You never know what kind of difference it's going to make when you speak to a student or you don't know what kind of impact that's gonna have might be way down the road. But you don't know no
one never knows what a new experience will do to change our direction or provide new insight. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're chatting with the recipient of the Heartland Community College Distinguished Alumni Award. The award is given annually to individuals who demonstrate exceptional achievement in their profession and make a positive impact on their community. awardees are selected from nominations by fellow Heartland alumni, faculty, staff, students and community members. The 2021 distinguished alumni honoree couldn't have expected such an honor as a student, even being a student was something of which he was skeptical at the time.
My name is Justin record, and I'm an associate professor of Animal Science at Illinois State University.
You got your academic start at Heartland Community College? Yep. Now, when you came to Heartland, like a lot of young people, did you have your whole plan set out in front of you? Or did you know what you wanted to do? Or were you kind of trying to figure it out?
You want the honest response?
That's always the best?
The honest answer is I came to Heartland Community College so that my folks would quit telling me I needed to go to college. And I planned on putting in my time there for as long as it took to prove that point. And then I was gonna move on.
Well, it sounds like you may be changed slightly your path, since you've become an academic. What did you want to do? What were you going to put in your time to do and then what do you have in mind when you first came to Heartland
I grew up on a farm, primarily a beef cattle farm and my family is involved in the grain elevator, construction and maintenance industry. And that's, that's all I ever wanted to do. And so, when I was at school, when I when I wasn't in class, I was employed doing that, that that was my that was my goal, came to Heartland because that was a halfway point between a four year school that was maybe I was pointing in that direction and my lack of desire to go to college at all. At that time, there was a program in place between heartland and Illinois State where you could take the 100 level courses in the ag department as a Heartland student, and that was my introduction to to ISU. But when I first started at Heartland and and came up with the idea of maybe school wasn't that bad of a thing. I was a lot more interested in sociology primarily, and then also really liked the idea of English literature. Ag was never really a thought at all.
You said you'd kind of weren't interested in going to college? Were you just done with school or not that interested in school? Or did you just think it's not going to offer that much else to me? Or both? Maybe
I'd say a combination. I'd say a combination. I just really wasn't, didn't really see the point, I guess at the time. So
Well, you said the things that you liked were sociology and English literature. What kind of made those things engage with your brain that that you became interested in those once you started at Heartland. I always
like reading. I like reading books. I like to read what I thought were the classics. And always like people and found people and culture. Just kind of societal norms, things like that to be pretty intriguing. But I didn't really know I had no idea what sociology was. And then I took I spent a long time ago, I guess, Introduction to Sociology with Doug Tao, who's a faculty member at Heartland and then that really started to I don't know, a lot of things made more sense, or they were just, they were just interesting to me, I guess.
So what was it about Doug's class that kind of caught your interest? Was there any particular point where you said, Okay, this is something that I'm not just enduring, but I'm actually interested in?
Not necessarily, I don't recall an exact moment. I recall a few different quotes. But I think it was just more of the environment. He was just he was very nice and very unassuming, very, at least from my perspective, as a student who obviously did not want to be there was very welcoming to whoever walks through the door. And I've had a few friends that also had similar experiences in that regard. Just made it more enjoyable, right? You could you could talk about, you could relate things to you and your own life and things like that. It wasn't, it wasn't like, let's just show up here and memorize a bunch of stuff and then move on kind of thing.
What got you from that introductory period of college into going towards what you do now with animal science with pursuing multiple advanced degrees. And now teaching so what flipped that switch and got you connected to that discipline.
And my thing my second year as a student at Heartland, I had taken a few classes in the agriculture department at Illinois State. And I came about those because again, in my effort to get out of school quickly, I thought, Well, why would I challenge myself when I can just take the courses that were things I was the most familiar with. That'll be simple enough, and then we'll move on, right? Or at least that's what I thought at the time when I decided to transfer to ISU to complete a four year degree and when I was at ISU again, didn't really intend to stick around and I met a faculty member. His name was Brian Wiegand. He was an animal science faculty member here in the early 2000s. And kind of similar to my experience with Doug at Heartland. It's just very, it's funny who you connect with, right? He was pretty influential in my finishing my bachelor's degree. We stayed connected, he was looking back on it now pretty close in age to me fresh out of fresh out of school itself. And we stayed connected. I had left school after my bachelor's and I went to work, but I stayed connected with Dr. Wiegand. A couple years went by and had we talked a lot about a master's degree. And I decided, you know, what if I if I had a master's degree, I might be able to teach and then I could farming or doing what I was doing for fun. So I agreed to come to ISU for a master's. And about halfway through Dr. Wigan accepted a position at his alma mater, which was the University of Missouri. And so halfway through my master's degree, I would tell him that he abandoned me and he went to Mizzou, and when he got to Mizzou, he helped me finish my masters, and he needed help. And I think by that point, I was just kind of with him wherever he was going to go, I think I would consider myself to be a fairly loyal person in that regard. So I continued on in academia, because of him, not because of academia itself. That makes any sense?
