WEBB Magazine Feature: Smaller Colleges Offer More

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Something for everyone may mean nothing for you.

By Christopher Michno

Large universities are sometimes seen as having advantages over small colleges. Not only do they boast top-notch research facilities and world-class faculty, they usually have more majors, a club for everything, and a diverse student body—in short, they advertise endless opportunities.

But students’ experiences in college are influenced by numerous intrinsic and external factors. “It’s important to help students and families look beyond the name and prestige of the place and consider the experience they are going to have at individual institutions. It’s about what they do when they’re there, the kind of education they’ll get, and the kind of connections they’ll make during those four years,” says Anthony Shin, Webb’s associate director of college guidance.

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Emily L. Stewart

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Photo: Wyatt Albert ’17

ARTS COLLEGES

Are you the kind of student,

he asks, who is good at doing things yourself, or do you need a nudge? If you are in a class of 300 students and it’s eight in the morning, are you the type who will go, even if the professor doesn’t notice whether you’re there? Or will you sleep in? And what kind of learner are you? Do you like having close relationships with your professors?

Associate dean and director of admissions at the University of Southern California, Kirk Brennan, says that he encourages students to look past the name and think more about what is important to them when they are selecting a school.

And if students are interested in a specialized area of study, or in being immersed in a community of similarly focused people that would enhance their experience and lead to more success, they may benefit from being at a college that specializes in their chosen field, or that offers a unique community. Following are some examples of colleges that specialize: arts, business, science and engineering, and women’s colleges.

“Webb students who go on to study at arts colleges tend to be extraordinarily talented and very self-motivated,” says Webb Dean of College Guidance Hector Martinez.

After completing college, some of them head off to the art world, others go into acting or theatre, and quite a few work in design or a related business.

Parsons School of Design, one of the five colleges of The New School in New York, offers creatives a multidisciplinary approach in the creative capital of the world. Pratt Institute, also in New York, has campuses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Utica and boasts seven different schools, including three for art, architecture, and design. And the Rhode Island School of Design, which is almost literally across the street from Brown University, in Providence, R.I., is one of the most respected art schools in the world. Fun fact: It also spawned the Talking Heads.

On the opposite coast, Cal Arts in Valencia, Calif. has consistently been at the forefront of artistic production with schools for art, critical studies, dance, film/video, and music and theater. Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, with undergraduate majors in various disciplines in fine art, design, advertising, film and video, is well known for its industrial design program. Otis College of Art and Design offers a cornucopia of areas of study, including emerging fields like game and entertainment design—even toy design.

In the middle of the country, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago offers degrees in a myriad of fi ne art studio media, art history, and visual and critical studies.

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BUSINESS COLLEGES

usiness has always been a popular focus for Webb students,” says Martinez. “There are a couple of routes. Go to either a liberal arts college or a large university and study economics, which is a perfectly good way to get into business and has its merits, or go to a business school at a university or a specialty college.”

USC Marshall, NYU Stern, and the Wharton School at Penn are examples of traditional business schools at universities, and there are plenty of others to choose from. Each has its own unique character based on whether it is a public or private university and what the faculty specialize in.

And then there are the specialty colleges like Babson or Hult International, where you’re doing business 24 hours a day, Martinez says. “They do offer the diversity of other courses to sprinkle into your college experience, but there won’t be a lot of other classes that are liberal arts oriented.”

And there may be a particular focus at such a school that distinguishes it. For example, “Babson immerses you in an entrepreneurial environment, where students are going to acquire those skills and direct experience in entrepreneurship, while at other schools, it may be a much smaller part of the curriculum,” he says.

Emily Stewart’s interest in art and photography was sparked at Webb.

At the time, there were only a handful of students considering photography and art as a career. She remembers the art room as a safe haven, and was buoyed by teachers who supported her interest. “Mr. Maffris empowered me to push beyond the curriculum and practice photography on my own. I even was allowed to build my own darkroom in an old bathroom on campus,” Stewart says. It was a formative experience, and Stewart went on to The New School in New York, where she earned a dual degree. “I have a BFA in photography from Parsons School of Design and a BA in culture and media studies from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts,” she says.

Stewart is currently the manager of education and engagement programs at Aperture Foundation, a renowned non-profit photography organization based in New York. “I help create public programs that invite people into our space to experience and learn more about photography,” she says.

Her interest in art education and teaching visual literacy in the classroom also traces back to a pivotal moment at Webb—but one after she graduated. While she was in college, she returned to Webb as a summer fellow to work in a program for middle school and high school students.

