Category: Alumni

Chris Dimick has spent the past 12 years working along Lake Michigan’s beautiful shoreline in downtown Chicago. An accomplished writer and editor, his professional journey to the Windy City started nearly 350 miles away at St. Clair County Community College.

Dimick graduated from Marysville High School in 1997. Like many high school graduates, he wasn’t exactly sure of his next steps.

“I enrolled at SC4 because I felt it would provide an easily accessible, affordable way to start my college career while I figured out just what I wanted to do with my life,” Dimick said.

While at SC4, Dimick enrolled in a number of general education courses to explore his career options. He also got involved with student clubs such as the Erie Square Gazette.

“By taking a variety of classes through the general education track and being exposed to different areas of study, my future started to click into place,” he said. “SC4 helped me realize what career I wanted to pursue with the help of some amazing teachers and clubs.

“Professor John Lusk in particular had a profound impact on me through his Journalism 101 class. It was in his class that I realized just how I could make a living being a writer, and discovered my inherit passion for newswriting and reporting. That, combined with working on the Erie Square Gazette newspaper, inspired me to pursue journalism as a major and career.”

Dimick transferred his SC4 credits to Western Michigan University in 2000, where he pursued his four-year degree and took on writing and editing roles at the university’s student newspaper, the Western Herald. He graduated cum laude from WMU in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism.

“I don’t feel I would have had as much success at Western without first attending SC4,” he said. “SC4 gave me a buffer to grow up and realize just why college is important. By the time I went to Western I knew what college was like and how to succeed in class. SC4 also allowed me time to decide on a major, journalism, one I knew for sure I wanted to pursue. The education at SC4 was just as good as a four-year university.”

According to Dimick, his work on the Erie Square Gazette prepared him to work on the Western Herald, which in turn led to his first professional reporter job at the Kalamazoo Gazette.

Since then, Dimick has served as an editor for the Arvada Press newspaper in Arvada, Colo., and as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Health Information Management Association in Chicago. He currently works as senior associate director of strategic communications at the Alzheimer’s Association, where he serves as executive editor of ALZ magazine.

“I enjoy my career immensely and aspire to continue making a living as a writer and editor,” Dimick said. “I feel very lucky that SC4 was just a 10-minute drive from my house and provided me the opportunity to figure out what I wanted to do with my life professionally. Colleges like SC4 are extremely valuable and provide high quality education to a wide array of students.”

St. Clair County Community College alumnus Alexander Neff credits his alma mater for helping him keep pace while pursuing his career along today’s information superhighway.

Neff, 33, of Mesa, Ariz., is employed as a cybersecurity and compliance manager for VisualVault and recently became an adjunct professor at Arizona State University.

“Everything I learned prepared me to jump into my career full steam and allowed me to catch up to speed quickly on technologies I hadn’t learned yet,” he said. “Without SC4, I would have never achieved the level of success I have today.”

The Algonac High School graduate earned his Associate of Science degree in computer information systems (networking) from SC4 in 2006. He then went on to attend Northern Arizona University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in information technology management in 2012 and later his Master of Science degree in management of information systems from the University of Arizona in 2017.

Neff began working as a systems analyst for Magellan21 in Glendale, Ariz., in 2010 and later became an information security architect for the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System in Phoenix in 2011 before accepting his current position this year with VisualVault. He is also a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH).

“In my first few positions after graduation, I supported small business networks,” Neff said. “My degree from SC4 aligned well with those positions. In order to move forward with my career, I transitioned to cybersecurity and was able to leverage all of my experience up to that point. In my current position, I’m in charge of cybersecurity and compliance for a company that provides software as a service.”

He also will soon teach college classes similar to the ones he took at SC4.

“I actually just accepted the position at ASU to teach night classes,” he said. “I will be teaching a couple of 100 and 200 level information technology and cybersecurity classes a semester, exactly the kind of classes I took at SC4. I feel it’s a way to strengthen my own knowledge while training the next wave of cybersecurity engineers as they are sorely needed in the industry. In the next few years, there’s expected to be a shortage of millions of cybersecurity workers.”

Neff added SC4 was a stepping-stone to higher education.

“The education I received at SC4 gave me a solid foundation of how technology works and allowed me to get my feet wet in my career,” he said.