Lurie College is excited to welcome Connie Kim, our newest staff member in the Child and Adolescent Development Department!

Hello – My name is Connie Kim and I am the new department analyst for Child and Adolescent Development. I am responsible for the day to day operations of the main office, fiscal budget management, procurement, and overseeing academic processes including: scheduling, teaching contracts, and evaluations.

When I was a baby, my family came to the United States as refugees from Vietnam. We were sponsored through a church in a small town: Fridley, MN. Maxine from the church took us in. She was a widow who opened her home to us, and we lived in her basement until my parents learned English and could work. Through my middle school years, I lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota but during high school, I moved to Orange County, California. After high school, while working full time, I attended Cal State Long Beach in the evenings and obtained a BS in Management Information Systems. My older siblings all completed higher ed as well, and one of them is an M.D. To this day, I remain surprised and thankful that although my family started with zero means, we were able to get past barriers to education and livelihood.

Since then and in a nutshell, my life path has taken me through working in high tech, owning my own business, and for the past five years, providing service through the public sector. I am an advocate of exploring new opportunities and growing from challenges. I’m very excited to be at SJSU, where my work “behind the curtain” is to the benefit of learners, and where I am surrounded by faculty and peers with the like mindset of imparting knowledge and enrichment, enabling students to shape their future, irrespective of where they came from.