Dear Honors Alumni Friends,

Our intended newsletter for the New Year has become a letter at the close of the academic year. We were caught up in the busyness of things, rather like Honors students trying to finish their theses! Okay, okay, I know this is not the best of comparisons, but it has been an extremely busy and hectic spring nevertheless—also per usual quite a productive one.

We have included some of the highlights from the year in the articles--this year’s HP200 course which may have more lasting impact than any sophomore problem solving course to date, the MatLab/SAP experiment, and the three Goldwaters. Behind these stories, there are substories and curiosities. For example, all of our academic initiatives this year have two underlying purposes: 1) to strengthen the problem solving component of Honors courses and to enhance the way each course prepares students for the ones to come, and 2) to provide much more feedback and instruction on communication skills. This last goal is something that Honors students told us last year that we needed to improve on. Good goals, the kind that take lots of day-to-day effort, but not the kind that make for easily tellable stories.

So let me turn instead to the curiosities, or better yet, the interestingly and enduringly satisfying moments behind such stories. Take for example some involving Chris Smalt who was an internal applicant for a Goldwater, but whose application was not chosen to be among the four that Clarkson was allowed to submit. His thesis project, a computer program that will identify musical instruments (a project comparable to designing his own speech recognition program), unites his two passions—music and computing. It is a brave and risky topic, since there is no one at Clarkson who does this kind of work (in fact, he has two thesis advisors, his trumpet professor at Crane, and Professor Ortmeyer). For reasons too complicated to explain here, his Goldwater application was similarly risky, requiring a great time commitment and holding small odds for success. I am as proud of and for Chris as I am for the awardees, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him on his application. He invited me to the Crane Orchestra’s spring concert (he is the second seated trumpeter, a remarkable achievement for a Clarkson junior computer engineer). It was great, particularly a Sibelius symphony that had some wonderful trumpet sections in it, and I can still see the look on his face while he played them.

Or let me share some involving Justin Ricci. Justin’s thesis was so good that the reviewer who did not know the Honors Program said that if it was the work of an Master’s student it was extraordinary and, if it were the work of a Ph.D. student, it was still very good, although might require a week or two more work. Quite an achievement, but equally memorable to me is the evening last summer he called me into the seminar room to hear a cut from a Montreal band, Arcade Fire, that he thought would remind of my wife Kristin or the day about a month ago when he brought the trophies the Concrete Canoe Team won this year for finishing first at regionals (for the first time ever). The emotional resonance of such memories is the heart of the heart of the Honors stories that I most think about.

We hope to do better in the future in making our alumni newsletter more regular (our goal for now is three times a year). The accomplishments and stories accumulate even faster.

As always,

David Craig

P.S. In the rush of things, we’re already looking ahead to fall orientation and to its alumni session, which will occur this year on Friday, August 25. If you would be free to help us out with this, please let me know.

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