One of the reasons she was hired was to teach photography classes for the program. It was a back-to-basics approach, where she taught students how to make pinhole cameras. They even set up a makeshift darkroom in the science lab. “I took the students on a field trip to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and gave them photo-based assignments,” she recalls. It was an experience that inspired her to pursue a career in art education, which she had never really considered until that summer working at Webb.

“Webb was the first place where I both succeeded and failed at organizing important events. In ASB we were responsible for Theme Week, Webb Day and International Night. While organizing these events, I quickly learned that organization and strong leadership is crucial to a successful outcome. My experiences shaped how I organize public programs at Aperture Foundation. Having the opportunity to fail and learn from those mistakes was crucial in teaching me how to improve and move forward.”

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David Albers

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David Albers is burning the midnight oil in his third and final year at UCSD as an international business major with a focus on European political science, juggling a full academic load and a full-time assistant manager position at an Amazon fulfillment center—not to mention keeping an independent business venture simmering on the back burner.

There is a deeply seated streak of curiosity combined with remarkable pragmatism that drives all of it. “The reason I’m at Amazon, in terms of management, it’s very interesting to me to use data and metrics to try to understand something, especially like human error, that is innately human and very hard to quantify with data,” he says.

He had intended to major in computer science and engineering, but what made a transition to a different major obvious was the 400-person waitlist to get into the program. If he ever looked back, he gives no indication of having done so.

He’ll stay at Amazon as long as he needs to for the management experience. He’s accepted an offer through an Amazon retention program to manage a fulfillment center once he graduates, and he hopes to move up to the corporate level.

“If I enjoy that, maybe I’ll stay longer. If not, I’d like to end up starting my own business or running a company,” he says.

Meanwhile, his business is percolating. He’s working with four Caltech students on an app that promises to revolutionize buying eyewear, with multi-brand inclusion that allows consumers to virtually try on sunglasses or frames and know exactly how they will look. What if his app becomes an overnight success? “That’s definitely been a consideration. Building a company is a lot more exciting and a lot more fun, albeit demanding, than any other experience in the world, I think. If that were the case, I’d want to spend as much time as I can on building a company,” Albers says.

“When I came to Webb, there was a club fair, and I joined 30 different clubs. Obviously that’s a ridiculous thing to do because it’s impossible to dedicate yourself to 30 different clubs and organizations. What it forced me to do was to find as many things as I was interested in and then if it really meant something to me, and I was really intrigued by it, I would stick it out. What happened was that I whittled those 30 down to four. Two of those were tech related and the other two were about entrepreneurship and leadership. That told me this is where I want to go in my future, this is what my career path should be, and this is where I should be focusing my energy.”

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SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING Engineering is one of the top three projected undergraduate majors for students at Webb, according to Martinez. As is true with other types of schools, there are substantial differences between those that specialize in science and engineering.

Harvey Mudd College in Claremont offers a curriculum that makes it unique among undergraduate colleges focused on math, science and engineering. Students complete a core curriculum in all six of its disciplines (math, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and engineering), enabling them to develop a breadth of knowledge across the sciences, mathematics, and engineering fields, before specializing in their major.

Courses in critical inquiry and writing are also part of the core for the development of strong communication skills. Director of admissions at Harvey Mudd Peter Osgood, says that students who are interested in Harvey Mudd tend to be excited about the requirements for breadth of study in the sciences, math, and engineering, and who also have an appetite for the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, which carries its own breadth of study requirements.

Engineering schools typically narrowly focus in engineering disciplines. For example, Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass., offers three engineering majors. But within that narrow focus, the college’s philosophy is to broadly educate students so that they are well equipped to answer not only the how of their profession, but the larger question of why.

The Webb Schools: A Curriculum that Is College Ready Webb’s interdisciplinary curriculum is designed to prepare students to think critically and engage with the world in complex and nuanced ways.

According to Dr. Theresa Smith, Webb’s assistant head of schools, two factors undergird the schools’ innovative curriculum: a group of amazing and remarkably talented faculty that is well equipped to develop engaging, relevant and academically rigorous new course offerings, and Webb’s unique setting, positioned on the front porch of Los Angeles and in proximity to some excellent institutions of higher education—namely the Claremont Colleges. Webb’s proximity to the Claremont Colleges has fostered the development of new partnerships, further enriching the educational experience for Webb students.

One of those partnerships is with the Pomona College chemistry department, which Smith notes enables Webb’s organic chemistry students to use the Pomona chemistry lab and to participate in some of the college’s programming. And the fact that Webb faculty can develop curricula that align with their areas of expertise and their interests, results in an innovative curriculum that is responsive and vital while aligning with Webb’s core learning goals. For example, Smith says, one of the new courses created by Webb faculty, Advanced Studies Gothic and Horror Literature and Culture, ties in directly with emerging discourse in the New York Times and elsewhere on the resurgence of horror as a literature genre. “It’s an example of how we are able to develop a course that is relevant and timely, but also steeped in an intellectual humanities tradition.”

