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.”
