Rick Cassar

Conduct individual and group counseling within the General Counseling Department. Build rapport, help new students to feel that they belong in college, consider personal and family dynamics while helping them to explore career options and develop education plans.

Work with continuing students through personal and academic issues to encourage them to stay in school throughout the semester and to stay on track to return each semester in order to earn certificates, degrees and to transfer.

Serve as a mentor to new adjuncts and contract counselors and serve as a friendly advisor to the department chair. All done through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Worked in General Counseling, EOPS, and Dreamers. Served on the Academic Senate Exec for 4 years and served on and off as Department Chair for 14 of my 21 years at Miramar.

My favorite part of the job was always Counseling but I found myself being pulled in to leadership roles.

While serving as Chair, I still made time to see multiple students every day while juggling chair duties such as scheduling, representing the department in various meetings and dealing with student-counselor as well as counselor-counselor issues.

Spent the 1998-1999 academic year as the first ever CalWorks Counselor at SD City College. There, I served as a student advocate to fight for their rights with caseworkers who, at the time, we more work oriented than college oriented. The CalWorks is much more student friendly now.

Performed all the duties of a community college counselor including individual and group counseling, conducting student orientation and education planning sessions, veterans counseling and conducting various workshops.

I was hired as a tenure track general counselor in 1988 after SDCCD had gone 10 years without hiring full time counselors. At the time, California Community Colleges were tasked with developing student services around a new matriculation mandate that included, among other things, assessment, orientation and education planning. I was hired and then tasked with developing a plan for new student orientation. I developed a workshop that grew into a 1 unit, then 2 unit and finally, a 3 unit Student Success class. Leading a team of adjunct counselors, we created the first College Success class in the SDCCD. This class grew to 30 sections enrolling as many as 1000 students each year at SD City College before I left to help with chair duties at Miramar in 1999.

I taught Student Success and Career Planning both on campus and online from 1988 to 2000.

Performed all the duties of an adjunct counselor in General Counseling

I worked for 2 years as a tenure track counselor at Barstow College in order to be best prepared for a tenure track position in the future at SD City College.

I counseled students and taugt a class entitled "College Orientation" which I used as a base to develop the College Success course that I was hired to develop at SD City College.