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.

You may have noticed that on January 18, Wikipedia and Reddit went dark and Google displayed a black rectangle over its normally colorful logo. These Internet giants—as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller sites—were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate: the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

The first true digital protest was surprisingly effective. If social networks and search engines are good at one thing, it is reaching a lot of people quickly. On Wednesday, 7 million people signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition, 126 million people saw Wikipedia’s blackout page, and 8 million used the page to look up contact information for their representatives. It was almost impossible to use the consumer Internet on Wednesday without coming across something about this legislation.

Apparently Congress listened. Between Wednesday and Thursday, 15 members of Congress dropped their support for the bills, and 70 members went from undecided to opposed. Just hours after the protests ended, both bills were dropped from the Congressional voting schedule. Now, both lack the support to be considered again.

For now…SOPA is dead and buried. If lobbying were a beer pong game, Hollywood executives would be running a naked marathon around Silicon Valley.

The Internet got what it wanted, but the conversation is not over. It is worth reflecting on SOPA and PIPA for two reasons: 1) to understand why they are perhaps the worst pieces of legislation ever written, and 2) to understand why we sort of need something similar. Stay with me.

Let’s tackle point #1 first. SOPA, as written, would have destroyed the Internet. To tackle the widespread issue of digital piracy, we needed tweezers—not the sledgehammer that was introduced on the House floor. Either the person who wrote SOPA had a painfully vague understanding of what the Internet is, or he hated it and wanted to kill it. Probably both.

The bill as written would have allowed the Justice Department to remove any website that displayed copy-written materials from the domain name registry, without due process. There are two things wrong with this. First, the punishment mechanism is silly. To be clear, removing a website from the domain name registry will not stop people from accessing it. It will, however, make accessing it needlessly difficult. If Google were removed from the domain name registry by this law, a user would have to type in one of Google’s IP addresses (for example http://74.125.224.72/) in order to access the site. This means that the URL “Google.com” would take you nowhere, but “Google.com” would still be around. Clearly the person who designed this punishment was confused.

Second, SOPA’s punishment criteria are extraordinarily broad. Punishing websites for hosting copy-written materials would mean that websites who allow people to post things would have to start policing their users. Or—in a more likely scenario under SOPA—websites would have to stop letting users contribute content.

Think of a website. Seriously, think of a website. Got one? Good. Were you thinking of YouTube, Facebook, Google, E-bay, Amazon, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, any blog, any porn site, or literally any website with an upload button or a comment box? That site would have three choices under SOPA: 1) try to stop it’s users from posting copy-written material at great cost, 2) face legal action from the government, or 3) stop letting their users from posting anything at all. In the best-case scenario, the Internet would change dramatically to skirt around this law. In the worst-case scenario, the Internet would become completely useless. Email? Good luck.

Imagine a law that forced Toyota to choose between policing drunk drivers and removing all the doors from its cars before selling them. This is the choice SOPA would give to Internet firms. Toyota would probably stop selling cars. Facebook would likely be a shell of its former self. Find me a modern law that is written more poorly than SOPA. I will be flabbergasted.

However—and this is a big however—it is important to understand that the original spirit of SOPA was a good one. Online piracy is a serious issue that requires a serious solution.

Technologies such as torrenting (which was sort of invented by a CMCer) have made it easier than ever to steal content (aka digital music, software, and books). Widespread theft has become a significant issue for the creators of content. By almost any estimate, we have swapped billions of dollars worth of content with each other. It does not seem like we are going to stop on our own.

Let’s use some of our Econ 50 knowledge for a moment. If the creators of content cannot get paid for their work, many will be forced to stop creating content (or only the wealthiest will be able to continue to create). If people are asking for payment in return from their work—and we are not giving it to them—everyone loses. Do not get me wrong; it is wonderful when people do things for free. Wikipedia rocks. But we cannot rely on the spare time of the smart and creative to fulfill our desire for good writing, software, television and music. If we try, we will end up with crap. A culture of theft will eventually lead to a culture filled with things that are worthless.

Ending Internet piracy is a noble goal, and one that should be taken seriously by the government. Not to say I wasn’t raging with you, but the piracy party must end. We really ought to be paying people for their work.

