kick starting Miguel’s teaching career. While Miguel was still a graduate student, for example, a faculty member encouraged him to apply to teach in the English Language Program at CSUSB’s College of Extended & Global Education. These formative experiences instilled in Miguel the importance of reaching out to his social network for advice and support. As he reflects, “If you try to go it alone, there’s a lot of information out there [that] you will miss.”
Miguel earned his B.A. in English (Creative Writing Track) in 1998 and his M.A. in English Composition (TESL Concentration) in 2000. He won the English Department’s distinguished 2001 Kellie Rayburn Outstanding Thesis Award for his thesis on Men’s Gossip. Miguel has also been recognized with several teaching and advising awards since he joined RCC. And in 2017, he began a PhD program in Adult Education.
Miguel remembers that he didn’t always experience academic success or confidence. In fact, there was a time he wasn’t sure that he would graduate high school. It wasn’t until he made the conscious decision not “to go it alone” and to seek out resources on campus, such as tutoring, that things turned around for him. Miguel sees his younger self in his students and wants to provide them the support that he needed and received. He encourages all of us to continue persevering in our goals in spite of challenges. These challenges can be made less intimidating when we decide not to go it alone.