Theresa Smith ASSISTANT HEAD OF SCHOOLS THE WEBB SCHOOLS

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The Webb Schools: Unbounded Days Come Alive Another of Webb’s innovative learning environments that complements the regular curriculum is Unbounded Days, a five-day immersive learning program launched every two years. Students can choose from a diverse catalog of offerings. Dr. Tracy Miller, director of studies, calls it “the realization of our wildest aspirations about experiential learning connected to our environment.” One example is a marine ecology course led by science and humanities faculty on Catalina Island. Students immerse themselves in the Island’s habitats, through scuba diving and hiking, as they learn about Catalina’s natural history through direct experience. Miller says, “That connection between being in a place and using the place as a springboard to deeper academic inquiry is central to the academic experience at Webb.”

Unbounded Days widens students’ horizons and amplifies their sense of what inquiry looks like, so they realize that learning happens not just in a textbook, or behind a desk, or in a classroom, but that opportunities for authentic learning can happen everywhere.

We hope that it broadens our students’ sense of resources, so that if in a classroom they are tasked with a research assignment, or any kind of a project, that they begin to have a more expansive sense of how they might go about answering that or where they might look for answers. I want our graduates to love learning, and I think that a Webb education in general helps them do that, and Unbounded Days is just a magnification of that rich experiential way to learn by doing. The Unbounded Days courses are really small and they’re highly collaborative, and so it gives students the opportunity to practice collaboration, problem solving, and getting to know new groups of people. There is something serendipitous that happens when you put a random group of kids together and take them off campus,” Miller says.

Tracy Miller DIRECTOR OF STUDIES THE WEBB SCHOOLS

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WOMEN’S COLLEGES According to Martinez, the Vivian Webb School sends more young women to the most prestigious women’s colleges than any other school in the western United States. On average almost 20 percent of VWS’s graduating classes have matriculated to women’s colleges for each of the past 20 years.

There are many reasons to seriously consider a women’s college. According to the Women’s College Coalition, women’s colleges are more likely to have smaller classes, more opportunities for collaboration, a strong emphasis on developing communication skills, and undergraduate research and internships.

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lot of the time there is a perception of women’s colleges that is associated with vestiges of the past. There is an idea that they are very traditional, that there are no men around at all,” says Christina Lopez, dean of admissions at Barnard College. “But at Barnard, we teach from a gender equitable perspective.”

Cross-registration between Columbia University and Barnard, which is one of the four undergraduate colleges of Columbia University, means that Barnard students take courses with other Columbia students and vice versa.

Bijan Garcia-Dehbozorgi

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; Three years ago, Bijan Garcia-Dehbozorgi and his uncle and fellow

Webb alumnus Pedro Garcia’ 88 developed a concept for a new beverage company: Agualucha—aguas frescas with a Luchador theme. But they weren’t interested in producing just any aguas frescas—at least, not the kind typically available at local burrito stands.

“What we’ve found is that the majority of aguas frescas are produced from powders or syrups, and a lot of fountain drinks are being called aguas frescas. So we took it upon ourselves to make it right by our culture,” he says—noting that he’s half-Mexican and also half-Persian.

“Growing up, we were inclined to work with food,” he says. “Pedro has a background in organic and Hispanic food, and investment banking.

Bringing together our experiences, we started from the ground up: what does it mean to be Mexican. What does it mean to drink aguas frescas?

How are you supposed to drink aguas frescas? What kinds of foods do you drink it with?”

Garicia-Dehbozorgi’s Agualucha is a kind of fruit-infused water, made from real fruit, like the aguas frescas he and his cousins remember drinking at home while growing up. “Sourcing the ingredients is the hardest part,” he says. They work directly with suppliers from Mexico and Africa for hibiscus, Mexico and Thailand for tamarindo, and Florida and California for citrus. “Every time we’d get a batch of ingredients, we’d make a small production run to test it: how would it turn out if we ran 10 bottles, 20 bottles, 100 bottles?”

Where does the luchador theme fit in? Garcia-Dehbozorgi’s great uncle was a wrestler in Mexico in the 1950s, who wrestled with perhaps the most famous Mexican wrestler of all: the legendary El Santo.

Agualucha sells mainly to the gourmet food and taco trucks that crisscross Los Angeles. Perhaps most importantly, at least for the street cred of the brand, Agualucha is available on Roy Choi’s truck—the chef who is credited with starting the food truck craze. But they have plans to develop a shelf-stable product and their goal is to make it available in supermarkets in 2019.

