By Chelsea Zizzi
Bob Pohlad has traveled all around the world and experienced the beauty of every place he visited. He loves traveling and learning new perspectives from each place he visits, even if he has already traveled there before. Eventually, Ferrum College is where he decided to return to see the world through a different lens.
(Pohlad on Ferrum College campus. Photo by Chelsea Zizzi.)
Pohlad, who has a doctorate in plant pathology, began working at Ferrum College in 1978. He spent the next 41 years working as a biology professor, along with his wife Carolyn Thomas, who has a doctorate in environmental engineering and joined Ferrum in 1979. Pohlad and Thomas built a family at Ferrum among the faculty and the students. The diversity that Ferrum offered not only helped Pohlad learn from the people around him, but he and his wife became counselors to struggling students and helped them grow as individuals.
(Pohlad with his wife Carolyn Thomas. Photo courtesy of Ferrum College.)
“The big thing in life is not the degree behind the name, the real thing is if you are a real person,” Pohlad said. “Being in this community of people and developing this strong feeling of family, that's just special and it taught us the importance of family, so when we raised our boys our students were part of their family, and that's why we stayed all those years,” Pohlad continued.
Pohlad finds himself and Thomas deep-rooted in Ferrum College and the broader Franklin County community in many ways, including the water quality work with Smith Mountain Lake, botanical garden and trails on campus, and the landscape design classes that designed gardens around campus. They started their life at Ferrum when the college was a junior college; and they helped shape Ferrum into what it is today through growing programs and limiting class sizes.
During his first year of teaching, Pohlad was supposed to teach a geology class. Eventually, Pohlad taught a plant disease class instead, which he continued to teach for the next 40 years. Pohlad originally taught one class of 126 students who were split into four labs, but soon he changed it to four classes of 24 students so that he could keep what Ferrum was about. He also redesigned the class to enable better personal learning, such as knowing an individual student’s struggles and helping them. Pohlad wanted students to understand concepts in a way that will stick with them forever.
“When students light up because of something that dawns on them because of something in the classroom that's how I get my feedback,” Pohlad said, “and that's why I ended up teaching all these years.”
Pohlad and Thomas both retired in 2018. Retirement to them did not mean sitting around. They traveled to many different places including Hawaii and the Galapagos and participated in events like the 11,000-mile national park tour so that they could see the world from a different view.
“You retire but you don’t quit doing things,” Pohlad said.
Thomas passed away in January 2020, after a long battle with ovarian cancer. At her memorial service, hundreds came to celebrate her life. Among those people were students that both Pohlad and Thomas taught 41 years ago in their first class, along with students from their most recent classes at Ferrum.
Without Thomas, Pohlad still continues to work and help Ferrum College as an emeritus professor. He keeps learning and growing from his interactions with the people at Ferrum College; and no matter where he travels, his fond memories and the family he has created are what always bring him home to Ferrum.
“I love seeing things through other people's eyes because you open your eyes to a different world than I do and I see it through your eyes,” Pohlad said, “to me, I could see the way you did things and it helped me learn in a different way so you never stopped learning.”
To Pohlad, Ferrum College has taught and continues to teach him even today. It was the starting point to one destination, which is also the destination of another journey.