Ever wonder what it's like to stroll through the palisades while chatting with a university president? Well, prepare to experience just that as we journey with Dr. David Munson, the president of Rochester Institute of Technology. Our engaging conversation meanders through the twists and turns of his remarkable career, from his time at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan to his current role at RIT, reflecting the path we tread - both geographically and intellectually.
We delve into the diverse world of RIT and its unique blend of STEM and performing arts, and we explore the historical significance of Rochester and the Hudson River. Listen in as we navigate the complexities of university boards of trustees, and the business acumen required for the success of an institution. Our discussion also touches on climate change, an issue that is as pressing now as ever before. We share insights into the creation of the Climate Exchange organization, and ponder on our individual and collective roles in addressing this global concern.
Throughout our hike, our conversation veers off into intriguing paths, touching on career choices, altruism, and the often misunderstood correlation between happiness and wealth. As we reflect on our experiences, we also discuss the importance of passion in achieving personal and professional goals. This vibrant episode concludes on a contemplative note, emphasizing the importance of humility. Join us in this enlightening journey, a walk in the great outdoors that offers more than just a breath of fresh air. You're sure to come away with new perspectives and perhaps, a renewed sense of purpose.
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Ever wonder what it's like to stroll through the palisades while chatting with a university president? Well, prepare to experience just that as we journey with Dr. David Munson, the president of Rochester Institute of Technology. Our engaging conversation meanders through the twists and turns of his remarkable career, from his time at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan to his current role at RIT, reflecting the path we tread - both geographically and intellectually.
We delve into the diverse world of RIT and its unique blend of STEM and performing arts, and we explore the historical significance of Rochester and the Hudson River. Listen in as we navigate the complexities of university boards of trustees, and the business acumen required for the success of an institution. Our discussion also touches on climate change, an issue that is as pressing now as ever before. We share insights into the creation of the Climate Exchange organization, and ponder on our individual and collective roles in addressing this global concern.
Throughout our hike, our conversation veers off into intriguing paths, touching on career choices, altruism, and the often misunderstood correlation between happiness and wealth. As we reflect on our experiences, we also discuss the importance of passion in achieving personal and professional goals. This vibrant episode concludes on a contemplative note, emphasizing the importance of humility. Join us in this enlightening journey, a walk in the great outdoors that offers more than just a breath of fresh air. You're sure to come away with new perspectives and perhaps, a renewed sense of purpose.
Contribute to the granola bar fund :)
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All right, dr David Munson, are you okay with being recorded on a podcast? Yes, I am. There goes that liability. This is I Took a Hike. I'm your host, darren Mass, founder of Business Therapy Group and Parktime Wilderness Philosopher. Here we step out of the boardrooms and home offices and into the great outdoors where the hustle of entrepreneurship meets the rustle of nature. In this episode, we journey along the palisades with Dr David Munson, the president of Rochester Institute of Technology. Hike along with us as we find a source of inspiration in a charismatic leader who believes in the potential of education and collaborative thinking. Join us as we discuss the importance of embracing fun and establishing a solid organizational structure for the success of any institute. When I Took a Hike with Dr David Munson this episode is sponsored by Business Therapy Group Book your session with me at businesstherapygroupcom to break free from the entanglement of employees, processes and growth. Take action now and book your first session. So this is a full circle opportunity for me because you are the newest and latest president of the college. I went to Rochester Institute of Technology. Yes, sir. So we're going to learn all about that. We are on the palisades, on the long trail, and we are looking at the bedrock granite that made up Manhattan and you can see why Manhattan is so sturdy and stable, even though it's sinking all the way. At the bottom and the southernmost point it's not sinking anywhere else.
Speaker 2:Good, you are much taller than me. How tall are you? Six, five and a half, wow, okay.
Speaker 1:That is much taller than me. So what brought you to Rochester Institute of Technology?
Speaker 2:That's a great question, because I had a long career as just a regular faculty member at the University of Illinois and I was a student in electrical engineering and often got approached about administrative positions, especially at other universities, and kind of resisted that because I was very, very happy where I was. But at some point each day started to look a little too similar to the day before it. So I moved to the University of Michigan after 24 years as a regular faculty member at Illinois and I moved just as a department chair, chair of electrical engineering and computer science, and I loved that job and thought I might actually retire perhaps in that position. But two years after I was hired the Dean of Engineering who had hired me said, dave, it's a little bit awkward, but I'm leaving to join another university as their provost. And I said, well, steve, that's okay, I'm really really happy here. So that was all great, yeah. And they of course launched a dean search immediately and I was giving absolutely no thought of being a dean of engineering. I was just a brand new department chair but some of my colleagues kind of pushed me off the cliff. Kind of cliffs like these it's a pretty steep stretch, yeah, and so I threw my hat in the ring at the last minute, ended up being dean of engineering at Michigan for 10 years, and that changed everything, because once you're in the dean role, you no longer had time to do research or teach and the kind of things I had done. But I had a chance to make some bigger things happen, and I will get around to answering your question. By the way, the views here are amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the views are amazing. That's the beauty of hiking you get a few moments to actually breathe in nature.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it makes your head clear.
Speaker 2:Do you want me to take a really cool picture? Well, and it's neat to see this so close to New York City.
Speaker 1:Oh and, by the way, the best view of New York City is outside of New York City.
Speaker 2:When I was a little kid Look at that my family camped in Palisades Park, right in this area, so that we could attend the 1964 World's Fair, and I haven't been back here since then the one with the Shea Stadium right that big thing that has been erected forever, that's never being torn down in Queens. That may be because actually I was a kid at the time, so I don't even know exactly where the fair was. So it was Queens, new York, but it was in Queens In.
Speaker 1:Queens, they erected these big, tall towers for the World's Fair.
Speaker 2:I remember a number of the pavilions from the different major corporations, which was awesome, but we were staying out here. I did not grow up in a wealthy family and we could afford to camp, but we couldn't afford to stay in hotels, and it's been a while since I've been back here, so it's actually interesting to me to get to know somebody who has actually been in the.
Speaker 1:World's Fair I passed those two towers hundreds, if not thousands of times in my life growing up in Long Island. You have to pass those to get to New York City and I've always wondered what they were, found out what they were, but I've never met anyone that actually saw them in real life, in operation, that is.
Speaker 2:And, as I said, I still remember some of the pavilions that were erected by some of the major corporations in the United States. Well, back to my story anyway, so at the University of Michigan. So I was Dean of Engineering for 10 years. They have a 10-year limit on Dean terms there.
Speaker 1:And so I stepped down.
Speaker 2:I decided that would take one year and decide whether I was going to go back to the faculty and just finish out my career at Michigan. Or I decided, if there was a presidency at another school that was different enough from Big Ten University Because I wanted to have a different experience that I might consider that. And lo and behold, rit came calling and at first I thought maybe it was a little bit too different. So it took some arm twisting.
Speaker 1:Similar weather, very similar weather.
Speaker 2:Very similar weather. The winters are almost identical, although Rochester gets a little more snow from the lake effect. But anyway, I was convinced by the chair of the search committee and the chair of the board of trustees at RIT in a phone call to at least throw my hat in the ring, which I did, and the first interview went incredibly well. I just knew it was going to happen Love from there. So it's actually interesting.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize you were a dean in the engineering and electrical engineering, which is something that I know well. You know a voltage divider by a circuit. Yes, yes, I can nerd out on that, because I did have to take five electrical engineering courses.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:As well as all the calculus that goes with it, and I learned to really appreciate it. I love electrical engineering.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and when I started college just for me, it was at the University of Delaware. I knew I wanted to do something related to math or science, but there were a lot of possibilities there. Oh you don't. I didn't declare, yeah, my major until the end of my sophomore year and I settled on electrical engineering, partly because I thought I could study double E and still do almost anything I wanted later in math and science. So I just felt like I wasn't eliminating options. That's absolutely true.
Speaker 1:I mean especially with any engineering degree. It is fairly universal to all others. Yeah, I had an opportunity to triple major at RIT because computer, electrical and telecom were only a few classes separated, so I could have done that. I didn't do that because that just would have been a little bit more work on my part than probably another year.
Speaker 2:Well, and let me ask you, Darren, what attracted you to come to RIT?
Speaker 1:Hi girl.
