July 2008, Vol. 5 No. 3
Cover Story: A Chance of a Lifetime
Sandra Timmons laughs over the speakerphone from her Manhattan office as she talks about how happy she is in her job. She's president of A Better Chance, a nonprofit that develops educational opportunities for talented and promising African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students. "I have to tamp it down a bit," she says of her exuberance. It seems like whenever she gets to the point where she has mastered the challenges of a position enough to enjoy what she's doing, enough to feel like she could be happy staying there indefinitely, well, that's exactly when someone comes along and tries to tempt her away.
Five years...
Read MoreIn This Issue
July 2008, Vol. 5 No. 3
It's summertime, which means school is out, but come next fall some high school students will have the chance of a lifetime, thanks to alumna Sandra Timmons, the subject of our cover story. As for the past school year, Carnegie Mellon had some BMOC's. Check out our exclusive online coverage of commencement speaker Al Gore and the "Farewell Tour" lecture by Bill Gates. The issue is packed with more thrills, too, so charge your laptop battery, head to the beach, and be inspired by our July issue.
Off the Market
Chester Spatt impacted nearly every area of securities law in his role as chief economist and director of the Office of Economic Analysis at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last fall, he returned to Carnegie Mellon and resumed his research and teaching at Tepper, where his students received some unexpected lessons.
Role Model
When computers are wrong, lives can hang in the balance and billions of dollars can be at stake. To find the most hidden bugs in computer systems, Edmund Clarke developed a method called Model Checking. The result exceeded his expectations by 10120 power and led to the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computer science.
Pop! Goes the Artist
In the 1940s a Pittsburgh resident enrolled at what would eventually become Carnegie Mellon University. The student, Andy Warhol, would go on to become an artist who helped establish the pop art genre. When Burton Morris enrolled at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, history had a way of repeating itself.