Benjamin Ringgenberg prides himself on being there for his students. And he says that in a high-tech school like Calbright, that’s actually easier than it often is at an in-person school.
“I encourage my students to never, never be scared to ask for help,” he said. “I don’t care what time it is, if you reach out to me at 3:30 in the morning, I’ll get back to you as soon as I check my messages. Whatever you need, don’t worry.”
It’s a commitment he makes because he’s passionate about teaching – but also because he understands where many of his students come from.
“It’s really meaningful to me that I’m working at a college where a lot of students originally thought ‘college isn’t for me,’ and tried something else, and now are coming back as an adult,” Ringgenberg said. “Because that’s my life, too. And I feel a definite kinship with many of my students because of that.”
Success Doesn’t Always Bring Passion
“I struggled in school from the word ‘go’,” Ringgenberg said. “I was very distractible and very energetic. I had some challenges, I would often miss important things. And there were teachers who tried to reach out and connect with me, and teachers who didn’t care because they had 30 other ones to deal with at that exact moment.”
That was the hardest part, he remembered: No one was consistently on his side. “It was a struggle all the way through high school, and I didn’t have a constant support system of people who would just listen and be there.” So he dropped out at 17.
“I got my GED a year later, but go to college? No way, I didn’t think that was on the table for me,” he said. “Teachers and adults in my life called me smart, but something I didn’t understand is that smart isn’t ‘what you know,’ it’s ‘how you use what you know,’ and when you choose to use it. I wish somebody had been able to explain that to me back then.”
While he didn’t go college following getting his GED, he still found ways to use skills. . He got into sales, and became one of the first cohort of salespeople to use a new technology – Salesforce – to manage his accounts.
“It was just a brand new system people were loading onto their servers back then,” he said. “I started using it because it seemed like a good tool. I did sales for the better part of my 20s, and I was really successful.”
He worked for big companies, first in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then in Los Angeles. The money was good, but the work was grueling. It was always something he did because he needed a job and it seemed like his best option, not because he really cared or even really liked the work.
“I had to produce a quota every month, and living by the quota was just too stressful,” Ringgenberg remembered. “And I did it every month, in and out. And every job I left, I had to start over because unless you’re staying in the same industry you can’t take your contacts with you, you’re building again from scratch. I was doing it, but it wasn’t for me.”
He lost his last sales job in December of 2007, as the U.S. entered the “Great Recession” shortly after. He didn’t know what to do, but he knew he didn’t want to go back to sales. He had to find another path.
“I had to try something else, and my girlfriend (now my wife) was very successful and encouraged me to try college,” he remembered. “This time it was different because for the first time I had somebody always on my side, in my corner. Someone who knew me and was listening to me and told me they believed I could do this. So the extrinsic need – I needed to do something – combined with that kind of support, made me say ‘you know what? College is something I want to do.’”
It’s Different When You Don’t Have To Do It Alone
It wasn’t just his girlfriend. This time, he found teachers and professors who consistently supported him. They became his mentors, and it made a big difference. He’d been successful at sales and using Salesforce, but he hadn’t really cared. With the right mentors, he discovered he had a real passion for teaching and supporting others.
“I had an English class, and one day after handing me back a paper, the professor told me to talk to her and she asked me: ‘Why are you in this class?’ And I was like ‘Oh no, what did I do?’” he remembered. “But she said ‘No no, you’re really good at writing. You need help with some of the formal stuff, we’ll work on that. But your creativity and your wordsmithing is really impressive. Do you want to work with my students and help them learn to write like you write?’”
He said yes, and soon got a job as a course-embedded tutor at the college, and the more time he spent trying to teach, and watching excellent teachers do it, the more he learned that this was his place.
“I realized I had a huge hunger for learning, which is a strange thing to discover at 30 years old,” Ringgenberg said. “But I hadn’t been fair to myself. I hadn’t given myself a chance in school. And when I finally did, when I finally said yes, what happened was transformative. This was at community college, and why community college will always have my heart.”
His first teaching jobs after graduating with a degree in English Literature were teaching in hybrid classrooms – his decade of hands-on experience with Salesforce for big companies made Ringgenberg proficient in using technology in the classroom. Then a colleague got a job at Calbright, and told him it was the right environment for him.
She was right, and now he teaches the same technology, Salesforce CRMs, that he was an early adopter and successful with. He’s never looked back.
“I could have stayed in sales and been just flop sweating behind a desk until I’m 70 and I keeled over. That could have happened. Instead I went after what I really wanted to do. And that’s what I have in common with so many Calbright students: They’re here because they have the same needs I did. They need to do something different for money, and they want to find a career they care about. Honestly, 10 out of 10 Calbright students want to find that career that is right for them. Some of them don’t know what it is yet, but they’re all here trying to grab it, to give themselves a chance. And they’re my people. We’re in this together.”
He is determined to be the kind of consistent support for his students that he needed to succeed in college.
“For a long time, I looked at college like, ‘That’s for the elites, only they can only go to college. What am I going to pay $300 per credit unit just to go maybe get a job later afterwards? It’s a worthless piece of paper, blah, blah, blah,’ just lying to myself,” Ringgenberg said. “I had to learn to lean on other people when I needed them. I had to learn to ask for help. And I didn’t do that enough in high school. I didn’t even know the questions to ask. But there also had to be people there who I could lean on, who were going to show up every time. And that’s how I teach. Help my students figure out the questions to ask, and show up every time. I say it again: They’re my people. We’re in this together.”
