Newly Appointed Academic Affairs Vice President; Jennifer Merlic

Sitting at her computer in the corner of a large office, promising to need only a few more seconds to send off an email, Jennifer Merlic takes a pause in her active work schedule to rise from her desk and offer me a seat at her conference table. Since September 4th, Merlic has been the newly appointed Vice President of Academic Affairs, but what’s more compelling is all that has brought her to this position.

Merlic started her academic career in the field of physical sciences, and she claims that her interest is owed to a remarkable high school teacher. “We called him Derby,” she remembers, “which was short for Dr. Brown. He was the only teacher at our high school who had a PhD…he was a very engaging teacher. We had tons of demos all the time and it was one of those classes that just gets you really roused for the subject.”

Merlic conveys just how much a teacher can influence one’s path, like “Derby” did for her. “I think all of us, when you get out of high school for a couple years and you look back, you realize high school teachers have tremendous influence on our lives. They can kind of color your opinion towards a whole discipline forever.” Merlic said.

This type of guidance was crucial in her later years of education as well. When Merlic attended Smith College–a particularly large, all-women, liberal arts school in Massachusetts–she had a great advisor that helped shape her academic career, “I got to know him really well and he just had a lot of good insights.” After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry, Merlic continued on to graduate school at Princeton University, and began her post-doctorate studies at University of Southern California when she came across an opening to teach Chemistry at Santa Monica College in 1991.

Since the beginning of her career at SMC, Merlic has proven the ability to master a number of different roles within the college, including Director of Academic Computing, Director of Tech Training and Research, Chair of the SMC Physical Science department, Chair of the Academic Senate Department Chairs Committee, and finally, the role from which she most recently departed, Dean of Instructional Services. Because her former role has yet to be fulfilled, Merlic finds herself balancing duties from her last position as Dean and her new position as Vice President of Academic Affairs in the subsequent weeks since being appointed.

“I’d say I’m kind of 50/50 right now…50% doing the most critical things of my old job and 50% trying to jump in with the new.” Merlic said. Merlic welcomes the new challenges that accompany this new role with open arms. “It’s really exciting,” Merlic expressed, “it feels very different from the dean role because there are areas of the college that I’ll be involved with now that I wasn’t before. So, I’m learning…I’ve had an opportunity to do a lot of different things here and I think that’s one of the things I’ve loved about my career is, it doesn’t feel like one job.” Merlic relishes in her opportunity throughout her career at Santa Monica College to learn more about the academic culture and hopes to improve upon the academics that SMC has to offer in her time as Vice President of Academic Affairs.