By Faren Visintin
Staff Writer
Whether he is teaching or enjoying free time, Pepperdine physical education professor Mike Anderson is almost always outside.
From surfing and hiking to climbing and mountain biking, Anderson truly appreciates the beauty and excitement of life in the natural world.
There are few things, it seems, that he hasn’t experienced. Anderson doesn’t wait for life to happen to him; he makes it happen.
As a Pepperdine undergrad, he studied in Heidelberg for a year and witnessed the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
Besides being a part of history, Anderson also realized how much he enjoyed the freedom of traveling.
“It was the first time that I could do whatever I wanted completely — to travel with whatever copy of the Kerouac book that I’m reading at the time and just go, sleep in parks,” he recalled with a smile. “That’s when I decided I wanted to do the Peace Corps.”
First, however, he had to finish college.
When he returned to Pepperdine his junior year, Anderson continued his adventures with road trips from L.A. to Latin America twice a year.
“I love everything about Latin America,” Anderson said.
Since his graduation from Pepperdine as a sports medicine major in 1992, the traveling hasn’t stopped.
After a year of research at UCLA, he attended graduate school at Boston University and earned a master’s in public health with an emphasis in health care in developing countries.
With the aid of a grant, he then worked in a children’s hospital in Nepal for four months conducting research, and shortly thereafter, joined the Peace Corps serving for two and a half years in Thailand.
“After the Peace Corps, I knew I wanted to teach,” Anderson said. He spent the next three years teaching second and third grades at an elementary school in Compton, Calif., before coming to Pepperdine in 2000 as an adjunct professor.
Now starting his fourth year at Pepperdine as the coordinator of physical activity programs, Anderson is happy to find “Everything that I’ve done in my life has sort of encapsulated itself here so that I can do all the outdoor stuff, I can do all the academic stuff, and I can do all the service stuff.
“Working with International Programs to establish the experiential learning program in Thailand has been one of the most positive things.”
Besides serving as professor for the Thailand program, Anderson also teaches PE 199, various activity classes such as swimming, resistance and marathon training, and several courses for P.E. majors.
“I love teaching,” he says, “You impact students in so many different ways and can influence what they do next. It’s awesome to see how some former students of mine are now doing the Peace Corps or Teach for America or continuing to run marathons.”
In addition, he still stays connected with the Compton area teaching credential classes for physical education teachers.
What is your favorite thing about Pepperdine?
The thing I love about being here is that I have had contact with so many students in very different environments. If I walk across campus, I see people from the Thailand group, I see people from the marathon training group, and I see juniors returning from overseas that I had as students in PE 199 when they were freshman.
If you were not teaching, what would you do?
I love traveling; I’m gone the second school gets out for almost always the entire duration. I know I will definitely at some point be working in a different country because I like the strangeness of things — new things, new people, new languages — not really ever knowing 100 percent what is going on because you never know what is going to happen next; it’s exciting.
Who inspires you?
There are a lot of pieces of a lot of people who have inspired me along the way from professors to teachers to some of the parents in Compton that I got to know very well, the family I lived with in Thailand — so the person who has inspired me most in terms of goals and what I want to do next is sort of an amalgamation of different people — including my parents and family.
What are you most proud of?
It’s not something specific that I did, but that I have never done anything sort of normal in terms of what is supposed to happen next. I am able to not get caught up in whatever it is that other people get caught up in that makes them think that they have to do something for their entire lives. The quote is from Harold Witman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
I am happiest when…?
I am doing exactly what I want to be doing at any given moment — which happens often.
As a Pepperdine alum, do you have any advice for Pepperdine students?
Take advantage of where you live. There is so much to do in Malibu. College is more than this experience on the hill; it’s about getting out and experiencing the real world.
October 30, 2003