Message from the President

It is a little tempting to take a victory lap with this column.

After all, a year ago, we were not sure what the 2020-21 academic year would look like. Would we be able to teach our students in-person, remotely or a combination of both? While we focused primarily on in-person learning as much as possible, hybrid and online delivery methods were also utilized. In all aspects of campus life we spent significant time and effort implementing a series of safety protocols designed to keep our students, faculty and staff as healthy as possible. And we succeeded.

BY ROBERT A. COONS, PRESIDENT coons@rose-hulman.edu

Thanks to our masking, social distancing, frequent testing, contact tracing, quarantining, and other policies outlined in our ever-evolving Rose Ready guidelines, (and, more importantly, our community’s compliance with those guidelines) the positivity rate for COVID-19 on our campus remained below one-half of one percent—consistently far below the national, state, and local averages. None of this means the cost of COVID-19 to our community was not high. Many of us suffered heartbreaking losses during this past year. My heart goes out to everyone for whom this year has brought immeasurable loss.

We Prospered and Improved Yet, with this spring it feels as if a new day is emerging. Vaccination rates are rising and new cases are falling. We celebrated Commencement inperson and outdoors on our beautiful new athletic field (Pages 10-12), and we are looking forward to welcoming the Class of 2020 during Homecoming this fall to celebrate in person their own graduation milestone which they did virtually in 2020. As this issue of Echoes will show, we did not merely survive the past year, we prospered and improved. Work continued on our wonderful new academic building (Pages 6-9), which is set to welcome students this fall. Our new Noblitt Scholars program enabled us to welcome dozens of passionate, diverse and dedicated first-year students to campus; two of our faculty earned Fulbright Fellowships; we launched two new programs, Rose Squared and Rose Accelerate; and we crowned yet another student Goldwater Scholar. Meanwhile, more than 530 of our alumni and friends combined to donate a record $331,709 in a single day during our 2021 annual Day of Giving. We appreciate all the continued support of our alumni as we look for a strong finish to our $250 million Mission Driven fundraising campaign for Rose-Hulman.

The institute also continued to receive votes of confidence from outside sources, including the Lilly Endowment, which awarded the AskRose Homework Help service a $1.46 million dollar grant to continue their good work and to increase our use of online technology in assisting middle

“Many of us suffered heartbreaking losses during this past year. My heart goes out to everyone for whom this year has brought immeasurable loss.”

and high school students with mathematics and science homework. The Endowment also awarded us, along with two other area institutions of higher education, $8 million to fund a new first of its kind consortium designed as a pilot program to expand access to and improve student mental health services to students on all three campuses. (See Campus News, Pages 16-19) As you will read in this issue, our alumni continue to make incredible contributions in their fields, including space exploration, auto racing, movie making, and civil engineering. And Linda and Mike Mussallem have again blessed the institute with a generous contribution, this time funding fullride scholarships for students from Mike’s native northwest region of Indiana (Page 13). We’re a Work in Progress So, yes, it is temping to take a victory lap, but we won’t. We know the work here is never completed. We are constantly striving to improve and discover new ways to fulfill our mission to deliver the world’s best science, engineering and mathematics education while giving our students the individual attention and support they each require to excel. As alumnus, former trustee and long-time friend of the institute, the late Hal Brown stated in a fine tribute he drafted to mark the 100th anniversary of his father’s graduation from Rose Polytechnic in 1921, our students and our institute will always remain a work-in-progress. In the same way that the sculpture of the Self-made Man that stands outside of our Sports and Recreation Center is incomplete, so are we all. Our desire to evolve, grow and improve never stops. So, please indulge in a little pride as you read this issue of Echoes, but remember, at Rose-Hulman, the best is always yet to come. “As you will read in this issue, our alumni continue to make incredible contributions in their fields, including space exploration, auto racing, movie making, and civil engineering.” From the President