“I love to teach. It’s rewarding to know that I connected with them, that I gave them something.”

By Steve Daniel

When Scott Sechrist was a wide-eyed, long-haired student at Old Dominion in the early ’70s, he couldn’t have imagined that he would one day be back at the university – at the front of the classroom. But Sechrist made the most of his college years, soaking in learning at every turn, and when he read in the August 1984 issue of Alumnews (a forerunner of Old Dominion University magazine), that his alma mater was planning to start a program in nuclear medicine technology, he immediately got on the phone to Tom Somma, then chair of the School of Medical Laboratory Sciences.

When the program eventually opened in 1987, Sechrist, who had been an assistant professor and program director of the nuclear medicine technology associate degree program at Lexington (Ky.) Community College, was hired as director and lead instructor. He received tenure in 1992 and is now in his 16th year of teaching at his alma mater. He’s also a member of the Alumni Association board.

For Sechrist, ODU holds many fond memories, including the time in 1971 when he visited the campus for Preview.

“I stayed overnight in Gresham Hall, and I remember sitting in the lobby with about 20 people listening to some guy sing the entire version of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ by Arlo Guthrie while playing an acoustic guitar. I thought, ‘This is just what I thought college would be like.’” (Sechrist also was one of the 35,000 in attendance at the fabled Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert at Foreman Field on Aug. 17, 1974.)

A graduate of Norfolk’s Maury High School, Sechrist was a commuter student and described himself as a “weekend hippie.” He remembers picking up copies of the underground newspaper Norfolk Gorilla at Abdul’s Leather Shop on Hampton Boulevard, but he said the campus was “not very political or anti-war.”

He also recalls sitting in Webb Center watching TV with fellow students as Selective Service draft lottery numbers were announced.

“You could have heard a pin drop in there. My number was really high, 212. I was lucky, since they were calling up to number 150 that year. But I remember some guys were crying. They had really low numbers. It was tough.”

Sechrist got involved in ECOS, the Environmental Conservation Organization of Students, during college, and took part in the second Earth Day in 1971. “We would meet at the old Quonset huts. We stored newspapers and glass there for recycling. I was really into that. I would go up to [math professor] M.C. [Margaret] Phillips’ office and collect her neatly bundled newspapers.”

While Sechrist uses his alumni status to recruit students and to enliven lectures with stories of his student days, it’s probably safe to say there are some things he doesn’t share. Like the time he and some buddies from Virginia Wesleyan were tossed out of the old library in Hughes Hall for their boisterousness while listening to Frank Zappa albums in the music listening area.

Or the time the school ordered him to stop selling ODU Geophysical Sciences T-shirts depicting Da Vinci’s anatomically correct “Vitruvian Man.” Sechrist had created his own screen print for the shirts, which were being snatched up at $1.50 a pop by students in the major.

“It created a stir. I remember the assistant dean of sciences calling me into his office: ‘Mr. Sechrist, you cannot sell a T-shirt with a naked man on it.’ But I said, ‘It’s Da Vinci’s proportional man, it’s man in his environment. That’s what we do in geophysical sciences.’”

Some of Sechrist’s most treasured memories of his student days involve favorite teachers.

“Art and photography were some of the most important classes I took because what I teach now is medical imaging. Everything I teach now is physics- and math-based, but it’s also how things look, how the human body looks. There’s an art to it; positioning is involved because you have to get the image framed right. I still remember a note from my professor, Wally Dreyer: ‘You have a real eye for photography.’ It has stuck with me to this day because it made me feel really proud.”

He also recalls taking an Art 221 class from M.C. Flinn, whom he can still picture coming to class wearing a Mexican shirt, blue jeans and no shoes. “He lit incense, lowered the lights and started showing us 35-millimeter slides. He showed us cave drawings in France and art work all the way up through the Renaissance. I got hooked on art, and to this day I love going to museums. That’s what going to college was about. That’s what ODU gave me – an appreciation for art, meteorology, science. For a non-liberal arts college, this was the most liberal education I could have possibly gotten.”