Speaker 2:Okay, hey, listener.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hiking along with us. Discover more episodes at hightokahikecom, or to recommend an adventurous guest, apply to be a sponsor, discover books along the trail, or to simply drop us a line. I'm being totally serious and honest.
Speaker 2:It was probably one of the few girls at the time there were six girls that went to RIT in my year.
Speaker 1:No, I'm kidding. It was a seven to one ratio. But no, that's the true story. So way back when I was a bad student not bad, but I was a challenged student in high school I thought hanging out with friends was more important than actually paying attention. My SATs were deplorable. I got a nine 10. So that's a badge of honor Out of 1600 back then.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's bad. Were they deplorable because you weren't good at taking standardized kinds of tests, multiple choice kind of tests, or deplorable because you didn't really care, didn't even try or what Both?
Speaker 1:So it was a combination. So my high school grades were challenged. It took until senior year for me to finally have the right teacher shake me and say you should be in advanced classes, what's wrong with you? And I was bored. Adhd student disruptive in class class clown paid to my benefit as life went on. But I knew I was going to NASA Community College. That was a must in order for me to stay in my parents house. I had to attend NASA Community or a school and I did that. My brother was looking through the catalog of courses and he saw telecom and he said to my mother I should go into telecom because I love math. Which was true, yes, I like science, I like taking things apart, putting them back together, and telecom is a booming industry which I can make a lot of money. That's how it was presented to me, so I said okay.
Speaker 2:Well, I think back in back, at that time, telecom was absolutely booming, huge, huge.
Speaker 1:This is in 1998 when the industry had opened up to expansion and competition from the telecom act of 1996. So it started really booming and careers were being formed left and right in competition to the Verizon's in 18th century. So there was opportunity.
Speaker 2:It was the industry to be in For sure. And I remember on the university side back in the 90s and up until the early 2000s, every university that had an engineering program was looking for faculty members and communication, and it was just really really hot it was so, as luck would have it, I started my first class ever sitting in an electrical engineering class.
Speaker 1:The professor had put a breadboard in front of me, which is basically this empty board with lots of pins and electrical connections. Underneath you put your circuitry on it and it had a few connectors, resistors, a transistor in there, and the first question asked at 8.05 am when it started, was follow the path of electrons through the circuit? Okay, I knew exactly what that meant, and then, from there, I was hooked went home, loved the industry. I did have a job at the CVS in town and there was this really cute girl that was there who was going to be starting RIT for photography in a week or two. I told her about my major and she said, oh, you should look at Rochester Institute of Technology. They have a telecom program and there you go. So that's how it happens A girl.
Speaker 2:that's really cute, but just not as if you were going out with her or anything at the time. Well, you know, I thought I had a chance. Okay, now I do.
Speaker 1:Now I look more attractive, but no, I ended up studying really hard. I was a student at 4.0's at NCC. Told the professor that inspired me with the breadboard that I was going to try to get into RIT. He showed me his rings. One of them was a graduate of RIT, ring Okay, small world. And that all worked in my favor. He told me how great it was. He didn't offer me the help, but he told me how great it was.
Speaker 2:And good choice.
Speaker 1:I got home, got ready for my application after that first semester at NCC, even though my mom didn't think I was going to get in, and I got in Excellent. I remember the congratulations packet and I was accepted into RIT. It turned out. I thought it was a big feat, but it turned out at that time they were accepting anyone that would apply, that had applied themselves, into the program, because the program needed students. Oh, I see it also helped that the professor in charge of the dean in charge of the department came from NCC as well.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:But it worked in my favor because I paid attention in every class.
Speaker 2:Now back to this young lady who was studying photography. Did you end up meeting up with her on campus?
Speaker 1:No, she fell down and transferred out after the first quarter of RIT, so I got there asking for this person and this person was no longer there, but perhaps that's a good thing, because it wasn't a distraction.
Speaker 2:Well, and those of us that know your present wife, Christie, were rather fond of her. Yeah, I think I like her better.
Speaker 1:But no, unfortunately most things in life are. You know you traverse the road of meeting somebody.
Speaker 2:Right wrong or indifferent.
Speaker 1:but this is one of those situations where I will say it was the right place, right time, right person and it was all meant to be yeah. Right, it was Kismet in a way from NCC having a program to this girl going to the very school one of four in the country that had this program. Yeah, yeah. So we are walking alongside the Palisades Highway. So unfortunately, we're going to pick up some of that noise, but that's okay.
Speaker 2:So let's go back to you, yeah because I could also talk a little bit more about RIT, because I kind of halfway answered the question. I wanted to go to a school that was different from a Big Ten university. But what is it that's different about RIT that would attract me and others to want to be there, whether it's a student or a faculty member or a staff member? And I'll start with our student body. And you were a student there so you can give me your own slant. But I sense that the student body was just unusually creative, also unusually quirky. Students that probably weren't the star of their high school class in the social realm, but they were just so full of ideas and I really like that about our student body. And of course, we have a range of students. You can't really pigeonhole people too much.
Speaker 1:It's a very diversified range of students.
Speaker 2:But I just love working with our students. They're also the most accepting student body accepting of differences in others that I've ever encountered and I give our National Technical Institute for the Deaf a lot of credit for part of that community forming, if you will, because anytime you're in a medium to large size gathering at RIT you always see individuals there signing and you can imagine if you're a kid from some little village or something and feeling out of place at RIT. You've got to make a decision. We're at a fork in the road, so we'll take it.
Speaker 1:Yes, we will take it, because I'm trying to get us out of this street traffic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but anyway, if you're a newer student at RIT and maybe wondering whether you fit or not, you just look around and you see that everybody fits Probably. We estimate there's no way to know for sure, but we estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of our students are from the LGBTQ community. Okay, and that may seem unusual until you look at the research that says, on average, people from that community are more creative than the rest of the population. So, okay, we have this creativity imperative at RIT, so we attract a lot of those kinds of students.
Speaker 1:Why do you think there is more creativity in the LGBTQ plus?
Speaker 2:Well, and that's not me saying it, I'm talking about researchers and I happen to have quite a number of family members and then friends of those family members who are from that community and man, oh man, they're like. They're sort of like a stereotype of an RIT student. They have all these ideas and things they want to pursue and dreams, and then they also have the passion to do it, because it's one thing to have ideas, but if you don't have the passion to pursue it, it doesn't really turn into anything.
Speaker 1:Well, that's apropos for anything in life. Yeah, you're starting and running a business or if you want to ride a bike. If you don't want to do it, you're not going to do it. I always tell my kids that can't live on Womps Street and they say they can't do something. I try to correct them because when you say you can't do something, you will not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, you won't even try. Yeah, yeah, and you've got three girls right. I have three daughters.
Speaker 1:Okay, and what are their ages? Twins are nine. They happen to just be sisters, nothing alike at all, and the baby is five.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to keep her five for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, watch where you step, there's lots of bees. I already got stung by one in the ankle, so every step is fun.
Speaker 2:See what happens here.
Speaker 1:It was my first time being stung in my life and I think I am not allergic.
Speaker 2:And I've been stung before and I know I'm not allergic and fortunately I'm wearing long pants today, yeah, which gives me a little bit less of a chance of being stung.
Speaker 1:Yeah, unless it really wants to defend itself Right, it will find a way in and it will come out and get us. Yes, so three daughters, and that's why I continue to have to work. One day they will continue to grow their expenses, so they already have. Now I want to step back to something you said. You went to Udell the Udell. From what I know of Udell, yes, it's a party school. Um, was it a party school back then?
Speaker 2:I would say it might have been, and I don't have a way to make a precise judgment, but kind of average. In that regard. There were definitely plenty of partying. The fraternity scene was pretty hot sorority scene I lived in a dormitory for part of my time that we were there and the fact that it may not be well known at least at that time, I think it's still true today. The majority of students at the University of Delaware are from out of state. Are they really Well?
Speaker 1:Delaware is a small state.
Speaker 2:It's a very small state and so we had lots of students. It's a population of Joe Biden. Yeah, we had lots of students from New Jersey, pennsylvania, maryland, the surrounding states and a number from New York City. In fact, my roommate was from New York City and it was a cast of characters. We all were pretty different from one another in some cases, but it was a great experience to get to know people who'd grown up in other kind of situations and I had a wonderful time there. I can imagine.
