June 18, 2018

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

Our efforts to organize a Hajim Women Alumni Network are off to a great start. Earlier this month, 25 alumni and current students joined me for an informal gathering hosted by Rachel Berg ’85 (electrical engineering) and her husband Andy at their home in Silicon Valley. Thanks so much to both of them for their hospitality! We plan to hold more gatherings on campus and in other parts of the country. In the meantime, we now have 91 members at our Hajim Women Alumni Network site at Meliora Collective, the University’s new online platform for networking and mentoring created by the Gwen M. Greene Center for Career Education and Connections and our Office of Alumni Relations.

There are two main goals:

• To engage and develop connections among alumni of the Hajim School or alumni from other schools with connections to the field of engineering who are interested in supporting and promoting women in engineering.
• To foster mentoring relationships and other connections between current women students in the Hajim School and those in the Hajim Women Alumni Network.

The latter goal is especially important to our efforts to not only recruit but retain women students in the Hajim School and help ensure they will succeed in STEM-related careers after they graduate. Women alumni, especially, can be great role models and provide invaluable advice for women students about networking, career paths, and work/life balance. The nice thing about Meliora Collective is that it makes it easy for students to ask alumni for mentoring help, but also allows alumni to set limits on how many students contact them, so they don’t feel burdened. Please check it out!

What are the limits for laser photon energies? How can we solve some of humanity’s biggest problems through new quantum technologies? These are among the tantalizing questions raised in “Light, the universe and everything – 12 Herculean tasks for quantum cowboys and black diamond skiers,” a Journal of Modern Optics paper that two of our Institute of Optics professors contributed to — Thomas Brown as editor-in-chief and Robert Boyd as co-author.  Tom hopes this look at the biggest challenges in quantum optics and optical physics will guide and inspire the next generation of researchers and be “read and studied by aspiring graduate students over the next decade.” Read more here.

Students in the Class of 2020: If you didn’t have a chance to submit your major declaration forms before the spring semester ended, this is a reminder that the process is now online and should be done by July 1 if at all possible. For more information, please contact your department’s undergraduate coordinator.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman