Faculty Profile
Programming a New Major
The first professor hired to teach computer science at Westmont, Kim Kihlstrom describes her work passionately.
"I have really found my calling," she says. "I love what I do. It's exciting to be part of something from the beginning."
Kim has taken a less traditional route to her career. She married Ken Kihlstrom (who joined the physics faculty in 1984), graduated from Stanford with a degree in electrical engineering and worked for Hewlett Packard. Raising three children and doing a little teaching for the physics department kept her busy. During Ken's sabbatical in 1993, she managed to earn a master's degree from Stanford. The next year, at age 37, she entered a doctoral program in computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara. She completed her degree in 1999 and took a job at Westmont, which had just added a computer science major.
Despite her background at research universities, Kim values the liberal arts approach.
"We teach fundamental concepts and the principles of problem-solving because the field changes so rapidly,' she says. "Communication skills are essential as programmers design software in teams. Computer science fits the liberal arts very well."
Building a sense of community is important to Kim. She eats dinner with students once a week and invites them to her home for a weekly Bible study. "I like the small, intimate nature of our program," she says.
Baking cookies is a small way Kim makes students feel welcome. The professional cookie oven she found on EBay sits on a shelf in the office.
Kim loves to teach, and her students appreciate her. In just her fifth year at Westmont, she won the Bruce and Adaline Bare Teacher of the Year Award for the natural and behavioral sciences.
Her research has also gained acclaim. Kim received the 2004 Wilkes Award for the best paper published in a volume of The Computer Journal. Westmont recognized her commitment to scholarship with a Faculty Research Award in May. She is the principal investigator for a fouryear National Science Foundation scholarship program for computer science, engineering and mathematics students.
Since graduate school, the focus of Kim's research has been survivable distributed computer systems. A distributed system is a loosely connected series of computers that work together. A survivable system can withstand an attack by a virus or a hacker. The challenge is to keep a distributed system running when one of its computers is hacked.
Kim collaborates with a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was a fellow graduate student. The two women and their students are working on the Starfish system, aptly named for the animal that can grow back a lost arm.
In the Starfish system, the body, the central component, is well protected with stringent security measures. The arms represent parts of the system that are better performing and more versatile but less secure. If one of the arms suffers an attack, the system can disconnect it to save the other components.
Kim enjoys involving students in her research and would like to see more women in a field that continues to be dominated by men. She has taken students to a conference for women in the discipline and is working with female colleagues to make the field more appealing to women.
In a future paper, Kim plans to integrate her faith and her discipline by arguing that the limits of knowledge in a distributed system reflect restrictions on human understanding. "We see in a mirror darkly," she says. "It's an idea that intrigues me. "
Kim finds it amazing that series of 1's and 0's create such complex systems. "I hope I never lose my sense of awe at what we are able to do."
The World of Welken
The wordplay in "The Welkening" is one of the most delightful aspects of the book.
A tradition of telling stories to his children, a penchant for word play and a remarkable imagination helped Greg Spencer write his first novel, "The Welkening: A Three Dimensional Tale" (Howard Publishing, 2004). With this engrossing fantasy, the Westmont communication studies professor demonstrates his ability to relate to readers and listeners of all ages.
The complex plot unfolds in three dimensions, beginning in the hometown of four Oregon teenagers known as misfits and shunned by their peers. These two sets of siblings stick together, and when they get attacked, they suddenly find themselves in a different world: Welken. The characteristics that make them odd at home turn out to be strengths in the strange new dimension. Welken faces potential destruction by a great evil, Morphane the Soul Swallower. The four heroes, Len, Lizbeth, Bennu and Angie, have a special role to play in the struggle against this beast. Throughout their quest, they must learn what it means "to be in Welken and of Welken."
To their surprise, the Misfits discover vital clues in a children's book that Len and Angie's mother is writing. "The New and Improved Adventures of Percival P. Perkins III and Bones Malone" is the third dimension, and it features a cat and dog detective duo.
Greg worked on the novel for 20 years. The tale of Percy and Bones evolved from stories he told his daughters about the comical adventures of their own cat, Percy. When he started to write them down, the four misfits showed up and took him in a different direction. The novel weaves seemingly separate strands together into a single story.
The Spencers adopted Percy because the stray showed persistence in hanging around. Greg learned a lesson from the cat and persisted in seeking a publisher despite 22 rejection letters. "It has been my lifelong dream to write a novel," he says. In 1992 he published "A Heart for Truth: Taking Your Faith to College" (Baker Book House). He has also written and spoken about the effect of media on culture.
Using "heavenly imagination," Greg conceived of Welken as a place between heaven and Earth where good was stronger and bad was worse, where characters became more fully alive.
Welken is an old English word. "Years ago, I learned that Charles Wesley's first draft of 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing,' was 'Hark How All the Welkin Rings,' " Greg says. "Instantly I loved the word. It sounds like 'welcome,' and I learned that it meant 'sky,' 'the vault of heaven' or 'the firmament' in the Middle Ages."
Christians reading the book will recognize subtle biblical references and themes. For example, the Misfits confront the horror of evil, see weaknesses become strengths, understand the connectedness of life and recognize that decisions matter. "What we do tells a story of our heart," Angie says.
In a review for Christian Book Previews, Debbie Wilson wrote, "Bizarre, beguiling, humorous, poignant, exciting, and most of all, fun, Welken may be the next Narnia."
The wordplay is one of the most delightful aspects of the book. Characters in Welken speak in surprising ways, especially Vida Bering Well and Jacob Canny Sea. When someone gets lost, Vida says, "We'll columbus him soon enough." To encourage the misfits she advises, "When life scurvies you, lemonize it." In the midst of fast-moving events, Jacob cautions, "Wait! Stop! What's all the ferrari?"
After the Welkening, a cataclysmic reckoning, the Misfits return to their own world wiser and more deeply themselves. As Angie says, "I think we'll always be connected to Welken. And Welken is closer than we ever realized."