Aside from being a member of the East Lansing City Council, Kevin Beard spends about 10 hours each week on MSU's campus — as a student.
Beard, 51, is enrolled in the lifelong education program and has applied to graduate school in the School of Labor and Industrial Relations. He hopes to graduate with his master's degree in human resource management sometime in 2009.
"I retired from (General Motors Corp.) the first of the year, and I'm trying to acquire additional credentials here so I can be marketable for a second career, as many people do these days," Beard said.
East Lansing Mayor Sam Singh said Beard's involvement at MSU is a good perspective for a council member to have.
"It's a great opportunity to have somebody who is at Michigan State University who can get the pulse of the faculty and the students that he is interacting with," Singh said. "I think that will help us as a council have a better understanding as to what are some of the other issues facing East Lansing and Michigan State."
And this isn't Beard's first experience at MSU. The Grand Ledge native did his undergraduate work at MSU, graduating in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in English.
"It's close to me; I think to have one of the best schools in the country in your backyard is a big plus," he said. "It may seem like you're too close to home or not exotic enough, but I think the kinds of things you are exposed to as a student on a Big Ten campus — whether at graduate or undergraduate level — it really helps with your world view."
While currently enrolled in two classes, one on employment law and another on organizational behavior, Beard also is a professor's aide, working about 12 hours a week coordinating programs and working with labor unions. Beard said he also spends about 12 hours a week in his role as city council member.
At this point in time, school occupies about 20 hours of his time each week — including study time and time spent writing papers in the business library.
"(There's) tons of reading, and my old brain is out of practice being academic," he said.
However, one of the greatest benefits he has found at MSU has been the lifelong education program because it has allowed him to take classes in his program before being accepted, he said.
"I think that's one of the great options that people have, because anything you're interested in or curious about, you can enroll as lifelong ed, right shoulder to shoulder with other college students," Beard said. "It tends to keep you sharp, keep you young and keep you informed of what's going on."
Community Student Liaison Rachelle Woodbury said Beard has had good ideas about communicating with the current generation of college students, possibly stemming from his campus experience.
"He had some great ideas about how we could kind of advertise East Lansing with podcasts and things like that," she said. "I think Kevin is doing a great thing going back to school.
"When people go back to school and start a second career, I think that's brave."
For Beard, the MSU experience has been anything but average.
He is a student and council member, but when he began his undergraduate work, he was working at GM and raising a family.
"I really did not have much time to spend on campus, and I really did not get to socialize much outside of the classroom. Layer on that I was a bit older than your average undergrad, and I pretty much just kept to myself and focused on getting things done," he wrote in an e-mail.
He said some of his best memories were the years he spent with his family at Spartan Village, a complex of university-owned apartments.
"It was just incredible that I was able to have my children in that diverse community," Beard said. "We had people from the Philippines and Iceland. And I can't even tell you, when my children are out on a daily basis playing with kids from literally all over the world."