Speaker 1:I will say that RIT did not have a party scene. I was in a fraternity. I was in Greek life, but only for a year. That's kind of challenged in a mostly male-dominated school.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And you know.
Speaker 2:Well, that's something we're working on. We're working on increasing the percentage of women on campus and actually just in the last year, we've made some progress.
Speaker 1:Can I be the head sheriff for that recruitment?
Speaker 2:That's right. Bring your daughters too. Yeah, wow, touche, touche, yeah yeah, it's interesting because from the day I got there, I announced that we've got to get to at least 40% women, because if we get to that point it'll feel pretty even. And then later on in my presidency, I discovered that my predecessor, bill Desler, had also said we must get to 40% women, and then it was a year or two ago. I found an old document from Bill's predecessor, al Simone. So this is going way back. It was my president. Okay, yeah, and Al Simone also said we must get to 40% women.
Speaker 1:So I take this as us trying to get to the moon, perhaps for today.
Speaker 2:I'd say it's been that way, and there are some folks who feel that, oh, all we have to do is somehow do a better job of recruiting women in computer science or some of the fields where they're underrepresented. But that can't be the only answer, and so now we're working on a plan to grow the health sciences at RIT, and so soon we'll start programs in physical therapy and occupational therapy, and if we can figure out the facility situation, we'll also start a nursing school. And I think that's going to help us enormously with the gender balance.
Speaker 1:So here's the business person and me starting a nursing school. Nursing is not traditional to Rochester Institute of Technology, that's true, right. So obviously, to attract a different client base, you want to pivot, you always want to pivot. But do you want to pivot so off-brand that you have a greater propensity for failure than not, right?
Speaker 2:So we have some special circumstances. I think that might help allow us to succeed, and also some thoughts we have in terms of how we might go about it. And, by the way, I'll interrupt and say we're walking through a bit of a boulder field here.
Speaker 1:That is gorgeous. We are deep in the woods down below the bluff now getting a little bit closer to the river, so it did pour earlier. So it is very damp, yes, but not too muddy.
Speaker 2:Well, so, going back to the nursing conversation, there is just an enormous shortage of nurses in the nation. It's more than a million.
Speaker 1:This is absolutely true, especially after COVID.
Speaker 2:Yes, in an upstate, new York, the shortage is even more acute than in the metropolitan areas like, say, new York City or Boston. So there's this huge demand for more nurses and, so far as we can tell from the studies we've done, there are plenty of students that want to study nursing, but not enough spots available at universities.
Speaker 1:And then you want to be part of the solution, which that one, I could absolutely step behind the pit.
Speaker 2:But I also feel to go back to your point, there are plenty of competing programs out there. We need to be or we would prefer to be, distinctive in some way, and so we've got a number of ideas there, whether we are graduating nurses that you might refer to as kind of high-tech nurses who know a lot about nursing, informatics and what have you. Or another idea and I don't know which of these we'll end up pursuing, but is to actually have a co-op program in nursing. So, of course, traditional nursing bachelor's programs are four years at colleges and universities, and one thing that I know for sure is that students who graduate from those programs often feel underprepared to immediately take on tons of responsibility in the clinical setting.
Speaker 1:Well, this is unequivocal, without a doubt, with every undergraduate graduate that if there is no requirement for an internship or work or co-op, you are not fully prepared. It is one thing to teach somebody text, research, book, information. It is another to put them into the workforce and give them the path towards experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I agree with that. Well, that's what makes.
Speaker 1:RIT so great. I don't mean this episode to be an advertisement for RIT. Go to the school or send your children to the school that most interests them. But for me, the five quarters now it's obviously a semester program, but at the time the five quarters of co-op, that experience prepared me for the world and I ended up working for the employer that employed me for all five quarters. So I was confident from day one. That to me, was my competitive advantage. That set me on a speed course to rising towards the top.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, and we hear similar stories from many of our alums about how important that co-op experience was to them and I always balance that a little bit by saying well, but don't forget to try to get an international experience, try to be on a student project team and do some other things I wish I had done it If I don't have regrets, because we shouldn't have regrets. If you're happy with who you are, then everything you can shape and maybe you did everything you could at the time At the time.
Speaker 1:But if I could do it again, I wish I did take that year off to study abroad or go abroad and learn a little more about the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1:I've done that throughout life, but it's not the same as when your brain is most malleable in your early 20s or even late teens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's the same for me when I was an undergrad a long, long time ago. But back then international study really wasn't even a thing, or even spending time overseas it wasn't much of a thing, except maybe a wealthy family could vacation in Paris or Rome or something.
Speaker 1:Well, those were the times where you would wear your best suit to be on the airplane and wash chain smoking a whole pack of cigarettes.
Speaker 2:You're right about that, and for me, like you, good old days. For me it was a little bit later in life it was as a faculty member I used to attend became accustomed to attending lots of technical conferences overseas because as great as the US is, they're really great scientists and engineers overseas as well.
Speaker 1:And to mix with them was terrific. We could obviously draw names on. Some of the world's best scientists Could come from the European countries in the early 19th and 20th century.
Speaker 2:Yeah, quite a number actually. We did import a few of them on.
Speaker 1:Steins to be named as one of them. So let's take a step back and discover more on who. David Munson is not the doctor, but how did you get to where you are? You grew up you said you weren't the most affluent family you can afford to camp in tent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm back to my childhood. So I grew up until about I guess it was, fifth grade in Clinton, iowa, and probably just a normal kid childhood, except my family did purchase a tent trailer that we towed all around the United States and Canada where my dad and mom did, and so by the time I was an early teenager I'd been in all 48 continental states, all the provinces of Canada and what have you had seen? Probably the majority of national parks in both countries. So we loved the outdoors. So I grew up with a healthy dose of the outdoors.
Speaker 1:So this is nothing new for you.
Speaker 2:No, no, no no.
Speaker 1:So I should have picked a harder one.
Speaker 2:Well, except I'm getting older now. So yeah, and so, on the East Coast, I've climbed Mount Washington multiple times, up in Maine, mount Cotodon multiple times, and I love to do that sort of thing, but I haven't done much of that in the last I don't know six or eight years.
Speaker 1:anyway, Fair enough, so this is a good moderate.
Speaker 2:This is about right. This is about right.
Speaker 1:Well we'll soon be walking along the shore of the Hudson, which is very beautiful.
Speaker 2:It's a beautiful river.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I'd want to swim in it.
Speaker 2:Well, you might not want to swim, but the geography is beautiful, yeah, and I'm familiar with what it looks like further north up at Poughkeepsie and what have you and it's pretty dramatic with the hills up there.
Speaker 1:So that's why this is an important hike and I thought it was very cool for us. We're at the fork, we'll go this way.
Speaker 2:We are getting close to the water.
Speaker 1:Yes, so the reason why it's really cool is this actually ties into Rochester. Ah, okay, yes, we are on the Hudson. Rochester at one point was the largest city in New York. It is now the third largest city. It was at one point, one of the largest cities, if not the largest, in the world. Yes, I went to the museum, and the reason why is it was the head for the fur trade. That was the port for the Hudson Bay companies. Yep the fur is from Canada into the Lake Erie and it was essentially we had these canals dug and built all the way to tie up state and the upper states of our country to Manhattan down the Hudson River.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And here we are at the Hudson River, at the very end of where the fur trade would have begun its journey to the European colonies.
Speaker 2:Now, this is neat and, as you mentioned, the Erie Canal goes right through Rochester and a major access point for that is to go up the Hudson River and then further north on the Hudson connect to the Erie Canal. There you go.
Speaker 1:Got a little thorn. All right, get that out. Here you go. Some more history for you, if you want, okay.
Speaker 2:So we've got a whole plaque here to talk about colonial times.
Speaker 1:Which this is very apropos, because we're tying it all together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, another thing that made Rochester prosper was the fact that it's on the Genesee River and there is a real major change in elevation of that river as it goes through Rochester, flowing north to Lake Ontario, which is only like six or seven miles away. So there are waterfalls there and they were completely lined with mills and so anything that a mill would do, whether it's grinding flour or other things a lot of that done in Rochester. Here we are. Well, here we are. We're on the Hudson River Beach. Yeah, let me see Plenty of driftwood.
Speaker 1:It's peaceful.
Speaker 2:It is. It's as peaceful as you get. Yeah, it's funny because you look across the the river.
