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Twenty-one years after first enrolling in Dakota Wesleyan University’s criminal justice program, Joel Reinesch is going back. But this time, he’s not enrolled in the program — he’s running it.

After spending four years in the Marines, working for 11 years at the Mitchell Police Division and earning his master’s degree from American Military University, Reinesch said the new job he’s starting this fall has been a long-term goal.

“This was the next logical step for me, and it’s something that I knew that I wanted to do,” Reinesch said. “I had flirted with it in the past and it just wasn’t the right time. Since then, over the last couple years, it’s something that I guess I sort of mentally prepared myself for.”

Reinesch will be taking over Jesse Weins’ role as assistant criminal justice professor as Weins heads to Arizona State University.

“I really think that there’s a really good opportunity to keep the criminal justice program going forward, because Jesse’s done a really good job with that,” Reinesch said. “I think that there’s some things that I can do with the current administration that’s there to kind of keep making steps and going forward.”

Though Reinesch has two degrees and will soon be helping DWU students earn their own, he wasn’t always very interested in education.

“I kind of took the long, winding road,” said Reinesch, who first enrolled at DWU in the fall of 1997. “I’ll be the first to say that college was not my thing right away, which is ironic. I was probably there for more of the social aspect, more than anything else. It really just kind of got to a point where it was time to move on, and quite frankly, it was time to grow up.”

To do that growing up, Reinesch enlisted in the Marines in August of 2001. Following Sept. 11, he moved up his date to get to boot camp as soon as possible.

Beginning in March 2002, Reinesch served just under four years in the infantry and was deployed to Iraq twice.

“Were it not through the Marine Corps, I would not be where I am today, professionally, personally, however you want to frame it,” Reinesch said. “It definitely helped me to get my life on track, I guess would be a good way to put it, and definitely kind of hit the reset button.”

After Reinesch left the Marines he went back to school, but he was no longer sure he wanted to pursue criminal justice, the degree he had left unfinished before becoming a Marine.

Thinking he might want to be a teacher and athletic director, Reinesch enrolled in DWU’s sports management program. While he said he enjoyed that, he knew criminal justice was where his heart was.

After a year of studying sports management, Reinesch was hired at the Mitchell Police Division. He sat down with DWU faculty and worked out a plan to finish his degree with a few online and night classes. In 2013, Reinesch was awarded his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice with a business minor, and in 2014, he started working on his master’s degree, which he finished last winter.

“I went from a guy who was barely keeping my head above water to graduating with a master’s with a 3.4 GPA,” Reinesch said.

Although June 30 was his last official day at the police department, Reinesch is staying on part-time with public safety indefinitely. He plans to keep up with 40 hours of training every two years and to continue helping the department with background checks on potential new hires, a task he said can be time-consuming for an officer to juggle with other duties during a shift.

Reinesch said what he’ll miss most about working for public safety is the people he’s worked with. The decision to accept the teaching position at DWU was easy until it was time to tell Chief of Public Safety Lyndon Overweg that he’d be moving on.

“I had a really hard time telling Lyndon that this is what I was going to do, because I just respect him so much,” Reinesch said.

“He did an outstanding job for our department and he was an instrumental member of the Veteran’s Park Committee,” Overweg wrote in an email.

Now, Reinesch says his experience as a police officer is one of the things that’s prepared him the most to teach criminal justice, both in terms of being able to teach and of having experience in the field.

Since graduating from DWU, he’s maintained a close relationship with the school and has given numerous presentations to classes, including teaching an adjunct course. He also has teaching experience working with the Citizen’s Police Academy, a course that teaches civilians about operations in the Mitchell Police Division, and has trained other police officers.

“I really enjoyed the teaching aspect of the job, whether it was training new officers, having them here and there for field training or teaching them in the classroom,” Reinesch said.

In addition to his teaching experience, Reinesch expects his experience with being both the student who did the bare minimum and the student who was excited to learn at different points in his life will give him a unique perspective.

“I wore both of those hats, so I think I’m going to be able to relate to a large swath of the student body that we have at Wesleyan, but also in that criminal justice program,” he said. “I’ve been in both of their worlds.”