The shutdown of MegaUpload by the FBI on Thursday was justified. The site was willfully providing a way for people to steal content. Their intent was to steal. Therefore, in our society, they should be charged with breaking the law. I may not agree with the way the shutdown was handled, but it is time to realize that we can’t expect to be able to take what we want. The laws of our society have to apply to the digital space just as they do in the physical space.

Yes, it is true: the digital space we are creating is much different than the physical space we were born into. It has very different properties. For instance, you can copy something an infinite number of times for almost no cost. Our capabilities inside the digital space are much, much different than we are used to; even those inventing our capabilities still do not understand them or can predict what they will be.

Because of these issues, our values and laws have to be applied differently to the digital space. However, one thing is for sure: a system of laws must be created for the Internet. Users today are making questionable choices that clearly contradict our system of values. There are parts of the Web that resemble the Wild Wild West or Hobbes’ state of nature. It’s time to address Internet crime with legislation. That legislation, however, must be written by someone knowledgeable of the Internet and its purpose.

Writing laws for the Internet will be one of the great challenges of our time. I only hope we can do it before the 60-year-old technophobes in Congress pass something like SOPA.

It was a busy semester at CMC.

CMC moved up in the rankings to the 9^th best Liberal Arts College in the country.

The Kravis Center officially opened to students and faculty.  The Living Room (affectionately known as ‘the Kube’) attracted students’ attention  after some technical difficulties and the administration’s initial decision to limit access to students. This was all before the Kube became home to one Pomona student’s temporary interpretive dance studio.

The fall semester also celebrated and embodied student leadership at CMC.  Students started a movement to do a better job of cleaning up after parties and led an effort to change our campus conversation about sex and gender norms. Trying bridge the gap between our Building Attendants and their residents, the Forum got to know some of CMC’s friendliest staff members. CMCers led a campaign to be more environmentally friendly on campus and coordinated a day of reflection on 9/11. Others took the lead in social activity planning, expanding student involvement with Dean of Students and creating the College Programming Board (check out the big name they are bringing to campus). Student initiative also brought the popular TED talks to the Claremont Colleges, hosting a TEDx conference in September.

CMC also faced a number of challenges in the fall of 2011: an unexpected over-enrollment of students forced the conversion of two popular study spaces into four-person rooms and a large number of students returning to CMC in the spring from fall study abroad programs led to an on-campus housing crisis.  The story behind the “Marks Squatter” brought some humor to a rather-serious-but-now resolved issue of on-campus visitors.

The Associated Students of Claremont McKenna College was hard at work all semester, advocating for students on issues such as increased study spaces, building a better quality of life, and providing some much needed snack time.

The Occupy Movement swept the nation this semester and arrived at the doorstep of our Claremont Colleges. Students were active in the protests in Claremont, Los Angeles, and the rest of the nation. Indeed, two Pitzer students were arrested for their involvement in the Occupy LA protests.  Political dialogue was alive and well, especially towards the end of the semester, when CMC welcomed former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to our campus. Many 5C students, however, had a different plan in mind and formed an “unwelcoming” party for Rice’s visit. The planned protests forced a change in venue for Rice’s speech, which triggered an outcry from students. While the protests stirred up quite a controversy, the civility and political discourse throughout the evening exemplified students’ diversity of thought, without provoking violence or hostilities.

The Forum sat down with our very own college president Pamela Gann and discussed her current and future projects for the school, which included a revamp of the beloved North Quad and expanding the new Center for Civic Engagement.

But it wasn’t all business this semester at the Forum. Speaking with Paul Zak, a.k.a Dr. Love, the Forum got to hear the Doctor’s thoughts on love, life, and how giving 8 hugs a day will make the world a better place. Those student globe-trotters enjoying their study abroad experience took time to write home to CMC and share their experiences from far-off lands such as Washington D.C., South America, Italy and Oman. And for those bright-eyed freshmen, returning students and Dean Spellman gave them their two cents (sometimes musically) on how to navigate their first semester and discover how great this college really is.

We uncovered the top 5 companies that hire CMC students, brought Words with Friends lovers the 10 most useful Scrabble words, and suggested 8 classes to students that might have overlooked some academic treasures. Students contributed to the ongoing discussion on topics such as art, film, pop culture, public radio, music and concerts. And despite the delicious unveiling of a new Ath menu, the Forum offered some tips on how to stay healthy, even in the face of all those Rice Krispie treats.