Speaker 1:there's a pretty busy city on the other side, the one of the busiest in the world outside of Tokyo, I would say. Well, I don't know how busy it is these days.
Speaker 2:Lots of people have moved out and lack of Well, we have a few more people working from home. We know that that is right.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's get back to your childhood. Yeah, so farm life wasn't for you.
Speaker 2:What did your parents do? So? My father, you know I mentioned. He started out as a quality control person in a battery factory, but when he moved back to Clinton Clinton has a number of chemical plants there, one of which is a DuPont plant In those days it made cellophane. Later on it was making mylar and probably other things, and my father ended up being one of the first software engineers. I guess you'd say, oh really In well, really, corporate America. I remember this would have been around the late 1950s. He would disappear for weeks at a time, attending computer school in Cincinnati, and Cincinnati had a pretty sizable effort in the early days of computing. Now he wasn't doing scientific computing, he was working on developing software for business processes.
Speaker 1:So it was a chemical plant.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, he'll be careful here. And so he was more concerned about payroll and inventory and things like that. So did he write code? So I'm not clear on whether he wrote code himself or whether he managed a team that wrote code, but back then I'm sure there wasn't very much available in terms of just purchasing software off the shelf, Correct? Yeah, you had to write your own programs using a template, so I'm assuming if he wasn't writing code, he must have been close to some people who were Okay, so did he enjoy this job. I think he enjoyed it enormously, did you?
Speaker 1:get the experience to witness his enjoyment for the job.
Speaker 2:Well, I had one pretty crazy thing happen when I was young. We moved from Iowa to central Ohio just south of Columbus another DuPont plant there and gosh, that was probably around fifth grade or so and shortly after we moved they had a big IT problem at that plant back in Iowa and in those days IT wasn't even a phrase, and so you know what's IT.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, there's something that happened with their systems where they needed to rebuild everything from scratch. So they decided they were going to fly my dad in from Ohio. And there was one this was a little private plane and there was one seat left in that plane. My dad said why don't you come along? And I did, and that was a marvelous trip. And then I kind of knew my dad was sort of important, at least to this company in that field where you know he was the guy that could come in and get things fixed. How old were you? I was probably around 12 at the time.
Speaker 1:So is that the moment that you saw that your dad was a hero?
Speaker 2:I wouldn't put it that way. I guess I considered my dad to be an adventurer. Okay, he just always wanted to try new things. He was very much into music it was all the whole months inside of my family was, and so you know I and my brothers and sister got pretty deeply into music and, in some cases, theater.
Speaker 1:What kind of music?
Speaker 2:Well, it starts out with lots of church music, but then all kinds of choral music, folk music. I did not play in a rock band, okay.
Speaker 1:I have that's fun, but it's four, four beats, so you're not challenging yourself too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, and I often say that in my family and not just brothers and sisters, but my more extended family everybody did two things they did music and they did math and that's actually led to some things that some innovations we've created at RIT, to capitalize that in terms of getting really top notch students to matriculate into RIT and say no to some of the very best schools in the nation.
Speaker 1:Leveraging music and math.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:How so.
Speaker 2:Well. So what you'll find is that the very top students in performing arts in a lot of the high schools are often faced with a decision Do they go to some kind of conservatory type school, for music might be dancer, theater, but most often music, or very often they're really good at math and so should they instead major in engineering or computer science or one of the STEM disciplines. And what we're doing at RIT is saying for those of you who are in the majority, who've decided to STEM or out, partly because job prospects are excellent, don't worry about the performing arts side, we'll give you a really high level experience at RIT, and we're the principal school in the nation that's doing that right now. So we started a program called the Performing Arts Scholars Program and, as of this fall, we'll have about 2,000 students in that program.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And it's just some really absolutely exceptional students.
Speaker 1:That's a large volume of students.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're no longer just experimenting with the idea. We're starting to capitalize on the idea.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting. You're pairing the passion of the students with the reality of the world right. That's right, the reality is not every musician makes it. In fact, these days it's even harder to make it. You're no longer discovered. You are made. Right, it's who you know and who your family knows and whatnot. So the chances, the likelihood of being either that rock musician or that concert pianist that everyone shows up to see is extremely daunting. Yeah, it's like playing in the NBA. Yeah, what is it? 1% get drafted to a college and of that, only 1% get drafted to a profession.
Speaker 2:It would be something like that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So at least you're giving the outlet to pursue the passion but the reality of humanity you need that education.
Speaker 2:We've got quite a number of students at RIT that absolutely could be in the best music conservancies, the best theater programs, the best dance programs, but that's not what they've chosen. But they don't want to give up this other half of their life that they're so good at, and we actually want for them to be able to get better not just maintain their skills, but get better. So what?
Speaker 1:are the plans with that? Does RIT put on shows or concerts, or Well?
Speaker 2:so there are a bunch of components to this. For students in the Performing Arts Scholars program we break them up into affinity groups where where's the gang that wants to do musical theater? Where's the gang that wants to do rock music? Where's the gang that wants to do this kind of dance or that kind of dance, etc. And then we have essentially an advisor coach for each of those affinity groups. That helps arrange special experiences for those students Might be attending a Broadway type musical and going behind the scenes and that sort of thing might involve interacting with visiting artists to campus etc. But then most of it really revolves around performing groups. So at RIT now we have something like and again this is pretty new we have, I think, between 40 and 50 rock bands on campus and we have what I believe is the largest jazz program in the Northeast now already All right.
Speaker 1:that's pretty ridiculous to hear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's not as much as there is the Tudor technology Kind of booming. Yeah, I would say so. But then let me say, this takes faculty and it takes facilities.
Speaker 1:Oh, it takes investment. Yeah, it takes investments, exactly, and investing in the. Really, the faculty is probably loving this too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, music is a passion.
Speaker 1:Not only is it a business it's an industry, but it's a passion.
Speaker 2:We're growing the faculty and the thing that I have a particular passion about myself is the facilities. So we have just we're just in the finishing stages of completing this massive new building on our campus called the Shed. We can talk about that separately, but that does have some performing arts facilities in it. It's got an enormous black box theater, a big dance studio, music, rehearsal spaces and what have you, in addition to enormous maker spaces and some classrooms. But in addition to that, we just broke ground a few weeks ago on a new performing arts theater and we're very excited about that project.
Speaker 1:How big will this be?
Speaker 2:This will be just a medium-sized theater, 750 seats, because we want for the audience to be able to have a pretty intimate experience. It was designed specifically for musical theater productions and we think it might end up being certainly the best theater for musical theater in the state of New York, at least outside of New York City, and one of the very finest in all of the Northeast. It's designed by a very famous architect, michael Maltzen from Los Angeles, and so we're going to be very proud to have one of his creations on our campus and our students they are just so eager to be able to use that facility and perform in there All the way.
Speaker 1:I'm jealous because what I went to RIT there really wasn't that much to do.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like there could be lots of performances.
Speaker 1:There is more to do now, that's for sure. Now, is this going to be for students only, or will this draw an outside crowd for ticket sales?
Speaker 2:We expect we'll draw people from the community and we expect it's also a facility that on occasion, will run out to the community and really be in a position to share it.
Speaker 1:So that's the important aspect of college that I don't think many realize College is a business, right.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:And I think, as we do make it seem to be, college is a business and it is big business, it is mega business.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And it is successful business, and when you think you're done, it is even more successful. There's always ways to draw in more revenue, and that's what fascinates me most about college is it does have that moniker of higher learning and higher education and it does deliver upon that. Watch your footing here. Yeah, getting a little bit uneven. Yeah Well, it's just a small path. We are on a rocky scramble. So it does have that wrapper of education and it delivers. Right, you're buying a product. Right, it's an expensive product, but the return should be forever giving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. You know, in our faculty they're not probably too keen on hearing higher ed referred to as a business. But you're talking to a business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good. I do respect the aspect of it, though.
Speaker 2:Unless we've got the business fundamentals down, the university won't stay in existence.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And another thing that can happen is if you don't have the business fundamentals down, you're not able to make improvements. That's right. If you don't make improvements and if you stand still over time, you will go down.
Speaker 1:That's right. You will not attract the same quality or caliber students.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:You will not attract the same revenue stream or tuition or endowments.
Speaker 2:Yep 100%.
