He started by mentioning that his primary role is to elevate the quality of faculty and academic programs at CMC. He then stated that over the last six or seven years, in his role as the Dean of Faculty, he has hired roughly 40% of the current faculty members as the college has experienced high faculty turnover. For the upcoming academic year, Hess mentioned that the college engaged in a strong amount of hiring. (See below for a list of the departments with new hires.) He stressed that he is looking to hire faculty to encourage margins of development in areas where the college is not particularly strong, such as languages and sciences.

Hess then discussed the external review process for the academic departments and the various programs the college is looking to expand. The external review process occurs for each department every six or seven years and highlights specific improvements which should be made to advance that particular department.

According to Hess, the external review process of the Philosophy department determined that CMC currently has the best Philosophy department in comparison to any liberal arts institution.

Furthermore, CMC is extending the Yonsei-CMC summer program for another six years, with the hope to place students in internships in Korea in another two years. This summer, the college is also hosting a travel trip to Rome. Hess also noted that CMC wants to ensure the Silicon Valley Program is a 5C program. Four Pomona Students participating in addition to the 14 CMCers for next year; Pomona and other 5C alumni are helping out with the program.

He also mentioned that CMC is looking to add another ITAB networking trip, in addition to the current trip, to provide more students with opportunities in Silicon Valley.

In the near future, the college plans to establish a South Asia presence, particularly in India. CMC has been recruiting Indian students heavily, and President Gann visited India over winter break with the hope of establishing internships and course offerings for CMCers.

For the summer, the college has paired up with several NGO’s in India to offer social entrepreneurship internships. In the future, Cynthia Humes, a Religious Studies professor who has lived in India, may possibly teach a half-credit course. This opportunity will be subsidized heavily; the college is raising funds in South Asia to make the price modest for CMCers.

Dean Hess ended his talk focusing on entrepreneurship and the manner in which the college is trying to increase the academic presence in this field. CMC wants students of all majors to have some experience in entrepreneurial programming in the future. The college is trying to compliment the work done by the KLI and the RDS to extend entrepreneurship education to all students.

New hires:

Robert Day School: Hired two now professors. One of the professors will teach a course on economic development, and the other professor will offer a course on finance.

Literature Department: Hired a professor from Harvard to teach a course on British Literature.

History Department: Hired two new faculty members to teach courses on 19th century western history and environmental history, respectively.

Keck Science Center: Hired three faculty members to teach courses on Environmental Science, Chemistry and Biology respectively.

Furthermore, a professor from the University of Munich has been hired to teach Holocaust Studies in the John Roth Chair, which alumni of the college provided funding for. The college has also established the Cook Chair in honor of Scott Cook, the co-founder of Intuit, which will be filled by a new faculty member from Cal Tech to teach behavioral psychology and economic decision-making. Next year, the college is looking to hire faculty to teach Korean Politics, Brazilian History and Portuguese at the 5C’s, which will allow students to learn Portuguese after Spanish, if they so desire.

What do you see as the role of the SVSP Director?

To facilitate student interaction in the program and make sure everything runs smoothly. Also, make sure that internship hosts are happy with their interns, and vice-versa. It’s also my job to be a liaison back to campus. The SVSP is an outpost of CMC, like the DC program, and we want to make sure that the students studying in Silicon Valley are a part of CMC, not lost in the Bay Area. It’s a multifaceted job and it’s very interesting–part Dean of Faculty, part Dean of Students, part RA, part mentor, part faculty member, and also keeping my development role. I’m looking forward to creating a community of amazing students.

As roles in college administration go, development has less day-to-day interaction with students. Are you excited to be working with students more?

Yes. For the last six years, one of the best weeks of the year for me is the ITAB Silicon Valley Networking Trip, because I get to spend lengthy time with students. Sometimes I like to just sit back and listen–it’s amazing what you learn…some things I didn’t really want to hear, but most of it’s good and I get to learn a lot about the college from the students perspective.

The other part of that is that we’re all going to be pioneers. We’ll strive for perfection, but I don’t think we’ll see perfection in the first semester. But my hope is that we’ll have a good time with it and make a lot of progress as well.

Have you made progress figuring out the logistics for the program?

Yes and no. The most critical element is the curriculum, which is pretty well set but we don’t have faculty signed up. These will either be current faculty members of we’ll hire visiting faculty members who already live in the Bay Area–either faculty at Stanford or Berkeley, or one of the many Ph.D.s working in business in the Valley. Our primary goal is to ensure Claremont Colleges-quality, regardless of who is teaching. Brock Blomberg is working hard to try to solidify this.

