I AM UAA: Mike McCormick

Assistant Director of Student Activities
M.Ed. '85
Hometown: Haverhill, MA, and Eagle River, AK
Fun Fact: Currently teaching a course on Bob Dylan for UAA's Honors College, and has two poetry chapbooks published.

The year is 1971. Mike McCormick is at the University of Massachusetts, a freshman with a passion for blues music and related writing credits to his name from his high school newspaper and a blues music magazine he co-founded.

"When I went to U-Mass," he explains, "on weekends I would hitchhike or beg a ride to Boston, 100 miles east, to see blues music acts. What I quickly realized was that most of those acts came from Chicago, and they went right by the exit to U-Mass. So, I wondered why they didn't just play there."

Always a self-starter, he approached the blues music host at the campus' radio station with the idea of starting a blues music club so they could get concerts on campus.

"That's how I started doing concert promotions," he says. "And the roots for being here [at UAA] were set back there. I got more from that club than any single classroom; that experience was the single most important thing I got out of college. As an employee now, that experience gives me an insight on how valuable what we do in UAA Student Affairs is for students."

 

Granted, Mike's path from college blues music club to assistant director of student activities at UAA wasn't a straight line. In between was a career in teaching and the beginning of his own concert promotion business.

Mike entered college at U-Mass with a passion for both teaching and nature. He is a first-generation high school and college graduate in his family of two younger brothers, embracing the idea of college at a very young age.

"On the first day of school in first grade," he says, "the nuns at my Catholic school asked us to draw. I drew an elephant, and the nun declared I was going to go to the Massachusetts College of Art. That was the first time I heard the word 'college,' and it stuck in my head."

By fourth grade, the nuns would send him from class to class to talk about various reports he'd write. "I loved being in front of a class," he says.

Despite not finishing high school themselves, his parents taught him the value of reading and created opportunities for him to connect with the outdoors, taking the family camping in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and his dad regaling them with stories of when we was a cook in the mining camps of Nome, Alaska.

He started his college career as a forestry major, and that same year started the blues club. As much as the club taught Mike innumerable real-world skills, it ended up derailing his academics just a tad. After three semesters he was on academic probation and decided to take a break at the community college, taking only classes that intrigued him: art, philosophy and poetry. There, he made the dean's list, and after another three semesters decided it was time to go back to U-Mass to pursue a different major-environmental education-which fit Mike's love of both nature and education.

Immediately upon graduation, Mike felt the pull north, to experience some of what his dad did living in Alaska. That summer, he spent cooking for Mt. McKinley Village in Denali National Park. Immediately following that he began his teaching career with the Anchorage School District (ASD).

"I went back to school at UAA right away during my first year of teaching," Mike says. "I earned a master's degree in education with an administrative credential. My takeaway was that if I had gotten my first degree from UAA instead of U-Mass, I would have started in my teaching profession five years ahead of where I was. The education I got at UAA was far superior to what I got at U-Mass."

Mike racked up a successful 26 years as a teacher at seven or eight different elementary schools with ASD, working as principal for two years at Chugiak Elementary and logging a few years in Juneau in the mid-'80s as well. It was an already full career by many standards. Even so, he couldn't help his love for blues music from creeping back into his routine.

"When I first came to Anchorage, there was nobody writing about popular music for the newspapers," he says. "B.B. King was coming to Anchorage in 1980, so I contacted the Anchorage Daily News with a feature article I wrote, previewing King's arrival. Well, they didn't want to use that, but they did ask if I wanted to review the concert. So I became a concert reviewer for them, and later a columnist (one focused on music and nightlife and the other a nature column called 'The Weekend Naturalist,' for eight years, a second job to teaching."

From there, Mike's knack for concert promotions took hold again as well. After arranging a few successful fundraisers with artists already performing concerts in the state, people started to contact him. As a result, he and his wife, Katherine Spangler, officially started his promotion business, Whistling Swan Productions, in 1994. Since then, Whistling Swan has organized over 500 concerts with over 300 different artists, "and still counting."

Loving teaching, but knowing he wanted to try something new, Mike started peeking at the jobs classifieds in 2004. A year later he saw a UAA student activities coordinator job announcement and decided to go for it.

"A lot of what was in the job description I was doing already," he says. "Booking artists, putting on events, working with students-I said to myself, 'I know how to do this.' And I remembered what it was like when I was back at U-Mass, and thought it would be really fun to work at a university."

Now as assistant director of student activities, Mike works with three staff members and up to 25 students to put on 100-150 shows and events at UAA each year.

"The thing we're really interested in with these 20 to 25 students is helping them develop leadership skills," Mike says. "This is a laboratory for them to develop their skills by running events from start to finish. It's so cool the job I have here, getting to work with these students."

And so he's come full circle while living a mighty full life. His son just graduated from the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), his daughter is at Evergreen College in Washington and his wife is still immersed in her career as a distance educator for UAS. He also recently received the Governor's Arts and Humanities Business Leadership Award for his work at Whistling Swan Productions. He is a man who has always followed his passions, and it doesn't appear he's going to stop anytime soon.