Speaker 1:Business is a universal language. Right, it's among the most universal languages, like math and humor, laughter, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'll say I'm one, when I was younger I had no interest at all in business. I only cared about science and math.
Speaker 1:But later on, you spoke like an engineer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as an adult, I certainly came to realize that if you want to make big changes in the world, one of the very most effective ways to do it is through business.
Speaker 1:So, with that being said, who do you report to?
Speaker 2:So I report to the Board of Trustees. Okay.
Speaker 1:And who are the Board of Trustees?
Speaker 2:And I'll talk about that. But let me preface that by saying in this position, it's the first time I've ever felt like I had a boss, because you start out as a faculty member and you almost don't have a boss as an apartment share Is that true. Yeah, I reported to the dean, but as long as I was doing good things, there wasn't much oversight. And then so, just to interject.
Speaker 1:We just got to the 3,000 stairs.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, this is going to be good.
Speaker 1:This looks like a whole lot of stairs. It's a lot. This is a natural formation, by the way. Okay, yeah, a glacier dropped these off.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll see if a 70-year-old can make his way up thiswhat I don't really believe is a natural formation.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2:I do believe that some of these stones could have been in the vicinity, but they've been nicely arranged into an enormous staircase.
Speaker 1:My first indicator was the drill cup marks.
Speaker 2:Yes, as an engineer, I win this, that's probably not natural.
Speaker 1:My second indicator was logic. Yeah, nature doesn't make perfect staircase.
Speaker 2:No, they don't. That's what we do have a hike.
Speaker 1:It doesn't happen, though Are you good with taking this? It does go all the way up there. Yeah, we'll just take our time and keep talking a little bit After you.
Speaker 2:Okay, so every university has a Board of Trustees and their job is to really provide a high-level oversight and certainly especially to pay attention to finances and long-term viability. They would probably tell you their most important duty is to select the president. That is just completely their decision. Okay, who makes?
Speaker 1:up the Board of Trustees, they get picked.
Speaker 2:I'll talk about that. For me, probably the most important relationship is my relationship with the chair of the Board of the Trustees, because that person is essentially the chair of a board in the corporate world. Now the board chooses their own new members and they have a pretty elaborate process for vetting potential new members and they have a committee that is tasked with doing that job, called the Governance and Nominations Committee. Okay, a lot of private universities have a fairly large board, and we're in that camp. We have about 42 trustees right now, and they're chosen using a whole lot of different criteria. We need to have expertise that kind of covers the board, certainly people who are good in finance, people who are good in some other things. We care about diversity. We want the board, as much as possible, to certainly reflect our student body, and we're always looking for board members that are particularly passionate about RIT. We don't want to just sort of be on their list of donations. We want people who are passionate about what happens on our campus, in love with our students and really dedicated to helping make the place better. I say all that, though, where I'm not responsible for selecting these people.
Speaker 1:I sometimes can bring names to this committee, but the committee actually makes the selections Okay so, from what I'm hearing, you're looking for die-hard fans of the school that are willing to absolutely put to school before all else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean ideally that's the case and we understand, especially on the philanthropic side of the equation. People may have multiple things they're passionate about, but we just don't want to be one of ten or something. That's right. You want the dedication which does make sense. We want to be a high priority.
Speaker 1:So the board is responsible for obviously delivering like any other board delivering objectives of the school.
Speaker 2:They get very involved in helping construct the strategic plan for the university, and so I'd say yeah. The answer to that question is yes. This might make a good picture here, because we are between some enormous voters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this one is awesome.
Speaker 2:There's nothing that moved, that this is really something. Yeah, just for those who are listening in on this, I would say that we're standing next to a boulder here.
Speaker 1:Rock in a hard place.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, it is between a rock and a hard place, but I'd say it's, oh, I don't know, 12 feet high and at least 15 feet wide or something. This is enormous. So if you're 6'5", I'm 6'5".
Speaker 1:I'm not good at it. I may have underestimated it, but yeah, this is more like 20, 22 feet high.
Speaker 2:And yeah, this is I would say 100 tons, a big flat face more or less facing the river.
Speaker 1:So back to the board. So I would look at the board like any other board right, their responsibility is truly for the shareholder in business or in the school's case, it's really for the benefit of the school and its students.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would say one difference might be that the board at a university and this is certainly true at RIT they get very involved on campus. They spend time with students, they spend time with faculty, they spend time with staff. They don't just sort of drop in and offer advice and then skedaddle yeah, and so they're mentoring, yeah, and so at RIT we have a very strong internal governance system that has three legs One is the faculty senate, the other is staff council and the third is student government and they've all got strong voices in major decisions that we make. So the trustees actually spend time with those groups and are pretty much in tune with feelings in those different segments across campus. So that's great.
Speaker 1:So you had mentioned before that this is the first job where you felt like you had a boss, right right. So what's that experience like? Is it a good relationship with the board? Obviously it's a respectful relationship, sure, but do you feel that pressure, having to go into a board meeting like any CEO would?
Speaker 2:It is a good relationship. But a couple of things I'd say is, if I or whoever the president is has a new initiative in mind, there is some convincing to be done, because there are always going to be people feeling like, well, that's not what we've done before. We've been successful before. Why would we want to put effort or finance into this area? I mean, health sciences could be an example, the performing arts could be an example. There are other examples. So there's some convincing to be done.
Speaker 1:So you have a share of dissenting opinions, as human beings don't always agree. So how do they go about solving that issue?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say that we have a board that likes to achieve basically total consensus whenever possible, even before a vote. 42 members.
Speaker 1:Yes, total consensus.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so we have a committee structure. Depending upon the topics at hand, those have already been pre-discussed in the relevant committee. So then you have a committee and we need the support of the committee. And then the board also has an executive committee, which is a little bit less than half of the board. It includes all the committee chairs and some others.
Speaker 1:Okay, we've whittled it down to 21.
Speaker 2:So, then, we need support of the executive committee, which probably has about 18 people.
Speaker 1:Okay, so less than half.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a little less than half. And I would say if the relevant committee and if the executive committee are behind something, then it's generally happening Okay and there's generally not dissent, even if there are some naysayers, pardon, even if there are some naysayers. Yeah, but consensus is really the general. I think what happens is it would be the same probably in any organization those who have questions or reservations. After enough discussion, they trust their colleagues, true, and so if it's clear that the vast majority is heading in a particular direction or wants to head in that direction, then those who have reservations, they may still harbor those reservations, but they're taking the attitude Okay, let's try it, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:So have there been any dissenting opinions that have really stuck with you, or a decision that was made that you were against, or at that point you don't have a say, and they just basically say this is what we're doing.
Speaker 2:There hasn't been anything of a programmatic nature. You know the kind of things we've been talking about, where the ultimate decision hasn't turned out the way I had hoped.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It's just that sometimes it takes a while to get there, Like with any other major business Right. Businesses move slow, corporations move slow.
Speaker 2:They're not as malleable as yeah, and if I'm the Dean of Engineering at Michigan and Michigan is a very decentralized place where each college there, say, college of Engineering is one example is sort of a tub on its own financial bottom I'm the head of the college and because I'm a Dean and not a president, I don't answer to a board and I can make all kinds of decisions on how my college spends money without asking permission from anybody. Yeah, and Hence no boss. That's right. That's right. Do you miss that? It allows one to move faster. That's what I'll say. It's the read between the lines.
Speaker 1:Easier.
Speaker 2:But I can also imagine that you know there's some safety in having a board. I'm going to pause and look at this view here. It's beautiful. So we're looking out between boulders, right on the shoreline of the Hudson Big ship on the other side of the river Maybe it's in the middle of the river. Actually Looks like it's got a tug behind it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so these, I could say, were definitively dropped here.
Speaker 2:These boulders.
Speaker 1:This was the making of the highway above us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they pushed them down the hill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some of them big, some of them small.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but back to the board. What I would say is there's no question that A lot of boards are going to want to be for good reason risk averse, of course, and I'm not I don't tend to be a risk averse person. I tend to size up the odds and then just want to go.
Speaker 1:Wow, such an engine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable with probability, for example.
Speaker 1:Yes, A-N-Q.