Sechrist also fondly remembers C.S. Sherwood, for his use of stories and history in teaching astronomy; Charles Haws, for making European history come alive through guest lectures and field trips to museums in the nation’s capital; E. King Reid (“he was a hoot”), who took his students on archaeological digs; and Gary Copeland, his adviser, whom Sechrist credits with getting him focused academically.

After his freshman year, Sechrist decided he was no longer interested in his intended major of chemistry, and it was Copeland who encouraged him to pursue physical science, a degree offered at the time. “The beauty of physical science was it was a degree that had a little bit of everything. You could take physics and chemistry and geology and astronomy. I gained a broad background in science.”

It was also Copeland (now a professor of physics in his 32nd year at Old Dominion), who helped Sechrist realize early in his senior year that he had been coasting through too many classes on his ability to memorize facts.

“He gave me an oral final and asked me a lot of physics questions I could not answer. It became apparent to him and to me – it really was an epiphany – that I had really not applied myself. Ever since then, it was straight A’s. I took classes seriously. It taught me to go that extra mile, to get converging and diverging opinions.”

After graduating in 1975, Sechrist worked in radiation safety at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard until 1978, when he decided he’d spent more than enough time “hanging off submarines, chipping paint and checking for radioactive material in the freezing cold.”

A friend at the time, who was a medical technology student at Old Dominion, encouraged him to return to school for a med tech degree. Sechrist talked to an adviser at the university who suggested that he consider combining his nuclear background with medical technology. He took the advice and earned a certificate in nuclear medicine technology at the University of North Carolina in 1979, and went on to work as a nuclear medicine technologist for two years at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital and one year at Norfolk’s Sentara Leigh Hospital. He joined the teaching staff at Lexington Community College in 1983.

When Sechrist returned to ODU, he was essentially the faculty in nuclear medicine technology. Two students were in his first graduating class. Today, the program is accredited for 12 majors (eight is considered a big program in this field) and, while Sechrist still is the only full-time faculty member, he now has three adjunct faculty who teach on a recurring basis – a radiopharmacist, a radiation oncologist and a senior technologist who teaches nuclear instrumentation.

He also directs clinic coordinators at 11 area sites where the students gain hands-on training. One of these coordinators is a graduate of the program, Kevin Gates ’94, who is manager of the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Institute of Hampton Roads (see story on next page).

“The downside is I do everything, but the upside is I do everything,” Sechrist said of his role as program director. “Everything from ordering textbooks to deciding which clinics the students go to next semester.”

The combination of classes at ODU and clinics is a nice balance, he noted. “It’s a pretty big enterprise when you think about it. The clinic instructors are unpaid volunteers. The hospitals donate so much time and equipment and effort to train our nuclear medicine students, giving them the clinical experiences that we get them ready for here with the theoretical knowledge.”

Of all his many duties, teaching is what Sechrist loves most. “I look forward to coming to ODU every day. I’ve got friends that are lawyers and doctors who complain about being unhappy with their careers. For me, every day’s a challenge. I teach Medical Terminology, the driest class in the world, but I love it. Every year I learn something new, some new word. And every student is different, every class is different.

“I love to watch the transition from college student to baccalaureate degree graduate, to one who knows how to do something and is able to get a job. I love closure, which is not something you see a lot of in higher education. They call me after they have passed their national registry exam and again when they get their first job.”

He sums up his philosophy of teaching by the acronym EOD: Energized, Organized and Discovery. It’s a formula that has proven successful year after year, as students and colleagues will attest.

“He’s one of the best professors I had,” said John Burcher ’02, clinic education coordinator at Sentara CarePlex in Hampton. “He made it fun. He made you want to learn. He obviously loves what he does, and that makes it easier to teach students. ODU has a wonderful program. Everybody in my class was working in the field even before we graduated.”