A-Mitch even appeared for an encore.

ASCMC hosted a number of events this semester, improving on past traditions—Monte Carlo—and even starting some new ones—The Boardwalk Empire party and No Shave November. We know you can’t wait for the Wedding Party next spring—and neither can we. Expect even bigger surprises next semester.

Our tech guru offered some awesome tips on his #CMCTech blog, including advice on how to make your work faster and more effective, thoughts on the Semester in Silicon Valley Program and even a holiday gift guide (it’s never too late to get that perfect present).

The Forum also better incorporated sports into our publication. The Forum now offers live broadcasts of all home CMS athletic games, complete with video and audio from student broadcasters.  We celebrated triumph, defeat and the utter domination at SCIACs.  The publication also took and in-depth look at sports at CMC and uncovered how SCIAC rules hurt CMS recruiting high school athletes and what many are doing to save the Intramural program.

Outside of the CMC bubble, the Forum checked in with our beloved Claremont village, celebrating the once-in-a-century Zipcode Day (9/17/11=91711) and partaking in the delicious festivities at the California Beer Festival.

It was a busy semester and time for reflecting has just begun. First, we would like to thank you, our readers, for your support, comments, advice, kindness, crudeness, humor and thoughtful discussion. But, we have one more request. The Forum has grown considerably in the last semester but we want to know how we can continue to improve. Below is a short survey that we hope you will fill out so we can make this publication stronger. We look forward to hearing your constructive thoughts, suggestions and comments.

The Forum wishes you a wonderful break and a restful holiday. We promise to bring you the best in news, opinions, and insights from Claremont College students as we enter our spring semester. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading with us this fall, and we’ll see you in 2012!

President Pamela B. Gann

Nathan Falk: Thank you for meeting with me President Gann, I hope it’s all right if I start with some general questions about the “State of CMC.” What are the most important projects that you personally have been working on recently?

President Gann: Ok, yes of course. Obviously the biggest project that I’ve been dealing with for the last few months was finishing the Kravis Center and getting it ready for the beginning of school and its grand opening. It’s continuing to be a great success story, and we’ve probably gotten 95% there, but we still have some loose ends here and there that need to be dealt with.

Otherwise, to continue in the realm of buildings and grounds, our next big project is the renovation of the North Mall, which stretches from the Kravis Center all the way to Bauer. We have been working with student focus groups and ASCMC to figure out how best to preserve the aspects we love about the fountain, whether it is dropping students in on their birthdays, celebrating senior thesis accomplishments, or just having fun and hanging out on a really hot day. Student input was extremely important, and I think we have a design that would do that very well. Also, we want to enhance the seating areas and outdoor spaces along the North side of the Athenaeum to make that more of a useable daytime terrace, and also improve the South side of Emett Student Center, where the Hub is. Then, we’re moving forward with further planning for the section from Heggblade all the way to Bauer Center. Although there are no formal designs yet, one idea I like is putting a water feature where the four North Quad dorms meet. The first part of the renovation will be completed this coming summer, while the second piece has no detailed timeline right now.

The third buildings and grounds related project we’ve been working on, is the new Fitness and Athletic Center. This new space would house all our athletic facilities, but would also serve as a large events center where we could seat all students, faculty, and staff under one roof. Currently, we have no place on our campus that can house our 2000+ member community. We are beginning to review the programming for this project, and will start having fundraising conversations now that the Kravis Center is open and functional. We’ve already discussed how athletics will work during the 18-month transition period during construction, so we are ready to proceed with raising the necessary funds.

http://www.cmc.edu/civicengagement/

Transitioning to the Student Affairs and Academic arenas, our biggest project this year was to launch the Center for Civic Engagement, which brings together a lot of existing projects such as the community service internship programs, some community service projects that students have demonstrated interest for in past years, etc. But, the center is meant to pull all of those things together to make the programs more cohesive, robust, and garner broader student interest in the realm of volunteerism and service. We’re focusing on what I call “social capital,” which our country has always depended on. Whether that takes the form of voting, running for local or national office, working on campaigns, community volunteer projects, and environmental or sustainability projects, we want to be able to support students’ ventures in these areas, both domestically or abroad.

