At 6:45 a.m., Christopher Bernard runs out of his house and hits the road for the hour-long drive to work. He skips his lunch break to leave the company earlier than normal. He then heads back into his car for about an hour, where he ends up in room 34 at Willcox Hall.

There, Bernard takes a half-hour to prepare for his Monday Intro to Computing class (CIS 101). The class runs from 6:10 to 8:10 p.m., afterwards he heads back into his vehicle for the last time to drive 45 minutes back to his home in Connecticut.

Bernard is the Vice President of IT for Gama Aviation, a leading business aviation group specializing in charter, management, maintenance, aviation, design and software solutions. Once a week he adjuncts for Pace. He started teaching at the university last Fall and is currently in his second semester. He previously taught at Rider University.

These hectic days allow him to bring a new viewpoint to the classroom and give him the opportunity to work with students.

“I think I’m able to bring real world use cases to the classroom rather than just theoretical perspective,” Bernard said.

Although he is only on campus once a week, he makes himself available through email and provides students his cell phone number.

Junior Renee Fisherman says having an adjunct professor can make it difficult when she is struggling with a concept since it is easier to learn in person rather than through email or a phone call.

Furthermore, CIS 101 is a university core requirement, making it harder to find the median in teaching.

“I have to be careful about understanding what they want to learn,” Bernard explained. “For example, I have a nursing student and trying to learn python as a language is something that is completely uninteresting to them, but I have other students who are in the computer field and they are very interested in it so I can’t weigh one too heavily versus the other. I have to make it more aligned with their major.”

Bernard is in talks with the Pace to create a new class at the university about current topics in informational technology, which would be geared to students in the major.

Bernard believes the benefit of having someone who works in the industry as a professor is that it “helps them to understand what they are learning is going to apply in the real world once they graduate.”