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Abhishek Mantha

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Abhishek Mantha is an avid sci-fi fan. He’s long been inspired by the stories of Isaac Asimov, not only because they are immensely entertaining and thought-provoking, but for how the prominent writer influenced the field of robotics. Now, since becoming part of the autonomous car industry, Mantha has listened with fascination to thought leaders’ proposals because “it’s the stuff of science fiction—but it’s quickly becoming a reality.”

As an engineer with Mercedes Benz Research and Development, North America, Mantha is part of a team working to develop fully autonomous vehicles. The goal is to mimic how the human brain is able to gather realtime information and estimate where other vehicles might be in the next second or two—which is something humans are able to do “very, very quickly.”

Developing that technology, Mantha says, “has proven to be a significant challenge.” His work is to take data received from a variety of sensor inputs like cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and LiDAR, a radar-like technology that emits beams of light millions of times per second, and synthesizes it into something resembling a three-dimensional model of the various stationary and moving objects around a vehicle.

It’s an exciting project for him not only for the immediate goal of engineering a fully autonomous car, but also for the possibilities in related design advances it could open up. For example, he says, you can apply similar ways of thinking to the challenges of redesigning cities.

Autonomous vehicles make it possible to replace parking space with green space and to re-grow ecosystems.

Mantha began thinking about working in the autonomous car industry toward the end of his junior year at USC, when he began working with a USC professor on vehicle-to-vehicle communication. He now has the opportunity to work with some of the world’s foremost experts in vehicle safety, design and robotics.

“For a lot of students who are looking for a liberal arts college because they want to be part of a really strong community, that is a huge factor at a women’s college,” says Lopez. “Being in a room full of women who have made a very conscious decision to be a part of these communities, who want to be surrounded by other women who inspire them, who are going to support them and encourage them in whatever their endeavors are, creates a very close-knit community.”

Barnard’s faculty is tenured at both Barnard and Columbia, she says, and professors teach at both institutions.

Women’s colleges popular with Webb graduates include Barnard, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Scripps and Mills colleges. Mt. Holyoke and Smith are part of a five-college consortium that includes the co-ed Amherst and Hampshire colleges and UMass Amherst, which are all within a 12-mile radius and are connected by a free bus service. Scripps College is part of the Claremont Consortium, five contiguous undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions.

The Women’s College First and foremost, people tend to forget that women’s colleges were formed as an act of resistance to higher education, which was the province of white males. Our mission of educating women was an act of resistance at the time, and still we see that as a focal point of empowering women who were excluded from the landscape of higher education. And even though many schools are co-ed now, there is this sense of strength and support and encouragement and confidence that comes from attending a women’s college. Sometimes it’s just not in the water at a lot of those schools that weren’t designed for women in the first place.

At a women’s college, all you see around you are women leading. Many of the roles at the college, administrative roles, are also led by women as well.

And so you start to see different types of women leading, with different identities, different leadership styles. The prevailing feeling is, okay, well if she can do it then I can do it. There is a sense of mentorship. There is a sense of understanding the characteristics that embody leadership rather than it just being synonymous with a title.

Christina Lopez DEAN OF ADMISSION BARNARD COLLEGE

Elena R. Scott-Kakures

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Elena Scott-Kakures has always had a deep interest in foreign aff airs, and as an undergraduate at Wellesley she took advantage of numerous international opportunities, from travel and study to fellowships and internships.

“One of my favorite parts of my Webb experience was being able to form friendships with people from around the world, from diverse backgrounds and cultures,” she says. Many of her college friends were international students, and she believes she developed her interest in cultivating those friendships as a result of her experience at Webb.

She now works for AMIDEAST, a private non-profit Washington, D.C.based organization with a mission to foster mutual understanding and strengthen ties between the peoples of the U.S. and the Middle East and North Africa region. AMIDEAST conducts development projects and administers exchange programs, and in her role there Scott-Kakures manages the Fulbright Foreign Student Program on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. And occasionally, she is able to use her Arabic language skills.

Her work involves a lot of communication with U.S. embassies, state representatives, field offices and other stakeholders, and she conducts research on U.S. graduate programs, develops budgets, issues immigration documents and monitors Fulbright grantee statuses.

Over the last two years Scott-Kakures has volunteered her time to serve as an advocate for the DC Rape Crisis Center’s Hotline.

During that time, she says, “I gained insight into the challenges that organizations like this face, and was able to attend a court hearing advocating for survivors.” Additionally, she learned about providing support for those who have experienced trauma, and more broadly about how people can impact their communities positively in a variety of ways. She says, “Sometimes just picking up the phone and providing support is what someone needs.”