Barbara Lazar

Professor

“I’m so proud to be teaching in a place that’s considered crème de la crème. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”

“I’d always wanted to be an MD, but I found out that I didn’t like biology because I hated all the memorization,” says Barbara Lazar. “So my father said, ‘Well, you’re getting all A’s in English, so what can you do with that?’ And I said, ‘Well, teach, I guess.’ And I’ve always just loved it.” But there were some fairly amazing digressions Barbara involved herself in before becoming a reading instructor at SMC.

“I was a main-frame programmer for NASA back East,” she says. “And I fell in love with computer-based training. As a project for the Army, I created a program on Soviet Weapons Equipment and Organization, called SWEO. I did a unit on airplanes for Jet Propulsion Laboratories and worked there briefly as a space flight operations specialist. There was a time when I was using four different word processing systems simultaneously.”

Taking a page from the film War Games, Barbara describes another little project she found challenging. “I designed a human/computer interface for theater-level war games,” she says in typically understated fashion. And then she explains that “theater-level” means, “thermonuclear weapons exchange on a global scale. It was kind of…fun.” And as you might expect, the “fun” she’s involved in these days is somewhat untypical.

“I’m writing an historical romance novel set in 12th century Japan, which is a fascinating period in time,” she says. “My study is piled high with research books and my husband is worried that if we ever have an earthquake, we’ll never be able to get them all back to the right libraries.” Barbara says that “working for the military, there were nights when I cried. I’m not a war-game person. But now I get up in the morning and go to school and that, for me, is joy in my heart.”

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