LETTER from the Dean

Dear Parents —
On the 3rd of November, I enjoyed meeting many of you and your family members during New Student Parents' Day. I hope that you found the sessions on Life at Caltech, Freshman Core Courses, Financial Aid and Career Development productive. Our lunch at the Athenaeum featured a talk by Vice Provost Melany Hunt and a performance by the Caltech Glee Clubs, which included several freshmen and first-year graduate students.

New Student Parents' Day has been only one of the events that have kept everyone here busy so far this month. As described in an accompanying article, our first-ever olive harvest was held November 2nd. That’s me in the top photo of the article dropping olives into a 5-gallon bucket, which took over two hours to fill. Some of the olives were put through a two-stage press that had been designed by students, and the liquid produced was centrifuged in a chemistry lab with time to spare for the oil to be served at dinner that evening.

The movie Quantum Hoops, a full-length documentary about the Caltech men’s basketball team, opened at a local theater here in Pasadena at the start of November and played for two weeks. The movie is definitely worth seeing, and I hope other theaters around the country will follow suit. Also look for the 2-hour PBS documentary Curious, featuring some outstanding Caltech researchers and their projects (see accompanying article), which is now showing on public television nationwide. On November 15th, prior to the first airing in the western U.S., the producers were on campus to show clips and tell the story behind this major work.

The Career Development Center held its first "geek to chic" event on November 14th, intended to give students tools to use in their life beyond Caltech ... click to full article