When Rick Valentin was a young college musician and had an opening for a bass player, he turned to Rose Marshack. There was only one problem: Marshack had never played bass. 

“His bass players kept quitting,” Marshack said. “He didn’t know he needed me as his bass player.”

The choice was between Marshack and a guy named Pete. “But Rose had perfect pitch, and she was into punk rock,” Valentin said. “Obviously, she was the right choice.”

Marshack and Valentin have been bandmates for 38 years, married for 28 years, and Illinois State University faculty members in the School of Creative Technologies (CTK) together for more than a decade (Marshack was hired in 2007, Valentin in 2009). Both are CTK professors. Marshack is the school’s interim director.

The parents of two sons, Gram and Dao, they still play music together—just not as often as they once did.

Their journey began when they met as undergrads in their dormitory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their band, Poster Children, played dorms and house parties on campus and later opened for bigger punk bands. They were a touring band for over a decade. The years rolled by, and the shows piled up. Poster Children has played over 800 dates in the U.S. and Europe and released 10 albums. They’ve had music videos on MTV and been featured in wide-ranging media, from The New York Times to the Cartoon Network. 

As computer science majors, they knew a lot about technology. They designed their own album covers and were early adopters of new technologies. They posted blogs and podcasts on the internet long before those terms were part of our lexicon. It was a way to connect with their growing fan base. They published their first podcast in 1999, although that’s not what it was called back then. 

“We knew that we could create an audio file, and we knew that we could put it on the internet so anyone could access it,” Valentin said. “And then we started just the two of us doing a recorded kind of chat and putting that up.”

Marshack wrote about the band’s history and her experience in it in Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children, published last year. It chronicled the band’s do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic: writing original music, booking its own shows, selling T-shirts, driving a van all over the country, and sleeping on the floors in the houses and apartments of fellow musicians in the cities they played. (They reciprocated the hospitality when musician friends came to play in Central Illinois.)

Play Like a Man also documents the band’s innovative ways and DIY approach to technology. Skills honed by Marshack and Valentin from their experiences playing in Poster Children have served them well as professors in CTK, where they infuse their teaching with the same innovative spirit they’ve brought to their band.  

Valentin remembers feeling out of place as a tech-savvy musician back in the 1980s, but his students today embrace the identity. “Now it seems pretty normal to be kind of a creative, techie person, but it was unusual then,” he said. “Now more people have seen the value of that mix of creative work and how technology can be creative.”

But other lessons learned from the road permeate their teaching, too. They try to build the same community in the classroom that they have felt as a community of musicians. 

“We teach students that community is important, and that they’re a community of students,” Marshack said. “I tell them in the middle of class when I’m teaching, ‘OK, take a break now and see if the person next to you is caught up. I want you to make sure that they know exactly what’s going on in the class.’

“Because we’re all in this together. Once you leave here, you’re going to be working with other people. You need to learn to take care of them.”

Valentin said CTK offers a collaborative environment to help students thrive. It’s by design. 

“We want the modern or future student to be able to ride the waves of technology and changes and still be able to be relevant and do good work,” he said. “Because of their skills, a lot of times they become the sort of connectors in situations where the engineers can’t talk to the creatives. So, they can be the person who is trying to get everybody to understand each other. That’s a really valuable job and skill. 

“You can call it networking, or you can call it community. And that’s where we came from. And I think that’s typical of musicians.”

CTK is growing at Illinois State—it grew from a program to the School of Creative Technologies in 2023—and Marshack and Valentin have played no small part. But they haven’t done it alone. Marshack praised her predecessor, Aaron Paolucci, for his leadership, program creator Dave Williams for his vision, and advisor Jody Decremer for building relationships—and community—with students. 

“I’m just thrilled to be the caretaker. We’re a really tight-knit group of professors who really respect—I could even say love each other,” she said. “I’m thrilled that Rick is also part of it. These people are my heroes.”

Marshack recalls being impressed by the personal touch at Illinois State during the interview process. “The faculty were talking about students by name, and I was like, ‘You know their names!?’” she said. “I thought: ‘I’m home. I want to be here.’”

She still feels that way about her colleagues, describing them as “extra generous and extra caring.”

At her first winter commencement at Illinois State some years ago, Marshack was seated next to a faculty member from another department. She was curious about his experience.

“I poked him, and I was like, ‘Dude, my group of people, my faculty that I get to work with, I love them. Is it like that where you are too?’” Marshack recalled. “And he goes, ‘Yeah, just like that.’

“And I just thought, ‘Wow, what a great place.’”