Scott Phipps is a well-traveled and well-versed teacher who works at Nicholls just to make a difference in his student’s lives, and somehow he makes teaching look easy.

Before Phipps became the history teacher he is today though, he had an ambition to become an architect.

“After I left high school, I was going to go into architecture because I was a pretty capable draftsman,” Phipps said.

Phipps’ plan was to specialize in residential design, which is the designing of homes and other neighborhood buildings. He then realized that being an architect was not for him.

“I’ll leave the big tall buildings for better men than me,” Phipps said. “Shortly after I graduated, I realized that this is actually pretty damn boring and I couldn’t imagine seeing myself doing it for 25-30 years,” he said. “I thought about my fallback and it just so happened I was good at history, so I pursued it.”

After graduating high school, Phipps attended classes at the University of Michigan, where he earned his undergraduate degree.

“I stuck around an extra year to complete my teacher certification in History, German and English,” Phipps said.

Phipps completed his formal education in 2000 when he received his master’s degree at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. He has been teaching history at Nicholls since 2002.

Phipps actually began his teaching career while still in college.

“I taught a semester at McNeese and adjunct teaching at Lafayette and a lot of part time stuff in Michigan,” Phipps said.

Before Phipps found his home teaching at Nicholls, he had already developed his classroom skills.

“I was completing a five year teaching stint at an all girls Catholic school in Guam.”

Phipps stated that he could have lived there and retired there, but due to the cost of living he was not able to.

“I went to a job fair in Kentucky and there was a representative from St. Mary Parish looking for a middle school teacher,” Phipps said. “He hired my wife and I, and we moved down from to Franklin and I lasted about five weeks there. I decided I couldn’t handle teaching middle school and that’s when I took the opportunity to re-enroll in Lafayette for my master’s degree and that basically opened the door for me to be hired here.”

Phipps has taught in a lot of classrooms throughout his career. Schools he’s taught at range from Lafayette, Guam and even Papua, New Guinea.

“I’m a bit of a globe trotter,” he said.

Although being a well-traveled professor, Phipps’ days still consist of him learning a few things for his classes.

“I’ve been teaching long enough, to where I can teach the survey courses like 101 and 102 off the hip with no notes,” Phipps said. “I don’t really need to prepare because I’ve been doing it so long that the information is right there.”

Phipps’s also has a new objective to work on this semester though.

“This semester I’m teaching a new class that I’ve never taught before, Medieval Europe, History 368,” Phipps said.

Phipps stated that he’s still getting used to the new class he’s teaching so he still has to go home each night and do research for it so that he can make sure his students get the right information.

“This new class is actually occupying a lot of my time,” he said. “I’m giving new tests and this is the first time I’m giving essays at Nicholls. It’s my first exposure to the writing skills of Nicholls students.”

Phipps explained that he loves teaching, although he may not be a great historian.

“The simple truth is I’m in the history department here, but as far as being a historian, I’m really not that good, but I am a halfway decent teacher,” Phipps said.

The favorite part of teaching in Phipps’ opinion is the many students he teaches.

“One of my best assets is that I form a rapport with a lot of the students, at least the ones that care,” he said. “The ones that don’t care are lost no matter what I do. By forming a personal connection, I use that relationship to basically get the students to think about themselves.”

Phipps stated that no matter how hard he works to teach some students though, his efforts in the end would only help some.

“The truth is that at the end of the semester, no one is going to remember a damn thing about Napoleon or Alexander the Great, but I dwell on topics in history that have a relevance to the life of the student,” Phipps said. “I’m actually making them better people, not all of them, but some of them.”

According to Phipps, he can’t see himself doing anything else with his life.

“I’ve found my dream job here,” he said. “I’m not a materialist, I don’t need to be rich, and I don’t want to be rich. As a teacher, I’m never going to be rich. I’m fortunate enough to say that the paycheck is not that important to me.”

Phipps said that his life is not about the material things.

“I don’t need to be rich, I need to pay the mortgage, feed my kids and have a little bit of mad money and that’s it,” he said. “I don’t need a 200 ft. yacht.”

For Phipps, his students matter more than the money.

“For me the great joy is dealing with the students, that may sound a little cliché but they make me feel young,” he said. “They talk to me as an equal and I talk to them as an equal and we can talk to each other on the same level. I don’t need the big paycheck as long as I can say I have made the world a better place through the students’ that I’ve reached.”

History instructor Scott Phipps draws a map of the United States in his history of western civilization class on Tuesday in Powell Hall.