Professor Designs a Future for Students
Bryce Bresnahan
March 3, 2022
As a former marine and two-time art director, Professor David Smit has led a life as colorful as the media he works with. He teaches multiple courses including Multimedia, Advanced Multimedia, Graphic Design 2, 3, and 4, though his specific discipline is in graphic design. He is also a program coordinator for Graphic Design, Multimedia and Mass Communications. While he has been a teacher at ICC for 14 years, his overall teaching experience goes back to the beginning of the century- 22 years ago.
Smit grew up on an island in the Bahamas, graduating high school in the 1980s. Immediately after, he joined the United States Marine Corps as an infantry soldier and served for several years. While not everyone would want to spend time in the military, Smit is glad he did, believing the experience helped him grow as a person.
“[It] was a good thing for me, because you grow up in the military pretty quickly,” he said.
After returning from the military, Smit first came to Illinois Central College (ICC) as a student. Since he had always considered himself artistic, he decided that pursuing something art-related would make the most sense for him. This led to him becoming interested in graphic design. He graduated in 1994, after which he transferred to Northern Illinois University to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
In 1997, he got his first job as an art director for an advertising firm in downtown Chicago. When he and his wife first had children, they moved to Peoria in 2000 to his wife’s original home. He then became the creative director for a local agency. This was also when he took up his first teaching position at Bradley University as an adjunct professor. Despite only working as a professor part-time, he fell in love with teaching and returned to ICC as a full-time professor in 2008.
Smit prefers to teach in hands-on environments, where students are able to learn new information from experience. His favorite part of teaching is working one-on-one with students, being able to walk around to each of his students to see how they are doing and helping them if needed.
“I can stand and talk and show you things forever, but it’s going to make a hard connection until you actually work on it yourself,” Smit said.
When Smit is not too busy with teaching, he enjoys spending time with his family, whom he also enjoys cooking for. Some of his favorite hobbies include riding and working on his motorcycle, and woodworking. For woodworking, Smit enjoys both building and fixing things around his house.
“There’s always something to fix at the house. Having a little bit of woodworking skill definitely helps,” he said.
With so much experience under his belt, Smit should be able to teach many more students for years to come.