Mike Bandy has spent years helping others learn both in and out of the classroom. As a professor at Bluefield University, Bandy uses his experience in accounting and coaching to help students prepare for life after college.

Bandy has always enjoyed teaching others. He runs his own certified public accountant (CPA) practice, which he has operated since 2001, where he helps clients with their businesses. He also coached soccer earlier in his life and believes coaching is another form of teaching.

“I’ve been drawn to passing on information that I know to someone else,” Bandy said.

When the opportunity to teach at BU came along in 2018, Bandy said it was “a blessing from God.” Since then, he has enjoyed helping students grow throughout their college careers and watching them succeed after graduation.

Dr. Paul Bennett isn’t much into sports, but among the few events he watches is the America’s Cup, one of the oldest international sports competitions in the world. It began with a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851.

“A whole fleet of British boats contributed,” Dr. Bennett said. “One boat came from America — that was the yacht ‘America’ — and it sailed across the Atlantic in order to compete. It won by about half a mile.”

Dr. Bennett has loved sailing since he was a boy. He says it “gets into your blood — you can’t forget it.” Hanging on his office wall is a painting of the boat he had when he was 18. Although he now serves as assistant professor of economics at Bluefield University, Dr. Bennett spent most of his career in IT.

As an undergraduate, Dr. Bennett majored in mathematics, which he sees as an “incredibly beautiful” part of God’s creation. He interned with IBM, where he worked on a program to design cuts for a numerically controlled glaze. He loved it so much that he spent the next 40 years in IT.