A large part of our leadership development efforts centers around giving our students important responsibilities and expecting them to act like leaders. Good examples of this are our student-led Clinic projects and the HMC Honor Code—students have key roles in administering both. Another example is our HMC 2020 grants competition. This year, as the result of generous donations from our trustees, we were able to commit $100,000 to projects that respond to our strategic planning goals. We invited proposals from all members of the community for grants of up to $5,000. We received 53 proposals and were able to fund 29 of them (Reports on these will run in the summer Bulletin.). Perhaps unsurprisingly for HMC, more than one-third of the successful proposals were submitted by students.

Another aspect of leadership development at HMC involves providing students with access to role models through programs like the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Visiting Professors in Leadership and Management lecture series. This program brings leaders from industry, government and non-profit institutions to campus for a day-long visit that includes attending Clinic presentations, teaching a class and giving a public lecture about tough decisions they have made during their career. Last year’s series included Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin; Judy Estrin, serial entrepreneur and former CTO of Cisco; Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering at Google; and Jeff Wilke, senior vice president of Amazon.com. This year’s speakers include Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel; Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of research at Yahoo; and John Benediktsson ’01 CEO and co-founder of Financial Asset Trading and Technology of California. In addition to enabling student and faculty interactions with some of the most influential people in science and technology, the Annenberg series introduces these leaders to the extraordinary people and learning environment at HMC.

Some leadership development takes place through courses and workshops explicitly designed for that purpose. In addition to Jay Prag’s course Approaches to Leadership, Dean of Students Jeanne Noda annually teaches The Seven Habits for Highly Successful College Students. Alumna Michele McCarthy ’89/90 has arranged for and co-taught a leadership course called BootCamp several times, including this year.

Many of our students’ leadership development opportunities arise through other curricular activities. Academic courses across all disciplines regularly require students to develop a wide variety of important skills including self-knowledge, teamwork, communication, organization and accountability. The Integrative Experience course requirement helps students synthesize these skills by combining different perspectives on technology and society.

On the other hand, many students and alumni will tell you that they learned most about leadership through co-curricular activities, whether as a proctor or student orientation leader, organizing a club or playing a sport. One of the most successful co-curricular programs for leadership development was the Bates Program offered at HMC from 1962 to 1990. This two-year program, involving about eight students each year, included aeronautics instruction and pilot training at Brackett Airport in two Cessna 172 aircraft. Although the program only took students about 60 percent of the way toward gaining a pilot’s license, most of the participants eventually completed their flight training and continue to fly regularly today. Bates alumni talk to me often about how the program impacted their lives. They tell me about how it taught them discipline and developed their confidence and leadership abilities. They point out that Batesers are an unusually high fraction of our most distinguished alumni (Astronaut Stan Love ’87 is one of them.), and tell me how much they learned about life from Iris and Howard Critchell. Over the last few months, many Mudders have been thinking about how HMC might recreate a program similar to the Bates Program for our current students. Together with Iris and Critch, a group of Batesers gathered March 7–9 to explore this possibility (See a report about their discussions on page 4.). Their workshop was one of the many important initiatives funded through the HMC 2020 fund.

Our students are not the only people at HMC working to hone their leadership skills. I’ve been fortunate to have a wonderful team of faculty, staff and trustees who have helped me adjust to the differences between being a dean of engineering at Princeton to being president at Harvey Mudd College. The experience has deepened my understanding of HMC and made me even more appreciative of our extraordinary college.