Nancy Meraz

Student

“I’m in the 11th grade at Jefferson High School, and I’m getting credit for classes I take at the Academy of Entertainment & Technology. It’s just a great program.”

In her junior year of high school—and her first semester at SMC, courtesy of the Launchpad Program—Nancy Meraz was having the creative time of her life. “It’s so interesting to be learning all of the things that people can do with computers, like animation and websites,” she says. “Take the Flash program, for instance. You draw something, and then you want to make it move. So you add layer upon layer of commands until it moves in the ways you want it to. Suddenly, you’ve got something like a video rolling across the screen. And that’s exciting to me.”

Nancy reports that “being in this program has made me a lot more hungry to learn. Even though I’m still in high school, I feel a lot more like a real student here. And I feel like I can go just as far as I want to towards a career. If I work really, really hard,” she adds, “I might even be able to make my own movies some day.” But in the ‘movie’ that she’s starring in at SMC, Nancy reports real joy at the ‘leading men’ she plays opposite.

“James Reilly, Michael Eggert, and Stu, the lab director, are all amazing teachers,” she says. “Michael teaches the video editing and James is more into the web design stuff. And both of them are really useful, because what they teach are the skills I’ll need to make my own animated cartoons. And Stu is always there in the lab to help me whenever I’m stuck. He’s always got answers to help me to get past technical problems. And since I’ve got a scholarship to learn all this, the price is pretty good, too.”

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