Success story: Community leader credits college for achievements

Thirty years ago, newly-named Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce chairman Kevin Schlueter was preparing to graduate from NMC. Now, as he embarks on his latest leadership challenge, he continues to credit the college and hopes to illuminate the sparkle from the “gem that we have in Traverse City” to the Chamber’s 2,000 member businesses.

“Everything that I have, I owe to NMC,” said Schlueter, 49, also the president and CEO of Kalkaska Screw Products. “It’s just flat-out factual.” Here’s how NMC is woven, both professionally and personally, into Schlueter’s life:

• Scholarship – a Presidential scholarship covered the St. Francis High School graduate’s bills. The scholarship required him to keep up his GPA, which in turn meant he was admitted to the competitive Michigan Technological University, where he earned a bachelor’s in engineering in 1992. A master’s at Central Michigan followed in 1998. Neither degree, Schlueter says, would have happened without first graduating from NMC, in 1988.
• Family – Schlueter met his wife Leana when both were students at NMC.

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Congratulations!

• To the 40 Chinese students at the Yellow River Conservancy Technical Institute in Kaifeng, China, who will earn an NMC associate’s degree in marine technology this month, as NMC completes its pioneering overseas delivery of instruction in technical programming.
  “I don’t think anyone in the United States has done this, in terms of a technical, applied program being delivered,” said Hans Van Sumeren, director of NMC’s Great Lakes Water Studies Institute. He’s currently in China completing the instruction in marine technology and construction begun last June. Others who have traveled to teach include Ed Bailey, Brian Kelley, John Lutchko, Phill McCuien, Scott Swan and Brian Sweeney.
• To recipients of the 2017 Liberal Arts Network Development (LAND) awards. Mark DeLonge and Tom Gordon won the Institutional Excellence Award for their Perceptual Learning Method/Module. Student Ann Hosler’s piece "I Still Love You" placed in the organization’s student creative writing competition and was published in LAND's online Creative Writing Journal.
• To Hosler and fellow students Liam Strong and Deanna Luton, who each have a poem in Z Publishing's "Best Emerging Poets of Michigan" anthology, published in February. The book will be available at NMC’s Osterlin Library later this month.
• To NMC faculty who saved students $149,500 this semester by choosing free or low-cost textbooks.