Career Milestone: Interview with Retiring Educator Suzanne Smith
Suzanne Smith, chair and associate professor of data analytics at Johnson County Community College, is set to retire in December 2025. She has played a key role in implementing the NSF EPSCoR-funded Kansas Data Science Consortium (KDSC) since its launch in 2022. On June 1, she transferred her KDSC duties to Kiran Mihir, assistant professor of computer information systems.
In the interview below, Smith reflects on her life’s passion—teaching—and her post-retirement plans with University of Kansas Freshman Joshua Alston. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Interview
Q: Where are you from?
A: I grew up in Wichita, but I’ve lived in the Kansas City area for a good long time now, teaching at Johnson County Community College.
Q: Where did you attend college?
A: I went to Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, where I got my bachelor's degree, and then I went to Kansas State University for my master’s degree in math.
Q: What got you into math?
A: I always just really loved math. When I was getting my bachelor's degree, I was trying to decide between chemistry and math, because I liked both. But I found I was just not very good physically with the chemistry labs, like I’d have to spend a couple hours in chemistry labs and everybody else would be done way before me.
Q: Tell me a little bit about your role in the KDSC?
Suzanne: So, KDSC brings together a bunch of schools in Kansas to create data science opportunities for students. My role involved finding projects for us to give our students and offering a repository where students and other people in the community could go for data science.
For the first two years, the community college partners watched the four-year counterparts at WSU, K-State and KU implement data science courses. We’ve been involved in meetings about the projects, but we haven’t been teaching our own students with these projects. Until this year! This spring semester, I taught a data mining class, and used those real-world projects that were provided to us through the KDSC program. So that’s huge—to be able to get real world projects for our students.
Q: What’s your favorite part about teaching?
A: I love to learn new things, and then I love to figure out how to teach other people those things. I love the process of coming up with lectures and figuring out what is the best way for me to bring these concepts to life.
Q: What are your plans for retirement?
A: My husband has already retired. We just got a cargo van and have been turning it into a camper van. It’s been really fun! We’re planning on taking a lot of different trips, all over the country, staying in different state parks.