Speaker 2:But you know, I can't always guarantee that what we're talking about is going to be a home run. I can't guarantee that it's necessarily going to make money for the university in a P&L, but I have this pretty strong feeling and some data. But again, I would say, working with the trustees, we've always been able to get to where I think we ought to go and I'm thankful for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's. You know, from an outside lens, it appears as if everything has been running smooth and that the votes, whatever the decision is, it's in the best interest of the university and its students. So I would say that's effective. Now let me ask you a little pivot question here. Did you ever want to be in real corporate America? Oh gosh, so. Is that your thing?
Speaker 2:When I finished my PhD at Princeton I didn't know if I even wanted to be a professor. So I interviewed in universities and I interviewed in corporations and I boiled it down to sort of my favorite offer, if you will, in academia versus my favorite offer from corporate America, and that was University of Illinois electrical engineering versus IBM Thomas Watson Research Labs, really close to where we are hiking today up in Yorktown Heights. And darn, if that wasn't a coin flip in terms of making the decision. And the deciding factor was, I felt if I was unhappy at the university, I could most probably get that same offer from IBM, you know, a year or two later. But in universities, once that faculty slot is filled, you don't know. When is the next slot going to come open, you don't know. So I decided I would try teaching first, and then I just never left. That's the honest story.
Speaker 1:So I would say a few things. One, teachers are born, not made, because you do need that patience and that desire to be willing to give your all to the benefit of others, to inspire. And two, that's probably the wisest choice for career moves I have ever heard someone make, Because, as a pragmatic engineer, someone who thinks about both sides of an equation, always before making a move, that one makes the most sense. Because, you're absolutely right. If you do not like teaching, you're right. That job would have been filled, but you can go further with a teaching career behind you after your doctorate, especially than you could if you went from corporate America backwards to teaching, it's a little harder to go in that direction, that's true. So I think your probability map right there was pretty spot on.
Speaker 2:I would say in those days, and excuse me.
Speaker 1:I'm getting dry here. No one's died, so that's all right.
Speaker 2:Don't be the first In those days and I'm not up to date now, but IBM Watson was just a phenomenal research place.
Speaker 1:Well, it still is. Watson still exists.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Bell Labs was in there heyday. But at least in terms of the opportunities presented to me at that time, I preferred IBM over Bell Labs.
Speaker 1:Thinking back, if you had made the opposite choice and went into corporate America, do you think you would have found success and if so would it have been greater success, or maybe not so much?
Speaker 2:I think I probably would have met with success, but I honestly can't predict whether I would have in some way climbed the corporate ladder or just what would have happened. So I don't really know.
Speaker 1:I always like to pose these scenarios and then paint the reality. You probably would have landed up on top because you would have climbed the corporate ladder. Look at where you are today. Well, so it seems likely. You had to have networking skills to get where you were today. You had to push past fear, uncertainty and doubt to be thrown into the ring of becoming a dean, especially after just being hired. Essentially, rise above your peers. You had to make that ultimate decision to move your family from Michigan to Rochester. You have to deal with a board. I would say you would have been just fine in corporate America.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd like to think so and, equally important, I'd like to think I would have been happy there would be a way to carve out your place and feel like you could make a contribution. But I'll tell you I've got another connection to IBM. The gentleman who is currently the CEO was a graduate student in the lab I worked in as a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and here's the kind of the cute fun fact there was a faculty basketball league and he was the scorekeeper for the faculty team that I played on, and so it's kind of interesting because he would have been doing very theoretical work as a graduate student. I know his PhD advisor and the kind of things they would have been doing, and yet he went the corporate route and obviously became extremely successful, extremely successful. Is he happy? I have not spoken to him about that, but I believe he is.
Speaker 1:Okay, so happiness is not defined by wealth as we and every story has dictated the experiment for us. I'm sure on the corporate route, there would have been greater wealth, monetary wealth for you. But at the end of the day, are you happy? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Then there you go. I think for at least a lot of people, happiness is defined by the opportunity to be able to make some kind of contribution to society or the bigger world. It's not just about traditional measures of success.
Speaker 1:Well, everyone has a small altruism book. Whether or not they've realized their potential or not, that's up to them. There's something about helping and supporting others and not doing something just for personal gain, which is rewarding.
Speaker 2:Well, and that brings us back to the university. One thing I'll mention about RIT is we have lots of students from very poor families, and that's the history of the place. And if you judge that by a number, you can talk about what percentage of a student body is Pell eligible for a Pell Grant from the federal government, and at RIT it's about 30%. If we look at a peer set of schools, they average out at about 15%. Oh wow. And so we love figuring out how to serve these students and making it possible for them to attend what ordinarily is a pretty expensive private institution and giving them an opportunity where, if they graduate, get a great job, they might even change the course of their entire family.
Speaker 1:Oh for sure they will, because we do know I mean, you don't need much evidence to know that if you're starting from the bottom to dig out to the top, it's extremely tough.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:The stories you hear, those inspirational stories, are essentially very far in view. You only hear about the grandiose ones, like Damon John from FUBU. You only hear about that. You hear about that because of the media.
Speaker 2:Because they're so unusual.
Speaker 1:But you didn't hear about the millions of others that just don't make it, that's right. So to be able to give an opportunity and provide an opportunity, you could help change that cycle, that curve.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what are you in town for? Well?
Speaker 2:so there is a new organization in New York City called the Climate Exchange and this is a consortium and it's an initiative led by Stony Brook University, and there's going to be a lot of activity taking place on Roosevelt Island.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:We're going to be constructing some facilities there for climate-based research and then a whole set of universities working together to try to think about a future that will let us do. Let us deal best with climate warming and also try to reduce that, because any cities that are basically on the ocean front are really going to be facing huge problems in the coming decades. So this is true Unless something gets reversed, or we build more resilient infrastructure or something. So I don't think reversal is possible, right.
Speaker 1:I just don't think that can happen. I think we can kind of stay the course if we alter our trajectory, right, if we pay attention to carbon emissions and not being such a wasteful society. But unfortunately human beings are doing what human beings do. It's very mean-y.
Speaker 2:Well, that's certainly what's happening right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I really don't think we're going to alter the course. I think we have certainly sped up. I don't know if I want to call it global warming, but glacial melt. Right, we live through ice age periods. Right, these are normal every few hundred thousand years.
Speaker 2:They are. What's different this time around is that it's happened on a very short time scale, and so then you have to ask what could make it happen on such a short time scale? And the leading explanation, without any second place contender, actually is it's us, the human parasite, it's all the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere?
Speaker 1:Yes, but that's where I say we've sped it up. We haven't created the ice cap.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, whatever we're doing is riding on a bigger thing that occurs over thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have to change our course and hopefully, you know, slow this train down a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I mean, I don't. I can't forecast the future, but it's easy to do some calculations. You know, some sizable chunk of Antarctic falls into the ocean. How much do the ocean rise? And that sort of thing. We're going to have new beachfront property. Unfortunately, yeah, it's absolutely possible that something catastrophic could happen, where everybody sits around and says, well, yeah, we knew it could happen, but we didn't necessarily think it would happen. But there are things, in my view, that we just can't take a chance with.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, especially if you want your children and your children's children to have a future and not have to walk around in in masks their entire lives Right.
Speaker 2:we've already had a few events.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it came to Rochester, but in the oh, from Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, my golly. Yeah, oh yeah, we had many days which just, I'll say, beyond horrible air quality in Rochester.
Speaker 1:You almost couldn't see through the 500 AQI, which is insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's worse in.
Speaker 1:Shanghai that's worse than in Mumbai.
Speaker 2:Yeah and we know. We know forest fires occur. We know forest fires have occurred in Canada. They occur every year, but this year was different.
Speaker 1:This year we had changing weather patterns which kept a low pressure and kept those plumes low and not blowing over the seas. But at least that you could pinpoint. You have a definitive reason, right, and that's somewhat natural, but it gave everyone a taste of what misery smells and feels like and looks like.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I'm here for a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Climate Exchange. Okay, and part of that is taking place tomorrow at Pace University, which is one of the members of the consortium, and the rest of the meeting will be on Friday, out on the island.
Speaker 1:That is very cool. I've been to Roosevelt Island really nice, peaceful and somewhat eerie place. You will understand if you've never been.
Speaker 2:I have not.
Speaker 1:this is my first trip to see it, Okay, so you will understand what I mean by eerie when you're walking around Roosevelt Island. It's the reason why there's been several horror movies on it. No disrespect from Roosevelt Island. Even its residents understand what I mean In fact, you know what I'm saying Roosevelt Island.