The two classes will fill in pretty quickly–hopefully by May or so. All the students will be taking the same two classes, like the DC program. While the DC program’s classes meet at night, I’m 85% sure that the classes will meet on Saturdays. That said, I’m concerned about students having fun. So we’re considering having students work four ten-hour days, Monday through Thursday, and then have classes on Fridays in order to give students more free time during the weekend. The downside of Friday classes is our hosts have businesses to run and their conference rooms will be filled. Three companies have offered to let us use their conference rooms as classrooms. So while this would be nice, it’s very likely that classes will be on Saturdays.

The sentiment of many students is “I want to live in San Francisco,” but I don’t think that will be as economically feasible. The challenge we face is how students can create a community amongst themselves if they’re spread around the entire valley and city of San Francisco. So the driving guidance right now is to obtain corporate apartments where all students will live, in order for them to create community at night and ease transportation. But that’s the short term. In the mid-term, I can see the college buying apartments or houses in Silicon Valley and renting them to students. In addition, we’ll continue to rent the space to CMC students who are interning in the Bay Area during the summers. The rule I’ve set for myself is that I’m not going to find myself a place to live until I’ve found places to live for all the students.

Could you share a few companies where CMC expects to place interns?

Sure. A lot of companies want us: Atlassian, Google, Electronic Arts, Applied Materials, Zynga.

Michelle Chamberlain (Director of Employer Relations for the Robert Day School) has developed a list of 40 firms that will likely say yes to interns from us. We’re going to have to make some tough decisions. The idea right now is to have two students at each firm, because this will make things easier logistically. But I want students to have the best experience, so if a student came to me and said he or she really wanted to work at a particular firm, we want to make that happen–as long as it’s tech focused.

Five years down the line, describe how the SVSP is perceived at CMC.

The SVSP will be part of a greater innovation and entrepreneurship focus at CMC. If you look at the things we do at CMC today that are entrepreneurship-focused, we have three classes and the Innovative Start-Up Award, but there’s a groundswell of support for entrepreneurship from alumni. So what we’re trying to do is create a program that will help young entrepreneurs at CMC.

How many students will participate in the program?

Right now we’re looking at at least 14, but possibly 16 or 18.

Last question, why did you want to become the SVSP Director?

After six years of doing the ITAB Silicon Valley Networking Trip, I feel I’ve gotten to the know the Valley quite well and what it has to offer. I buy into the philosophy that the innovation and exciting things happening up there is extraordinary, and it lines up very well with what CMCers are all about. As I look at my classmates, many of them are very innovative in their thinking. In order to foster that kind of enthusiasm in our students, the SVSP is a great program. It’s an opportunity to start something fresh and do something important, and I believe that it can really make a difference for the college. And I want to make it happen.

Crescit cum commercio civitas. Civilization prospers with commerce: indeed, it does. And our college strikes out to prepare our students to be leaders in commerce and in the great institution that facilitates it: government. There is no doubt in my mind that graduating Stags and Athenas–perhaps more than any other graduates in the country–leave our school with a stronger background in civics, economics, and the theories and frameworks that drive and guide these fields. CMC aims to go beyond merely producing great businessmen and women–we seek to produce leaders in society.

The project is modeled off of CMC’s established Washington D.C. program. The College is also looking to begin a similar program in the Middle East, for a total of three distinct offerings of this kind.

The program is designed to provide CMC students with new internship and employment opportunities, as well as to widen CMC alumni and parent connections in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Silicon Valley is unquestionably a center of high-tech leadership for the United States and having a program there has always seemed a natural fit to me,” Barton Evans ’70, Trustee and chair of the Information Technology Advisory Board (ITAB), told the Forum.

The program would accept between 16 to 18 students, who would have a full-time internship and take three classes.  Program participants would use the location to their advantage and meet prominent figures in different fields. Evans said that although the internships and classes will be structured based on the existing Washington D.C. program, his vision is that they are “separate and distinct.”

The program will focus on technology and include topical courses such as organization and finance, but will most likely be designed to be open to all majors, to “make sure that the program is a gateway for as many student interests as possible,” according to Gregory Hess, Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of Faculty.

Students have responded positively. “I am eagerly looking forward to this opportunity myself. These internships will give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge in real-world environments and to develop skills which will provide useful in future employment,” said Orlan Davies ’13.

The new program was inspired by the current ITAB Silicon Valley Networking Trip, organized by Cynthia Humes, Chief Technology Officer, Linda Tuthill, ITS Business Manager, and Stephen Siegel ’86, Associate Vice President of Development. Students on the trip spend a week in Silicon Valley networking with alumni at leading firms such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Meebo, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin. Siegel has been on the trip several times, and said that the students learn “not only about internship and early career opportunities, but about corporate strategy, latest business developments, markets, and other important topics.”