Another Student Affairs issue is library hours and study spaces. We are currently working with students on this, and although I don’t have any policy updates, Dean Hess and Dean Huang’s office are working with a student group to come up with a better solution.

Career Services and student needs are also a big focus for me. I think that currently the quality of services is excellent, but we need to increase the scale. Frankly, we’re trying to figure out how to best broaden the scale of our career services.

As for the purely academic side, in addition to conducting extensive faculty searches, our biggest single project is launching the Silicon Valley Program for next fall. Also, last year we ran several experimental models where we had students pursue international work for-credit. This is different than summer-internship credit, and much more similar to our program with Yonsei, where students study economics in South Korea, or the Jordan program, which we think is more likely to be a biennial opportunity.

CMC-Yonsei Korea Summer Program, Photo Credit: DSME Photographer

This year, we’re taking a very serious look at India. We have a faculty working group and student focus groups so that we can try to begin programs there in the areas of Technology, Business, Finance, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, not to mention culture and religious studies.

NF: Perfect, that’s quite a lot to deal with at once. Next, I’m curious, what shortcomings have you or your administration encountered in the last few months?

PG: You know, I get asked that question a lot. Just the other day at Forum for the Future, the young alumni asked, “what are your big problems,” and my answer was this: If you look at the college internally, and the things that we can affect, CMC is in a very good spot right now. The biggest single challenge is one thing you can’t control, and that’s the economy. The economy affects our financial model because our revenue comes from three sources: tuition, gifts, and returns on the endowment. So if the economy is growing very slowly, families have a harder time affording tuition, which results in more financial aid, alumni may feel more pressure about how much they’re willing to give, and then you also have lower returns on investment.

Credit: USA Today

In 2008, we had to hit the “reset” button after what happened to the economy, and the markets are just now, a few years later, about to recover everything we lost. So we haven’t gotten above the point, we’re just getting back to where we were. Still, we’ve had two years of expenditures and modest inflation, so the purchasing power isn’t back to where it was, and, since July 1, we’re looking at negative investment returns. That’s not an environment where we can take on lots of new initiatives, etc. That’s an environment where you just try to hold on to everything. So when people ask me what my biggest challenge is, it’s managing the college in such a way that we remain with forward momentum, but not in a way that makes new financial commitments that, at this point, would put financial pressure on CMC. Basically, how do we run the college, keep it moving forward, but not start anything bold or expensive, because we can’t do that in this environment.

NF: How do you want to see CMC change in the next 5 years? In the next 10 years? In the next 50?

PG: Actually, I don’t want to change CMC in the most fundamental ways. We have an incredible mission to educate leaders through the liberal arts, and I think we are accomplishing that mission. I think our students and alumni like our mission, that’s why they’re here. You had lots of choices, and why did you come to this college? I think it’s because this is the right place to be for what you wanted to accomplish while in college.

Secondly, because we’re in the consortium, we have the luxury of not having to do everything at CMC. Let’s say these are the 13 things we do really well, and there’s another 50 in Claremont. I think that’s a luxury, because we don’t have to make trade-off decisions with lots of small departments, small programs, this organization or that organization. I think this is something special to Claremont, and I wouldn’t change that. I think that we should do as much as we can to use the consortium affirmatively to make it work for us and make sure we’re a strong partner with the rest of the consortium. You were asking what we need to be doing 10 years or 50 years out, and I think we have to pay a lot of attention to the consortium. So how do we keep building those bridges and making them more and more significant and more and more distinctive in higher education?

So I think the biggest things are making sure we stay the course, and just continue to work on quality and alignment of everything we do, while building the financial resources to give us the capacity to ride out economic challenges from time to time. I personally love CMC the way it is, and just want to be able to qualitatively improve and deepen the programs we offer. For example, we fund 125-150 summer internships each year. I’d like for us to have the means to fund internships for every CMC student. I’d also like to see every CMC student provided with the opportunity to have one international experience while they are here. It could be for two weeks, it could be in January, in the summer, or for a semester.

I think we are a very innovative place and we keep testing and trying out things, and then when they work, I work to try to figure out how to scale them financially.