Speaker 2:I am misspeaking, it's Governor's Island. Okay because Roosevelt Island is the island where Cornell has the tech hub there, right, yes, with the tech, lots of residents there.
Speaker 1:But the reason why that is creepy is because it's a small island in between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Speaker 2:Queens really.
Speaker 1:And it's just eerily silent. Yeah yeah, Governor's Island is even worse, even smaller and even creepier.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's more the southern tip of Manhattan. Yeah, so let's look at our stats here.
Speaker 1:How are we doing? We are an hour and 32 into our hike, 2.89 miles, average pace of 30 minutes, and we have trekked two miles per hour. But to be honest, I don't know if I would do this better alone or not. So let's take another pivot here. Do you think that academics have more fun or corporate suits?
Speaker 2:I can't answer that for sure. I know that academics have a lot of fun. That's a given. But I've talked to friends in corporate America where, if they were part of a team that produced a particular product something they were very proud of that collaboration turned out to be enormously satisfying and something that they would talk about. And in academia usually there's not quite the same level of collaboration. I mean, we talk about collaboration all the time and we do collaborate, but it's not as if in academia somebody up above dictates that a certain team be formed in order to attack a certain research problem or a certain development problem. It doesn't generally work that way, and so I will say that I have spoken with people in the industry that have felt satisfaction for different reasons than I might feel in academia. So this is pretty neat here. You just took a picture of the lower cluster, or new dock, a British invasion force of 5,000 troops commanded by Lauren Cornwallis Well, there's a famous name Landed before dawn on November 20, 1776. Wow, oh my golly. Jersey State troops saw them, alerted the garrison at Fort Lee and 3,000 soldiers led by Generals George Washington and Nathaniel Green retreated over the Hackensack River at the New Bridge on their route to the relative safety of Pennsylvania. This landing place was used in later raids and finally blocked with felled trees in 1780. We are right here.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. We are standing where, george Washington is.
Speaker 2:And long, long time ago. Look at this spot.
Speaker 1:Now the question is I might call Beason. I think George Washington actually landed right over there 16 feet.
Speaker 2:That way we didn't have GPS, so somebody had to say I had this spot to go. I think they put this sign a little bit of a clearing. That's what I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this was around this area here, so I think we can go ascend our stairs.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, that's where we're headed. We're going to the Heiler's Landing.
Speaker 1:Trail, yes, and start heading back.
Speaker 2:Okay, we'll do that.
Speaker 1:Up the cliff side. But this is really cool. If you really take a moment, this is as historic as you get for this country.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's funny because when I talk to some of our grad students it could be from China or wherever. Actually, at RIT the majority of our grad students are the largest population is from India, but their histories are so long. You know, for me to be sort of mesmerized by something that happened in our nation 200 years ago is like I don't know. That's kind of like what my mom and dad saw, or something.
Speaker 1:So that's the interesting part about America, right, and we all feel like we've had this huge history, but this is a new country. Yeah, and I think we are just the baby. We might be one of the newest, other than those that have been taken over and renamed in. Vice versa.
Speaker 2:And, honestly, to get to more of that history, we ought to be spending more time with Native Americans Because obviously they got completely displaced from all the land we walk on and terrible things happened, but they still have a lot of their traditions and understanding of the land very much alive.
Speaker 1:Well, in traditional American fashion, we kicked them out of their home, but we named the streets, half of them. Yeah, it wasn't that nice of us. Yes, we're so kind, yeah.
Speaker 2:And up in the Rochester area. We're not right next door to Native American reservations, but we're not far away.
Speaker 1:And we have students.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a Seneca area, yeah, yeah, in fact there was, at least I think, a Seneca trail that ran right through our campus and we're trying to get more information on that and Genesee and that have been Native American, there would have been settlements along the river Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Mohawk Valley. That's a little bit further down south.
Speaker 2:Mohawk Valley from us is further east Further east from you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so the ascent is obviously harder than the descent.
Speaker 2:But it's good for us.
Speaker 1:Yes, this is something you have to watch out for. These boulders do roll.
Speaker 2:And I would not want to be standing under this one right here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right up there, although you would hear that and see it. So I'm beginning to think that you have had an infallible career, and I don't know if that's possible. There had to be something, some foot and mouth syndrome situation where you could walk it back.
Speaker 2:There isn't really nothing like that, unfortunately, I guess.
Speaker 1:If that's the case, then I'm going to say that this was probably because of the Midwest upbringing. There's a politeness, it is a kindness that you know growing up in Long Island. I'm not going to say we're all kind of pushy. But if we believe something, we believe something, we push it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do sort of have my own polite way of trying to get people to see the light that I see. I mean that's true, but yeah, there haven't been any big mishaps or recoveries or anything like that. But you know, maybe it's because I'm in academia, where we often joke that the stakes are so low. The stakes are so low or actually they're probably just harder to measure, you know, because we're educating the future generation, which is hard to argue. There's much of anything that's more important than that, but just how well you're doing it is certainly hard to measure.
Speaker 1:Do you have a student that you really accelerated your care for, that you just knew was going to be just a superstar in their field and career?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, you know, there were probably, I think, about a number of those kinds of students where I, you know, saw that they really could do something beyond what perhaps they thought they could do themselves. But did you ever follow up? There aren't? No, and listeners might be surprised to hear this, but most faculty lose touch with almost all of their students.
Speaker 1:I'm not surprised, because that's true, because most students lose touch with all their faculty. Students go on. You know they go to the West Coast.
Speaker 2:They're working for Google or Microsoft or whatever, and they're, you know, a long, long way from Rochester. In many cases, or in my case when I teach at University of Illinois, there were almost no tech jobs in Champaign, urbana.
Speaker 1:Yeah so you're out of here. People weren't going to stay there.
Speaker 2:I will say that every once in a while, a former student will contact me with some very kind words, and the most recent of those was he's a medical doctor and he's on the faculty, I think, a Case Western Reserve, which is a good place, and beyond that, he's a member of the National Academy of Medicine, which is a big, big deal. It means he's thought to be, you know, one of the best research or unit docs in the entire nation not the entire world. Anyway, he contacted me totally out of the blue to thank me and said you know what? You probably don't remember my name. I was one of the millions of students you had in the junior or senior level course on digital signal processing. But he said that the way you explain complex numbers was different than I'd ever seen before and my whole career is based on that understanding and I owe my membership in the National Academy to you for teaching that to me. Wow, I thought, holy cow, that's not. You know, I don't expect to receive that kind of communication or for somebody to draw such a direct link but, every once in a while, something like that will happen.
Speaker 1:So that's important is you're doing it a way. You're doing your job. Your job is to yeah right, all I was doing was my job and but you were doing it in a way to inspire young minds and you know it happens with parents. You know you teach your kids and you think nothing of the moment, but they remember that moment forever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I have a moment like that Well, what's your?
Speaker 1:moment. It's a professor, jim Herney, in electronics 2. Okay, it's my second year in RIT or at RIT, and it was midterm time and he passed out the Scantron. Uh-huh, pencils in hand, put our names on the Scantron that should paint a vivid image for those listening and he said you know what? I don't know, maybe he had an epiphany or a fight with his wife, I don't know what it was. But he said put down your pencils Before I give you this midterm. You already know the answers, you've studied, you've got it. But let me tell you the only thing you need to take out of college. It is not what you know.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:It is your work, ethic and how you interact with people. Uh-huh, you want to be successful. You can find any answer, just ask. Ask someone to help Search it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, good for him. And you know one of our more well-known alumni at RIT, austin McCord, who's pretty famous in the startup world and a huge donor to RIT, he's also on our board. But anyway, I've heard Austin. He's got all kinds of little sayings, but they're all true and one of them is you can learn anything. And what he means by that is, you don't need to study up at any particular point and try to learn everything, because as you're working on a project or as you're proceeding in life, you can just pick it up and learn it in the moment and just keep doing that over again and over again. That's how he leads his life.
Speaker 1:So yesterday I had a very famous violinist Her name is Daisy Joplin on a hike.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And she is now going to take on singing, and she referenced some theory and study behind the fact that anybody can be taught to sing. Now I'm challenged with that notion because there are some people that are built with a better vocal range than others.
Speaker 2:For sure, and some people have more naturally resonant voices.
