Purdue News
Purdue News
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June 2, 2000
A Purdue top teacher left career behind for the classroomWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- An award-winning Purdue University professor in the School of Agriculture had no teaching experience before he packed up his family and moved across the country to join the Purdue faculty. It was a choice Robert Sovinski made with much doubt and trepidation, but years, and a few teaching awards later, he figures it was the right decision.
Sovinski, an associate professor of horticulture, says the award is quite an honor for a teacher who's career had difficulty getting off the ground. In 1992, Sovinski had been a successful architect in New York City for 15 years. The plan was to get some practical experience and then get into teaching. It's what he always wanted to do, but his career kept getting in the way. Then a Purdue alumni newsletter informed Sovinski, who earned his bachelor's degree in landscape architecture in 1975, that his alma mater was looking for a landscape architect teacher, and did anybody out there have any suggestions? "Sure. How about me?" was Sovinski's reply. "Opportunities come by, you evaluate them and you hope you take the good ones and ignore the bad ones," Sovinski says. He uprooted his family, bought a few things he never needed in New York, like a car and a lawn mower, and relocated to Indiana. "I wanted to do some research, to push the profession forward," Sovinski says. "What better environment could one be in than at a university where your administration and your peers are supportive of that? At Purdue, they not only permit you to be involved in research, they encourage it. The development of new knowledge and new ideas, that's where I wanted to be. "The Murphy Award is validation of the decision to leave private practice, change lifestyles, haul the family halfway across the country and come back to Purdue and teach. It's all worked out for the best." In retrospect Sovinski is quite confident of his career choices, but he wasn't always so sure he wanted to be in a classroom in front of a group of students. "I was extremely nervous about the teaching part of the job. I was not an experienced public speaker," Sovinski admits. But it didn't take him long to get over his initial fear. "My nervousness went away in the first five minutes of my first class. Having people actually sitting and listening to what I was saying, I thought, 'This is an awesome responsibility.' I couldn't get enough of it." It is one of Sovinski's innovative teaching techniques that earned him another teaching award this past year, the Class of 1922 Helping Students Learn Award. The award recognizes those who develop innovative advancements in teaching to improve the educational experiences of Purdue students. The virtual office project he teaches is part of the department's professional practice course. In a computer simulation exercise, students form professional design partnerships. Each week, student teams allocate funds toward the pursuit of new work, capital improvements of their offices and personnel changes. Sovinski reviews all submitted proposals and awards jobs based on qualifications, track record and mission statements, giving students valuable insights into the priorities and types of decisions facing their future employers and supervisors. Implementation of the program, run concurrently online this past semester on the West Lafayette campus and at a university in Poland, helped earn Sovinski the additional $3,750 cash prize.
Writer: Tom Campbell, (765) 494-8084
Source: Robert Sovinski, (765) 494-1341 PHOTO CAPTION: Robert Sovinski, associate professor of horticulture, was recently named one of five Purdue winners of the Murphy Award, which honors the top teachers on the West Lafayette campus. (Purdue News Service Photo by Nick Judy) A publication-quality photograph is available at the News Service Web site and at the ftp site. Photo ID: Sovinski.Murphy Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
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