Gates echoes Burcher’s assessment. “Scott has a genuine enthusiasm, and this is reflected in his teaching. He is there to make sure you get what he’s teaching, but he’s also there to help move you on your way. His goal is to make sure you are a well-equipped technologist so that, once you leave his program, you’re able to work in the field of nuclear medicine.”

Gates remains grateful to Sechrist and to the program’s many clinic coordinators who shared their knowledge when he was a student, which is why he’s more than happy to volunteer his time to help teach future technologists.

Lindsay Rettie, who served as dean of the College of Health Sciences during Sechrist’s first 13 years on the job, said of him, “The first thing that I remember when I met Scott in 1985 was his boundless enthusiasm and willingness to try anything new. It is his energy and interest in new teaching modalities that led him to become one of the first faculty on campus to use computer technology in teaching.

“Because of his expertise in the use of computers, he became a magnet for other faculty and administrators who sought his help constantly. Scott continues to play an important role on campus in furthering the use of emerging technologies in teaching and learning. He was one of the first, and continues to be one of the best teachers on TELETECHNET.”

Most students who graduate with a nuclear medicine technology bachelor’s degree go on to become technologists in community hospitals and clinics, skilled professionals who inject patients with radioactive materials and perform diagnostic imaging using sophisticated gamma cameras.

The injected Technetium 99 accumulates in cells and tissues, and the resulting images tell radiologists whether a patient’s cancer has spread. The cameras are used most often to determine the stages of cancer and heart disease, but they can take pictures of virtually any organ or bone, Sechrist said.

“If you want to know a patient’s physiology, how well are the lungs working, is the gall bladder contracting properly, is the heart beating like it should, then we can get an image from within,” he explained. “In determining if a patient’s cancer of the lung, prostate or breast has metastasized to the bone, almost half of the bone would have to be eaten away before it would show up on an X-ray. In nuclear medicine, as soon as that tumor moves and starts to attack the bone, it will often show up on a bone scan. So we can see it weeks or months earlier, hopefully before it gets too late, so that the patient can be treated. It’s a great physiologic imaging tool, but it’s highly expensive equipment. The cameras cost up to $500,000, and the scans themselves can cost $1,000 to $2,000.”

ODU’s program is one of only three nuclear medicine technology programs in Virginia. Approximately 75 percent of its graduates work in Hampton Roads. Three of the five nuclear medicine technologists at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital are graduates of the program, and Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News hired four graduates from the class of 2002 with sign-on bonuses.

Sechrist said radiologists at Duke Medical Center, the University of Virginia Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health have told him, “We’ll hire any graduate of the ODU program. Your students are that good.”

Of the 12 students in the spring 2003 graduating class, 11 already had jobs by the time they walked across the stage at commencement, Sechrist says proudly. The average starting salary for a nuclear medicine technologist is approaching $50,000.

Ever the student himself (as an undergraduate, he would spend hours in the library reading Life magazines from the 1940s because he wanted to learn about World War II), Sechrist completed his master’s degree in community health education at ODU in 1989, which he had started at the University of Kentucky, and in 1991 began a doctoral program in education at the College of William and Mary, earning a Ph.D. in 2000.

He took classes last summer to learn to operate a PET camera, one of the latest advances in nuclear medicine technology.

Because he has, relatively speaking, so few students – at most 12 juniors and 12 seniors in any one year – and is the sole instructor for the courses Nuclear Medicine 300, 331, 401, 402, 410 and 475, Sechrist gets to know his charges well. He is proud of the fact that his program has become increasingly diverse. His class of 2000, for example, included a Pakistani, a Vietnamese, a Hispanic, two Filipino Americans, two African Americans and a Botswanan.

Sechrist said it is extremely gratifying when his graduates become successful in the field. The calls, cards and e-mails from former students are what keeps him enthused about his profession.

“I love to teach,” he said. “It’s rewarding to know that I connected with them, that I gave them something.”