Speaker 1:But what it comes down to, though, is if you really truly want something and you're willing to train and put in your 10,000 hours.
Speaker 2:All of that work you can do it to some reasonable level.
Speaker 1:Yes, Now I did draw a correlation that surgeons have steady hands. That is a genetic trait.
Speaker 2:We hope, we hope.
Speaker 1:They're not very good, but we hope you can't train everybody to have steady hands. It's more than just practice. I have a friend that's a surgeon. I held my hands and every once in a while I quiver, he holds his and they're no shaking.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, that's not something you train yeah.
Speaker 1:That's something you just have, and that's why you pick surgery is. In whatever field of medicine you study, it's because you do have that.
Speaker 2:Well, there's so much work that's been done on in terms of how a particular human being progresses in the world, how much of it is genetic, is innate, how much of it is environmental, and I think the people who are on extreme on one side of the other both wrong, yeah, and it's sometimes hard to tell exactly what parts are innate, but I do think there are things that are innate. In my case, I was just. I just had the right genes to be good at math. I was sort of like a human calculator as a kid and it was kind of weird. And I don't Are you saying kind? of like a font I don't want to attach any particular label to myself, but it wasn't just me. My siblings were the same way. So you saw, numbers in your ranges line up. Oh yeah, and in fact, even to this day, I know a lot of people when they think about complicated topics, they think in terms of words, and I generally don't. I generally think in terms of images and numbers. Really, sometimes the images are more abstract, not like a photographic kind of image, and you kind of feel the connections being made in your brain, but you don't really know what's going on. I think this happens to everybody, maybe some people just more conscious of it If you're in tune to it.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, there's an inner monologue in your voice. They're in your brain, right? You think in words. That's not how your brain works.
Speaker 2:You think shapes and numbers. Yeah, I'm more likely to think that way. Interesting, yeah.
Speaker 1:I, in a way, I want to be in your brain. Well, I am the opposite.
Speaker 2:I think, in words.
Speaker 1:I have that inner dialogue, I rehearse, I work, I try my best to think four moves ahead and I react. And you know, occasionally I will picture a chessboard in my head when I'm making a decision. But that's as far as I go, as far as energy.
Speaker 2:Well, and I mean, we could talk about, you know, when you and I were in middle school, high school for me it was a pretty agonizing project to write a paper. For me it was as well, because, again, I didn't wasn't really necessarily thinking in terms of words, and then I had to find the words that I didn't become. I guess what I'll label as a good writer until I was in graduate school was actually writing technical papers about things that I understood and cared a lot about. And then, you know, my PhD advisor was very helpful in that process too, by just iterating, iterating, you know, making these papers better and better.
Speaker 1:Lots of practice. You got push and practice. That was your natural talent.
Speaker 2:So now I do think more in words than I used to because I have to use so much words in my profession, or so many words in my profession. But man, that's not how I started.
Speaker 1:So I would agree. So again, having ADHD, writing a paper was very daunting. It was impossible. It was let me get through this as fast as possible without plagiarizing, and then maybe I'll throw it up into it.
Speaker 2:You know a grammarly or something.
Speaker 1:I know the feeling yeah, so that was the worst? I was not. I didn't enjoy it and my way out of it was being disruptive in class and getting kicked out. Coincidentally, it was that English teacher that changed my life by realizing that I'm not an idiot. I just wasn't pushed, so is there anything else that?
Speaker 2:we missed. I guess the only thing we hadn't talked about was my research, and I won't say a lot about it, but I worked on my PhD when the field of digital signal processing was just developing.
Speaker 1:DSPs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dsp yeah, and this is before the DSP chips even existed.
Speaker 1:Wow, we were using transistors.
Speaker 2:But pretty early in my faculty career I got off of kind of this sort of generic DSP and started working on imaging systems and it was like I really credit a close colleague of mine who was at the University of Illinois, Ken Jenkins. He had some experience working on synthetic aperture radar and I certainly was not a radar guy at the time. But a whole lot of my follow on career, starting kind of the midpoint of being assistant professor onward, was in radar imaging and the trick there is how to use a small antenna, something that can be carried on an airplane or satellite, and get really high resolution and you do that by essentially looking at a target area from different angles and collecting all that data and then processing it as if you had a big antenna and it turns out a lot of the theory there is very analogous to the theory that's used in CT scans in medical imaging, and so I and Ken and some others we did a lot of work in that space, drawing the connections between that kind of certain kinds of medical imaging and radar imaging and interlacing a series of images over each other. Well, you don't actually do that. We only form I mean in the most basic version of this only one image. But you collect data from different spatial locations that span the geometrical area where you wish you had the antenna. Like, maybe you wish you had an antenna that was a mile in diameter, which would allow you to have a super narrow beam and you could steer that around and bounce signals off of just little tiny patches on the ground and collect returns. You could do a raster scan, for example. But you can't carry a mile antenna that's a mile in diameter on a satellite or on an airplane. So instead you fly that small antenna to a whole bunch of different spatial locations and transmit, receive from each of those locations. You store all that data and then there's a way to process it and form just that one image that's super high resolution that would have been obtained with a raster scan using this gigantic antenna. So it's used a lot in the surveillance community and the reason to use radar imaging is that it operates at microwave frequencies that can penetrate rain, fog, cloud cover and because you're carrying an active source of illumination, you can image at night. So, as I put it, the bad guys think they can't be seen, but they can be seen, but we can see them. But the bad guys also have similar technologies now they do generally not as developed as what we have in the US.
Speaker 1:What we like to think. So last question how old were you when you became a doctor?
Speaker 2:So I received my PhD when I was 26. Yeah, because I finished undergrad when I was 22, which was kind of standard and took four years to get a PhD.
Speaker 1:How many times did you look in the mirror to say, Dr David Munson?
Speaker 2:That's an interesting question. I've never done that. Yeah, I've never done that, and that sums you up. I've never done that. I'll tell you a funny story. My wife tells this story. My in-laws, who are really great people, are both deceased. But when they heard that the fellow who was marrying their daughter because we got married right after undergrad school those years when they heard I wanted to get a PhD, their question was why does he want a PhD? What's this all about? Like, can't you just go earn a living? And as soon as I receive my PhD, all the notes and cards that they would typically send us for birthdays or holidays or whatever were always doctor and missus David Munson.
Speaker 1:They were proud of you.
Speaker 2:So my wife got a kick out of that. But yeah, no, I never looked in the mirror and thought, wow, I'm a doctor. But there was something that happened before that. Grad school at Princeton was really, really challenging Because, like every kid in my class was, you know, at the top of their class wherever they were in undergrad and that sort of thing, especially in that school. Yeah, and the first year was really difficult because I had a whole lot of things to learn that some other students at least seemed to me already knew those things I was proud of myself for just surviving a year. After I survived the year, I thought, well, I guess I could do this, and it was a bigger deal for me to survive that year transition than it was to receive my PhD actually, yeah, that's how I felt with my first year of. Oregon.
Speaker 1:Okay, Well, you know it's imposter syndrome for me Just the belief that there's students that wasn't a great students is all of a sudden in a prestigious school, right, right, and am I going to get discovered?
Speaker 2:Well, and I felt that way, and anytime a faculty member asked a question, that first year man students knew the answer. It's like I didn't know the answer and later on I came to realize that it was generally a different student knew the answer to each question. It wasn't like one student knew all the answers, but that wasn't apparent to me as kind of a newbie. And there were a lot of international students whose mathematical training was superior to the American students in terms of they'd had more abstract mathematics than I'd ever seen and I had catch up to do. But after the first year I wouldn't say it wasn't that I felt necessarily proud of myself, I just felt like I was over the hump, like it was going to be okay, and so that was a big deal to be over the hump. So for sure I had that kind of feeling.
Speaker 1:Well, you have taught me a lot today.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been fun to talk to you, der, and I think you're doing a service to the world through this activity.
Speaker 1:I have to listen to some of these other podcasts you're making, and I will say the biggest lesson I take from this is humility goes a long way. Okay, well, thank you for that. Thank you for the hike, for you too. Well, hikers. Season two has come to a close, marking the end to this season's trail. We'll be taking a break and sharing bonus content until the season three premiere. Keep the comments, introductions and suggestions for adventurous guests and sponsors coming in. Your ongoing support means the most, and for that we thank you. See you back on the trail for season three.