Me: Ok, last question. What elements of your job do you most look forward to?

President Gann: My favorite part of my job is the ability to make a difference in people’s lives every day, and I really mean this. I want every student to come here and have a life-changing experience. If I’m a young faculty member, I want him or her to find this as a very satisfactory professional home for teaching and research and identify with CMC as an institution. I feel that my primary job is to come into work every day and try to make this the best possible institution for all of the people who have chosen to be here, and I also care that our staff feels great pride in their identification with this college. What I like to do is to come into work and think somehow I’m going to make this a richer and better and more successful experience for the members of this community.

Dear Freshmen:

It seems like just yesterday that you were arriving in Claremont!  I hope you are finding your footing and beginning to feel at home at CMC.  You have made a lot of decisions and met a lot of new people in the past month.  You have probably heard a lot of advice, some of which you have followed and some which you haven’t.  I want to give you a little more and hope that it is among the advice you will follow.

Ask for help and accept help when offered:  CMC is tough.  You got into CMC so we know you have what it takes to be successful here.

It is not going to be easy.  Inevitably you will struggle from time to time; it might be a paper or exam, a class, a roommate, problems at home, financial issues, etc.  CMCers often project an air of having it all together so it may feel like you are the only one struggling.  I promise you, everyone has their moments of struggle and doubt.  The good news is CMC is filled with talented and caring faculty and staff who want to see you succeed.  The College and the consortium provide a wealth of resources.   All you have to do is ask for help.  If you don’t know who to ask, come to the Dean of Students Office.  We are here to help you navigate CMC and support you through your time here.

One last piece of advice about help….accept it when it is offered.  When your faculty member emails you because you haven’t been in class or wants to meet with you to talk about a test, etc.  Respond to their email; don’t ignore them.  The problem isn’t going to go away if you ignore it and your professor is reaching out because they want to help you.   One of the more tragic things I see in my role as Dean of Students is the student who fails because they do not accept the many offers of help they are given.

Go to breakfast: Your Mom was right – breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Plus, if you haven’t experienced the campus as it wakes up you are missing out; you would be surprised how amazing the campus is in the still quiet of the early morning.  The other benefit to getting up for breakfast is having the whole day ahead of you to study, exercise, spend time with friends, call your family, etc. Oh, and the Collins omelet bar is pretty tasty!

Go to the Ath: If you have been following these “Letters to Freshmen” you have already heard this advice but it is such good advice it cannot be said enough.  You are truly blessed to be at CMC with this special place and the amazing programs that are waiting for you there.  Few colleges offer the caliber and quantity of speakers and performers who come to the Ath.  And you get them for free.  Don’t forget to sign-up to sit at the head table.

Get to know the Center of Global Education:  I loved college and while I tried to take advantage of the rich resources provided by my alma mater I have two regrets – not going to hear Cesar Chavez speak when he was on campus (see “Go to the Ath” above) and not studying aboard.  While I don’t regret the things I did on-campus my junior year, I wish I had a global experience too.   CMC offers amazing off- campus and international opportunities including faculty lead trips, exchange programs, study abroad, sponsored internships, and the Washington DC and Silicon Valley semesters.  There is something for everyone.  You owe it to yourself to explore these options and take advantage of one.  To find out more visit the Center for Global Education located on the first floor of the Heggblade Center.

CMC is an amazing place and I hope you take advantage of all it has to offer.  I look forward to getting to know you and seeing the imprint you make on CMC.

Best wishes,

Dean Spellman

Want more “Letters to Freshmen?” Check out advice on roommate etiquette from two RAs, advice on how to keep your body happy when things get tough, advice on how to go with the flow and many others. Looking for different advice? Let us know what you are looking for in the comment section below.

This week, the tech giant revealed its latest news at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). Nobody was more aware of this than me; the company for which I work, Atlassian, was having its conference down the street and looked positively puny in comparison. We actually had to dress up as bugs to get any attention.