Students have been offered numerous full-time jobs and internships as a direct result of the ITAB trip, now in its sixth year. Elliot Godzich ’12, a Computer Science major, landed an internship with enterprise software company Atlassian as a result of the trip. “The trip allowed me to witness firsthand how tech companies grow from ideas in the minds of a handful of entrepreneurs and engineers to multi-million dollar successes,” said Godzich, “In one week, the ITAB trip completely changed how I think of business in the tech world. I cannot imagine how valuable an entire semester in Silicon Valley would be.”

A small committee is still in the process of determining the program’s logistics, and narrowing down a course list. If the program were to continue, it would be an extension of the CMC Off-Campus Study program and would be funded out of CMC’s general fund. Dean Hess is optimistic. “The soonest we would possibly start the program is in the fall of 2012,” he told the Forum, “Of course, we still have a lot of planning and review to undertake before we make the decision to go ahead.”

Like most young people, I’m full of good intentions about helping to lift people out of poverty and put them on the path to economic prosperity. Unlike most young people, I’m cynical about the ability of foreign aid to help poor people; while charities have the best intentions in the world, many of them don’t actually measure whether the money they spend is making a meaningful difference. Furthermore, if aid groups work through the local government and aid makes up a significant percentage of GDP, aid may actively harm countries, by providing an incentive for local government officials to stay in power, to keep the faucet of aid flowing into their pockets. Many people are trying to fundraise to give money to Haitians, but the best thing we can do for Haitians right now has nothing to do with giving them money.

Figuring out what works in foreign aid and what doesn’t was named by a group of economists as the most exciting thing going in economics these days. The NGO I’m working for, Seva Mandir, conducts randomized experiments in northwest India to figure out what’s working in external aid, and what isn’t. They work with a whole bunch of cool economists all around the world, including Esther Duflo, who recently won a MacArthur Genius grant.

I have three goals for the trip. The first is to be more useful to Seva Mandir than the cash value of my plane ticket to and from India. The second is to say “I’m game” for any proposed activity, spicy dish or 3AM jaunt. This rule is extremely useful as it makes decision making very easy; just say yes to everything. The third is to learn how to cook. I will be able to make a mean curry by the time I fly home. I am also being very careful to avoid dog bites and to avoid making any judgments about the people I meet, for example, for going to a traditional healer to cure a disease rather than seeking modern medical treatment.

Right now I am in the New Delhi airport and visibility is about 20 feet. That didn’t stop the cab driver from speeding along at about 40 miles per hour. My cab driver was using the other cars’ horns like sonar, so he could tell where they were without having to look over his shoulder. I’m on my way to Udaipur, which was the location for the James Bond movie Octopussy. I am excited to meet the staff and begin work.

Top 20 things I would buy if I were President Gann* and had a boatload of money (in order of importance):

1. A new athletics/recreation center to replace Ducey.  Easily the most important thing for CMC right now.
2. A computer science professor (or two).  We only have one now.
3. A new website
4. More “networking” trips during breaks like the ITAB (Silicon Valley) and FEI (NYC) trips.  Both were some of the best learning experiences I’ve had in the past four years.
5. Renovations and furniture for the Hub
6. Renovations and furniture for the computer labs (better furniture, more screens, etc… check out the Mudd/Pomona labs and you’ll see what we’re missing)
7. Renovations and furniture for the Reading Room
   (Onto the frivolous purchases…)
8. Giant plasma screens and speakers all over campus broadcasting the same thing at all times
9. An elaborate mini-golf course between Boswell and Green
10. An outdoor pool for non-athletic use (Scripps is too far and has inconvenient hours for men)
11. A large outdoor hot tub at the Senior Apartments.  (Important: cleaned and sanitized daily, at least.)
12. A bronze statue of Donald McKenna outside Collins Dining Hall.  Oxidized to look old and grand.
13. A gold statue of Henry Kravis outside the Kravis Center.  Polished daily to look new and expensive.
14. Scripps College (just the students, the Motley, and the dining hall.  They can keep the other stuff.)
15. A lazy river from Kravis Center to Bauer Center.  (Important: shut off and emptied on Thursday and Saturday nights.)
16. High speed train from Claremont Boulevard to the top of Mt. Baldy
17. Chairlift (gondola?) from South Quad to North Quad
18. Pitzer College (KKR leveraged buyout style)
19. The Mudd Hole
20. Loanable go-karts (with front-mounted video cameras)

Other changes would include abolishing senior thesis, most GEs, and demolishing McKenna Auditorium and Ducey Gym.

*Henry Kravis, Robert Day, or any other super rich donor would do

Disagree? Did I forget something? Leave it in the comments.

Every year since 2005, a group of about a dozen Claremont McKenna students spend a week in San Jose where they have the opportunity to visit and network with various Silicon Valley executives at leading companies in the area. This year, students brushed shoulders with CEOs, partners, and other top management at nine companies in the Silicon Valley area. The trip, which costs ITAB over $1,800 per student, is provided free to participants.

