Ford Hall Opening, Smith College

On October 16th, a crisp fall day, my alma mater, Smith College, opened its new Science and Engineering center, Ford Hall. Built with a recession-defying budget of $76 million, the building represents the college’s ambitions to house 21st century disciplines at a large scale.

On the panel at the inauguration were several alumnae, including Dr. Laura Worth, Associate Professor and Center Medical Director for the Children’s Cancer Hospital at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (one of the best in the world) who studied biochemistry at Smith and was mentored by Prof. Stan Scordilis.

I was on the panel representing Computer Science, a discipline that was hot in my student days, but has been seeing a declining level of interest in America of late due to offshoring. This, by the way, is not just at Smith, but also elsewhere, including MIT.

As I was talking to professors about what strategies they were adopting to attract students to the department, I learned that at nearby Hampshire College (where Smith students are allowed take courses, as they are at Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Umass), a faculty named Chris Perry is teaching animation to full classrooms. Prior to coming to Hampshire, Perry was an animation software engineer and technical director at both Pixar Animation Studios and Rhythm & Hues Studios in California, and has an M.S. in media arts and sciences from MIT. His B.A., in physics and astronomy, is from Amherst College.

I also learned that Carnegie Mellon is offering courses and degrees in game design.

In my college and university days, we studied digital circuits, computer architecture, networks, VLSI design, and such. But increasingly, career opportunities that made those topics attractive have become less so. On the other hand, graphics and animation, artificial intelligence, human-computer interface, and other less nerdy, but more left brain – right brain combination topics have become popular, opening up exciting career prospects.

Open problems are many – can you make Pixar quality films for 1/10 the cost? Can you design virtual worlds that have all the depth of character and story elements that a Harry Potter franchise has? How about an iPod or iPhone -esque consumer product that makes consumers salivate? And in educational technology, can you make it interesting for children to go into a virtual world inside the human brain, or under the sea, and learn with addictive curiosity?

I imagine, at all colleges and universities, professors and department chairs are coming up with interesting ways to reposition their curriculums. If there are readers among you with interest or experience in this topic, please chime in. It is one of great interest to me.

ps. And irrelevant as it may be, here is a picture from my visit to New England to be at Smith after 12 years. I took this in Vermont.