A Guest to the Board of Trustees Meeting
I was invited to be a guest to a Caltech Board of Trustees Meeting this past Monday morning. The meeting itself was for the Student Experience Committee focusing on undergraduate admissions. Since I’ve been involved in almost everything there is to Caltech Admissions…I guess my presence at the meeting was to field questions and speak about the roles of students and involvement with admissions. So I joined the Admissions Office, Financial Aid Office and Center for Diversity representatives in their presentation to the Trustees. The meeting was 2 hours in the morning, and had a ton of people on the Board of Trustees and other important people from our campus such as President Chameau, Vice Provost Melany Hunt (also my advisor), Dean Hall, VP of Student Affairs Annelia Sargent, etc etc. It was a definitely a VIP crowd gathered in the Millikan Board Room.
I have never been in this room before—though I’ve seen it all the time. It’s the hexagonal shaped room connected to Millikan Library on the Pond…
I was super excited to have FINALLY been in the board room—with the fancy chandelier illuminating the room…and also the very elaborate continental breakfast set out for the meeting.
The meeting was really interesting—since we talked about outreach efforts of the admissions office, financial aid, retention and graduation of students. There were a lot of data and statistics presented…and of course, a lot of questions, issues, concerns and suggestions from the Trustees.
I spoke in the meeting specifically on my role as a student reader and a tour guide, and also the student experience at Caltech. It was great to speak about the experience I’ve had with the admissions process on multiple levels to the Board, and got good feedback on the efforts. This experience was very cool—and it was such a great opportunity to see how Caltech is run behind the scenes—or rather “in the hexagonal board room.”
