Mr. Joel Smith is the Testing Center Supervisor at LFHS, and to many students, that’s all they know him as. Smith’s position makes it difficult to build relationships with students as he works in the only area in the school where he is required not to. But there is a lot more to Smith than you would expect.

Smith grew up in Northfield–24 minutes from Lake Forest–where he spent his days as a passionate fencer. At New Trier High School, he joined the fencing team as a freshman in 1995 and fenced for all four years of high school, consistently making it to the Midwest Championships and placed seventh overall at his peak. He also was a Junior Olympic athlete multiple times throughout high school. Smith continued in a lesser capacity in college, but still nurtures this passion of his to this very day by coaching the fencing team at New Trier outside of his daily job as a supervisor. Smith started coaching at New Trier while he was attending Oakton Community College after high school and has been doing it ever since.

One piece of advice that has shaped Smith’s life is that, “If you are going to do something, do it right.” This was a piece of advice from his father and he has brought into all of his passions. 

“Any job I do, I try to do it to the best of my ability,” he said, “and that comes through when I teach fencing, or just teaching a kid to do something, I want them to be doing it right because that’s the best way to do it.”

The job of a testing supervisor is not any more than you would expect. He sits in the testing center, and if a student (perhaps not unlike yourself, dear reader) misses a test, their teacher gives Smith the test, and he holds onto it until the student takes it. But Smith has done multiple jobs for the school in the 21 years he has worked here. 

He left LFHS in 2004 to finish college, and he holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Illinois State University. While at Illinois State, Smith’s studies had a concentration in Military and European history. Some of his favorite research was on his own family.

“I found out that my maternal grandmother was one of the first air nurses in WWII,” he said “and that my father’s mother was living on a farm in Kansas… and she had German POWs that would come do farm work for her. 

For those wanting to know Smith better, his favorite movie is Serenity, a movie ending to the cult sci-fi series Firefly; it follows the crew of the spaceship “Serenity” as they are pursued by an agent known as “The Operative.” His favorite book is Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, an author known for technically detailed espionage books. In Smith’s own words, “It’s political, it’s a kind of version of what would happen if Russia actually attacked NATO.” Smith doesn’t have a favorite TV series, as he doesn’t watch TV, but he does maintain a love of documentaries. When his records are updated in the testing center, you can find him watching them regularly. 

Smith had some advice for high schoolers about “go out into the world” which is this: “Be prepared, because not everything is going to be like your high school experience.” 

In addition, he added, “If you want to do what I do, be prepared to sit a lot.”