ITAB, the Information Technology Advisory Board, is an organization of CMC-affiliated executives in the technology industry working to advance the role of technology at CMC. Since 2005, the organization has sponsored a week-long trip to Silicon Valley. The trip was started in 2005 by ITAB Chair Bart Evans ‘70.

Mr. Evans started the ITAB trip to help establish Silicon Valley as one of CMC’s “centers of gravity.” “The current centers of gravity for CMC alumni are LA, New York, DC, San Francisco,” Mr. Evans explained to the group of 15 students who attended this year’s trip. That is, CMC alumni are concentrated in a few industries and geographic areas. “The world is getting smaller—much of our country’s business is being exported, but Silicon Valley is one of the few places [in the US] where people are still creating and innovating.” Mr. Evans wants to add the technology industry, specifically Silicon Valley, to CMC’s radar.

During the trip, ITAB pays for all student expenses—a week-long stay at the Fairmont Hotel San Jose, transportation, food, and miscellaneous costs. ITAB also provides each student with calling cards (business cards), a leather-bound portfolio, and tote bags to carry the “shwag” we pick up throughout the week—an “I’m Feeling Lucky” t-shirt from Google, a chunk of Silicon rock from Applied Materials, a bottle-opener that plays the “Yahoo!” jingle, etc.

Throughout the week, students are shuttled to various companies in Silicon Valley from Apple Headquarters in Cupertino to Google Headquarters in Mountain View (plug for Google: free Naked Juices and food everywhere!). CMC Chief Technology Officer, Professor Cynthia Humes accompanies the students on the trip, as her office is responsible for planning the trip.

“It’s a lot of work to plan the trip, but we get better at it each year the program is in operation,” said Dr. Humes. “For example, we hope to visit a gaming company like Electronic Arts next year in addition to this year’s lineup of companies.”

ITAB is also actively recruiting new members to help defray the costs of the trip. “The current cost is about $1,800-$2,000 per student, with students paying for their own transportation to San Jose. We want to expand our resources to be able to pay for each student’s transportation as well,” said Humes.

The ITAB trip (and the similar Financial Economics Institute-sponsored Networking Trip) is an underutilized gem at CMC. Within days after the trip was over, students had landed interviews and even jobs at the companies visited. What one learns in an economics or computer science class makes for useful technical skills, but only opportunities like these prepare students for the real world.

My highlights from the 2008 ITAB trip:

-Presentation by Scott Mauvais ’90 at Microsoft. Mr. Mauvais gave us the down low on why Microsoft isn’t threatened by Apple and a few other “do not repeat this outside of this room” remarks. I will not repeat them. We also got to raid the company store.

-Julie Cox ’07 gave an informative presentation about what consultants, especially IT consultants, do on a day to day basis.

-Listening to John Volk ’70, Partner in the Venture Capital Group at PricewaterhouseCoopers recount his decision to go to law school (“This was nearly 40 years ago… we didn’t know what was what… Duke was the best [law school] I got into, so I jumped in a car and drove across the country.”)

-Ashwin Navin ’99, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent delivering the keynote address at the Alumni Association-hosted ITAB Reception at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. In a chat with students after his speech, Ashwin recalled how cool he felt living in Auen Hall when it was the only dorm with high speed internet hookups in every room.

-Weston Presidio, a venture capital firm located on a pier in San Francisco. Jim McElwee ’74, a partner at Weston Presidio, talked about the hardships and benefits of venture capital firms.

-Todd Teresi ’94, Senior VP at Yahoo!, brought in legal and marketing experts from the company to talk to us about censorship in China, redefining Yahoo!’s brand, and other topics. I was pretty unconvinced that Yahoo! would grow or survive much longer after our visit until recently.

-Discussion with Bill MacGowan ’79, Executive Vice President, and Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystem. Mr. Schwartz is a legend in Silicon Valley and his blog is one of the most widely read in the industry.

-Apple presentation by Scott Gilfoil, head of campus recruiting. Mr. Gilfoil gave us an entertaining pitch to work for Apple (and buy Apple products).

-Joe Pon ’89 and George Davis ’80 at Applied Materials. Joe Pon gave us a tour of Applied’s labs, including chip manufacturing and research clean rooms where we had to take off our shoes and wear booties. Mr. Pon also discussed our country’s energy crisis and gave me a clearer view of solar panel technology and alternative energy sources.

-A visit to Infosys in Fremont, CA convinced me to apply for an internship in Bangalore, India this summer. I guess I’ll see how that one turns out…

-Jonathan Rosenberg ’83, Senior Vice President at Google, first fanned out 15 business cards, smiled, and said “E-mail me. I WILL help you.” Mr. Rosenberg also recounted some of his favorite CMC stories and advice for success in business.