When most college students imagine a chemistry professor, they don’t picture someone with a law degree. And they don’t picture someone who does creative writing and mixed martial arts for fun. But students at Lipscomb find exactly that in Dr. John Smith, assistant professor of chemistry.
Smith, who started full-time at Lipscomb in 2007, said students seem to enjoy hearing about his unusual hobbies.
“Some of my students think it’s amusing that I’ve taken up mixed martial arts,” Smith said, explaining that he picked it up because his 8-year-old daughter, Miranda, has been doing it for over a year. “I started that back in March. I’ve wanted to do marital arts since I was Miranda’s age, but my family couldn’t afford it. Now is my chance. It’s fun.”
Beyond martial arts, Smith spends some of his free time writing.
“I love writing,” he said. “I hate science writing; it’s incredibly formulaic and boring. I love creative writing.”
Smith said he writes scripts for VBS drama presentations at Harpeth Hills Church of Christ, where he attends. He has also written poetry, short stories and parts of novels.
“I’ve entered some competitions, but I never win anything.”
Smith, who has a bachelor’s in chemistry from Drew University in Madison, N.J., said he began working at Lipscomb as an adjunct faculty in 2001 while he was getting his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt.
During the 2001-02 academic year, Smith said he wrote his dissertation for his Ph.D., started classes at Vanderbilt Law School and began teaching at Lipscomb.
“It was a busy year,” he said. “I don’t remember much. I remember sitting down every night and trying to get five pages typed out. I don’t remember much more than that.”
Smith said he decided to go to law school after a chemistry lab incident scared him and his wife, Laura, “to death.” After spending a day in Vanderbilt’s chemistry building using new equipment to work with ether, Smith said he came home and had so much ether in his lungs that his wife could smell it on his breath.
“I started looking around for something to do where my Ph.D. in chemistry wouldn’t be wasted but where I wouldn’t have to be in a lab,” he said. “In patent law nowadays, you have a huge advantage if you have a graduate degree in science or math.”
After obtaining his law degree, Smith moved with his wife to Chicago where he began working at an intellectual property law firm.
“I was lucky because it was a nice firm,” he said. “You had a lot of people with scientific, geek backgrounds, so we all got along. People were more laid back than at your typical law firm maybe.”
While in Chicago, Smith’s first child was born and his wife, a Lipscomb alumna, learned that she had postpartum depression.
“I couldn’t keep putting in the hours that the firm wanted me to put in, so we realized we really needed a change,” Smith said. “We were looking for something different because it was either, I can have my legal job or I can hold my family together. That was kind of an easy question to answer. It was kind of a no brainer in terms of, I’ve got to have more time to take care of my family.”
Smith was then hired to teach physics and chemistry at Battle Ground Academy in Franklin. He moved back to the Nashville area with his family and taught there three years before taking a full-time position at Lipscomb.
“It was kind of a natural fit,” he said of joining Lipscomb’s chemistry faculty. “I definitely prefer teaching college to high school.”
Smith said he enjoys teaching because he likes helping people realize that they can do things they didn’t think they could.
“My most enjoyable teaching moments are definitely the times when I know a student can do something, and they’re having trouble figuring it out,” he said. “They’ve got obstacles that either somebody else put in their way or that they think are in their way. Helping them through that and then that illumination moment, when they’ve got a smile on their face and their eyes lit up, and they say ‘I did it. I can do this. It makes sense to me now.’ It’s that moment of realization–when somebody realizes they can do something they didn’t think they could–that I live for.”
In addition, Smith said he thinks Lipscomb students are “just wonderful people.”
“I think that probably a lot of faculty would say this here: we feel like it’s an honor to serve the student body here,” he said. “It’s a special group of students. The student body here is not your average student body. It really is an honor to serve this group of people as they serve so many others.”
Smith offered three brief pieces of advice for students.
1. Do good for others.
2. Never give up.
3. “Chocolate cake tastes better when you share it.”
Smith said one of the most important lessons in his life has been understanding how much there is to learn.
“It’s important to know how much you don’t know,” he said. “The universe is filled with stuff I don’t know. The more you learn, the more you realize how much is out there that you know nothing about. It’s humbling. It’s important. It gives you perspective.”
Smith, also father to 3-year-old Ariana, said it’s important to hold on to things that last forever.
“Faith and family are everything,” he said. “At the end of the day, as you go through life there are going to be all kinds of things that come and go, but you have to hold onto those couple of things that are forever, that are always going to be there. Someday you won’t have any of the other stuff.”
Much is expected of college students, Smith said, explaining that it sometimes seems unrealistic to decide on a career just out of high school.
“Someone’s asking you after a relatively short period of time to know what you’re going to do with the rest of your existence, decade after decade of life,” he said, “and I think, in some ways, it’s unrealistic to ask you guys to do that.”
But Smith said he follows the advice that one of his college professors once gave.
“Doors are never closed,” he said. “You can always take another path, and you don’t have to give up searching for what you want to do. And the bridges don’t have to be burned as you go from one thing to another. You can always go back and take another path.”