Sonia Cannon

Professor

“I like teaching for teaching’s sake. There’s no job that has more of an ultimate impact on people.”

Sonia Cannon has a full-time job with a major financial corporation. “But it’s hard to feel you’ve made a huge contribution to humanity when you’ve been working in Lotus at your computer all day,” she says. So teaching economics provides her with the human contact she needs to feel a sense of balance.

“Teaching is the only opportunity I have to do something more interactive,” she says. “In the classroom, you get that instantaneous reward. Or sometimes,” she adds with a laugh, “the instantaneous aggravation, as the case may be.” But she finds the “social” aspects of her classes in economics to be the most rewarding. “I try not to teach it as some form of calculus,” she says. “It really is a social science. And what I like most is that it gives you a way to evaluate the people you vote for and what you read in the paper. And no one,” she adds, “leaves my classes feeling like they haven’t learned something they can use in their daily lives.”

This native of Manhattan worked in New York banking for three years. “But I always felt teaching would be my primary field,” she says. She finds a lot of satisfaction in her work at SMC and stresses the unique character of her students here. “You need to be incredibly mature to teach here,” she says. “At SMC, you’re dealing with an amazing array of people with many different needs. So you have to really care and realize that you’re there to fulfill what they expect. Because ultimately,” she adds, “we work for the students.”

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