Well, that's pretty interesting. So now you have your own students. And you mentioned that if you were going to pursue a degree beyond a bachelor's, you might want to just keep going. So you could teach was teaching something that you found yourself gravitating towards? And what's your approach? Seeing is there, obviously, there were some strong impressions that some folks made upon you as a student? So how does that affected how you think about teaching,
I mentioned that my family was involved in the commercial grain elevator construction world. And when I went to work for my dad, in that business, you know, you would get assigned to work on different crews, or with different forms and things like that. I found it to be a struggle sometimes to get people to explain things to you, even if you wanted to learn. And I probably learned more in my experience working in that regard than I ever did in school in terms of people and how they interact and how you can you try to read the room and figure out who's engaged, who's not. And I always told myself that I was going to not hold on to the information that I do, right, you're going to try to pass that along and not make someone struggle to try to find that out those who want to. And I think I found that same thing certainly found that same thing. And Dr. Wiegand was more of not just your instructor, right, but you're looking at it from a mentor perspective. And I think that those experiences have certainly helped me a lot. As an instructor. Sometimes I think it's easier for me to relate to the students that don't necessarily either want to be there not sure why they're there. Because a lot of people, in my experience in academia, maybe they maybe they always wanted to be in academia, or maybe they always wanted to go down a certain path and mine went all over. And so have just tried to use those experiences and put them towards mine. And I've been pretty fortunate to have some outstanding students over the last few years.
So tell me a little bit about your research and what some of the stuff that you're doing now,
really, I've been pretty fortunate in that my research has always been, there's not a really hard line for me between my personal life and my life in academia in terms of teaching and research, right. So the things that I teach about are the things that I have always done at home. So livestock production, for example, and many of our ideas about research or potential research projects come from personal experiences. And so my PhD is in animal science with an emphasis in fresh meat science. So we look at things like how does nutrition or what we feed animals change the quality of the final product. And so maybe we're trying to make a better pork chop or a better steak or a better burger or whatever the case may be. But I've always tried to pare what's important to the producer or the meat processor with something that I I can maybe try to address for them. So we did, I've done quite a bit of research looking at brewers grains, for example, we did a few years worth of work with distilled brewery here normal and looking at feeding their spent grain following the production of beer. And I mean, that's trying to develop a more sustainable system that benefits everyone involved, right? So how can we include this product that is a waste in a manner that can be cost effective for producers? And that how does that influence the product from someone who goes to the store and buys it to take it home and have a meal, your research program adds your teaching program, which adds to your personal life, and then it cycles back around, right? And they all kind of feed off of one another. And everybody can talk about food, right? We might all come at it from different angles, but I find that to be pretty enjoyable. Just doesn't matter if you eat meat, don't eat me don't raise livestock. Do you raise livestock, everybody can talk about food?
Are you still involved in farming on a personal level with your family business?
Yep. So we still raise cows. My wife and I also raised cows, pigs, chickens. No, I've never stopped doing that. I always thought it it was just something that I just couldn't let go of, I guess. And I think it has helped helped me in the classroom. I think it's helped me relate to some students, because I was doing at home what they're doing at home kind of thing.
If you were to be able to look back at yourself, as somebody that was just at any of those stages, just wanting to get through school and move on. What do you think that you would tell you then? You know, because it seems to me that the more I talk to you, the more I think I don't know that your attitude necessarily changed. You just figured out the best way to apply what was in front of you and not completely discount ideas? Because it seems to me like you're kind of doing what you always said you wanted to do. It just turned out that maybe a school had a little bit more to do with it.
And it's funny how that it's funny how that works out. I don't know, I joke sometimes the 19 year old knee does not care for the me that I've become. But I don't really think that I have changed a lot. Just your perspective changes. I know when I met when I met Dr. Wiegand at ISU, I mean, he introduced me to things that I never even never even dreamed to be imaginable, I guess. And so I would probably my focus would be less on what I would tell the me back then, as it would be what I would tell instructors, right? It's like you never know, you never know what kind of difference it's going to make when you speak to a student or when you're you walk into Doug gallons class and he was nice. And you don't you don't know what kind of impact that's gonna have might be way down the road. But you don't you don't know in
that moment, this kind of comes full circle with Heartland naming you Distinguished Alumnus this year. I wondered if you know, instead of giving any advice, as I say, maybe to students, maybe we should go back and talk a little bit about, you know, maybe what would you say to some instructors that are just starting other than what you just said about? You never know what what should they look for in some students? Because I gotta tell you, it has to be a little disheartening sometimes to look out at a class that maybe is not fully engaged. So what would you tell them? How do you get past that? How do you help make connections
don't get, don't get too discouraged? If you if you can't be you don't have a 100% of the crowd engaged 100% of the time, and just have to read them. I guess some of the students that I'm the most proud of that I have had the pleasure to work with. I mean, they weren't necessarily sure why they wanted to be there. Don't be don't be afraid or concern if actually, that's funny, that gal told me this. But don't don't make the mistake of thinking that the students in your room will be the exact same student that you will be, which is certainly true. Just remember that everybody's sitting in the room for a different reason. And try at least to meet them where you where they are. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But when it works, it's pretty, pretty cool thing so
well Justin, thanks so much for joining us today. Congratulations on the honor and congratulations on the career that's gotten you to that point where people are pointing to you and saying listen, this is somebody we want to recognize as having come through heartland and moved on to some impressive accomplishments throughout his career so far.
Well, I appreciate it. Definitely quite the honor and a pretty big shock. So I can assure you that
Justin record is an associate professor of Animal Science with a teaching and research appointment at Illinois State University. He teaches a variety of Animal Science and food industry courses, and his research program focuses on improving livestock production. In food animal industries, he was honored with the 2021 Heartland Community College Distinguished Alumni Award. If you'd like to hear interesting stories about other distinguished alumni, or are just interested in interesting research history or more, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, audiobooks, Spotify, or wherever you found this episode. Thanks for listening