Apple’s WWDC conference is targeted primarily at developers (better known as the people that make your iPhone apps). Apple generally stays away from making big product announcements at this conference, saving things like the iPhone and iPad for special events. I won’t try to offer serious analysis of what was said– there are more than enough people already weighing in on that. Instead, I’ll  break down the three biggest announcements, simply and concisely for your reading pleasure:

iCloud
If you haven’t heard about “the cloud,” get ready. It’s here, and it’s everywhere. If you’ve ever used Google Docs or Dropbox, you’re already storing documents “in the cloud.” Amazon and Google have both announced music services where you can upload your music and then access it from a phone or tablet, as well as your computer. Here’s the important takeaway from WWDC: Apple’s vision for the cloud is completely different. Apple wants to make the cloud so omnipresent that you forget it’s even there.

Instead of uploading documents and then downloading them somewhere else, everything will just “be”. Documents on your computer will also be on your iPad and your iPhone. No uploading, not even saving, just there. Same with music, email, photos, and apps. It’ll all just “be there”. You don’t have to think about it. The thing to understand about iCloud is that it’s not really a product so much as a name for the way Apple will back up all your documents, music, and photos automatically. You won’t need to access any particular “cloud-based” applications because it’s built in to all the applications (iTunes, Camera Roll on iPhone, Mail, Docs, Apps, Contacts) that Apple already makes. You don’t need to buy iCloud, it’s just going to become a part of your digital life. It’s essentially the cloud for people that don’t care what the cloud is. Oh, and it’s free (mostly).

Mac OS X Lion
If you’ve bought a Mac since you started college, you’re using one of the last two Mac operating systems–”Leopard” or “Snow Leopard”. Keeping with the big cats theme, their latest effort is Lion. It includes a lot of new features, like “Mission Control”, which helps you organize your windows better. There are also full screen apps, just like your computer games back in 1999 (sorry Apple, not really impressed by that one).

Here’s the takeaway though: three features actually matter–”Resume”, autosave, and the Mac App Store. Resume means that when you exit a program, it will come back exactly the way you left it the next time you open it. That means you can keep a billion tabs open in Chrome when you’re writing your research paper, turn off your computer, and when you turn it back on, they’ll all still be there. Autosave is more of the same. Do you like how Google Docs automatically saves your work every few seconds? Now all of Apple’s desktop products will do the same. Finally, if you haven’t already started using the Mac App Store, start. Because you’re not going to get a choice soon. Apple wants to make it the sole way to get programs on your computer–just like the App Store on an iPhone or iPad. And they’re starting with Mac OS X Lion itself, which will be available in July for $30, on the App Store.

iOS 5
If you haven’t realized that smartphones run on an operating system, or that the iPhone’s operating system is known as “iOS”, then Apple is succeeding in its goal to make it so simple, you don’t even notice. iOS 5 is the next major upgrade in the software running on the iPhone. It’s not a new iPhone, it’s just an overhaul of the software that runs on the phone. While a new iPhone design will probably come out in the fall, anyone with an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 will get access to the new features in iOS 5. Takeaway? Apple took a lot of crap from technology commentators this week because a lot of the new features were eerily similar to things that Android and Blackberry users already have.

First, the “Notifications Center” mirrors Android’s in that all your notifications (messages, missed calls, Facebook pokes) can be accessed by pulling down the bar at the top of the screen. Next, iMessage is a messaging service connected  to iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touchs (which your Mom probably calls an “iTouch”…not a thing, and kind of creepy sounding). Sound a lot like BlackBerry BBM? It IS a lot like BlackBerry BBM. Will it get all those faithful BlackBerry users to ditch their PINs and join the Apple crew? We’ll see. Finally, the third biggest thing Apple did to resemble Android–you no longer need to plug your phone into your computer. Ever. You can sync everything wirelessly, buy apps wirelessly, and charge wirelessly. Just kidding: you still have to plug your phone into something to charge.  But wireless syncing has indeed arrived on the Apple iPhone scene. There are a bunch of new features that you can read about here, and they’re all going to be free.

In between all this, Apple also found time to announce plans for a giant new spaceship-like headquarters building up in Silicon Valley. But the main focus of this week in tech news, unavoidably, was WWDC. While these announcements were by far from the most exciting Apple has ever made, the innovation is certain to continue: get ready for your MacBook and iPhone to do a lot more in the near future.

Want more of Dave Meyer’s tech insight? Read his article on tech tools that simplify college life and twitter.

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.