Transformational.
That’s how Glen Miles, one of the original Summer Honors Program attendees in 1978 describes it.
“Life has many transformational experiences, but none were as pivotal for me as those encountered at the first year of SHP. We came as small town youth with limited expectations of what was achievable in the wider world. The first SHP experience gave me an entirely new set of horizons and feeling of community with fellow academically inclined peers,” Miles said.
Astronomy was the first class he took and even though his mother proudly proclaimed it “astrology” when bragging on him and the class may have decided running and sliding into the portable igloo planetarium was the best way to enter, he loved his time spent talking about black holes and reciting the mantra “follow the curve of the big dipper’s handle to arc to Arcturus, then spike to Spica.”
Miles learned from instructor Steve Pompea, who had a diverse scientific background, the wisdom that most of the great advances in science happen at the intersection of multiple disciplines — “the truth of which was made very evident to me throughout my career in the semiconductor industry.”
Glen said it was from social science instructor Doug Walters that he learned to examine his own biases.
“He brought us all together in “games” which were in reality lessons in the foibles of sheepishly following the social conventions about human potential and wealth inequality. Although the games were rigged, the lessons that human value has many measures and wealth leverages wealth are as true today as they were then.”
Glen recently retired from GlobalFoundries semiconductor manufacturing, in the New York Hudson River Valley where he worked for 20 years. Before that, he worked at IBM Microelectronics in Vermont. When he moved to New York he ended up moving close to his best SHP friend, John Groen. They live closer today than they did when they attended SHP.
“Small world, eh?”
He’s also “returned” to Summer Honors as a guest speaker in Jonathon Irons’ Computer Science class.
Taking his turn at transforming the educational path of other SHP students.
Students and instructors at the first Summer Honors Program.