Reporting for duty, Captain!

Chief Science Officer on a starship.  That would be my career goal if I were starting my college education now.  If somebody were to ask me about what would be a worthy career goal as a way of selecting courses for college study, that's what I would say:  Aspire to be the Chief Science Officer on board a starship.  That should really stimulate the conversation.  Let the imagination run wild!

So what if science isn't for everybody?  (Not to mention traveling on a starship; more on that later.)  There are some who would say that college isn't for everybody.  Respectfully, I disagree on that last one, and I would restate the proposition in this way:  College has something for everybody.

In front of me is a list of over sixty vocational goals that can benefit from college education.  Here's a sampling:  accounting; advertising; architecture; aviation maintenance; business; child development; construction trades; computer science; culinary arts; creative writing; engineering; geography; health science; horticulture; interior design; journalism; medicine; music; nursing; physical sciences; pre-law; psychology; sociology; teaching; theater.



The list comes from the scholarship application at Long Beach City College (LBCC).  LBCC is one of California's community colleges; it currently educates over 30,000 students every year.  The Long Beach City College Foundation (LBCCF) awards scholarships to LBCC students.  I have a small volunteer role in the Foundation (if you go to the Foundation's web site and look hard enough you will find my name).

Earlier today I participated with others from the Foundation in a work session to evaluate some of the 800 or so current applications for merit scholarships to be awarded by LBCCF.  My assignment was to read and score eighteen applications; this required almost three hours since each one includes the student's autobiographical essay, as well as--in many cases--faculty recommendation letters.  A small number of the applications were probably pounded out in less than an hour; most looked as if they required several hours of the student's time.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for a good story, but you should know that some of those autobiographical essays were very touching and inspiring.

LBCC is what I will call an immigrant-heavy campus.  My batch of applications included students whose origins included Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, Central America and Egypt.  A few were born in the United States, including one who identified himself as being of Lebanese parentage.  Some--not just the naturalized citizens or holders of permanent visas--told hardship stories.  Ages ranged from 20 (one showed an age of 16 years, but after reading the entire application I have to conclude that was the result of an online keyboard entry error and the likely true age was 26) up to 70.

Common themes emerged in the applicants' statements about themselves.  The younger ones were mostly about gaining education to help them attain their career ambitions.  (At least one or two sounded like they had potential to become chief science officers; wish that I could tell them that!)  The older ones were largely working to transition into second careers, or were trying to make up for lost time by getting the education that had been previously beyond reach due to decades of adult responsibilities.

As I said earlier, college education has something for everybody.

There is no face-to-face meeting with these scholarship applicants; that's not part of the process.  But we have their enrollment histories, including transcripts of courses taken and grades received, as well as next-semester enrollment in courses at LBCC, so there's plenty of objective and validated information that is included in our evaluations.

I think that Long Beach City College is far from being unique as an institution of higher education that serves large numbers of students who could use some help.  Reading the stories written by these students gives me a great appreciation for how fortunate I was during my college education.  The deck was stacked in my favor.  That's not the case for a lot of college students today.

Providing scholarships to community college students is a great thing to do.  The payoffs--whether more or less concrete and pragmatic--are local.  Simply put, the resulting college education helps people to do stuff better.

Now, about that starship.  There aren't any.  Not yet.  Nonetheless, a person who prepares to be chief science officer on board a starship will learn much--physical sciences; biological sciences; computer science; mathematics; and disciplines such as history, languages and sociology--that can be used in other vocations while waiting for that starship to be built.  One way or another, the end result is a good career.  If in time Fortune should not just smile, but actually start grinning from ear to ear, then perhaps a dream would be realized, too. 

On that particular subject, here's another educational organization that's a favorite of mine:  Friends of Amateur Rocketry (FAR).  These folks operate a first-class, well-managed and energetic launch site for testing of rockets commonly used in all sorts of scholastic programs.  The site is located in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, nearby to Edwards Air Force Base and the town of Mojave with its space-oriented businesses.  Check out FAR at its web site.

This is not to say that anybody at FAR is working on a starship or on anything to do with deep space travel.  But they get a lot of college students out there at the rocket site; I wouldn't be surprised if most of those students are thinking about space travel.  Would you?

Yes, I know, a starship is a wild thought.  But there was a time when suggesting faster-than-a-running-horse travel was a wild thought, too.