CATLab CATLab Director's Note: March 2025

Welcome to the CATLab Director's Note Newsletter! I send these out periodically to update CATLab alumni, donors, and partners on what we've been up to and the achievements of our students. I can't wait to hear what you think!

In this edition, I look back on some fun events we've hosted recently as well as forward to the summer. Then, I reflect on the program as a whole and share some thought-provoking industry news.

-Zak

Hello friends,

Thanks to all those that showed up for the pancake breakfast a few weeks ago! So great to see you all. It's so encouraging to see CATLab alum in positions of influence and meaningful contribution so soon after graduation.

We are just returning from spring break, and so much is happening!

Time to Pass the Torch... with Pie.

As we do every year, we'll be passing the flame of CATLab leadership to the next cohort. CATLab cohort seven passes the mantle to CATLab cohort eight.

This year's event will be in the UN Room and we're inviting all alumni and supporters. Imagine a room full of all the local CATLab alum, all the faculty of related disciplines, several supporters working in industry, all gathered together to lift the next cohort into the future.

There will be pie that can only be purchased in advance.

CATLab 25 member Amelia Ubben created this rsvp form using our new ticketing partner Webconnex (you'll recall that this is the company founded by Westmont alum Eric Knopf and introed to us through alum Kevin Kishiyama). This event is one of the very first tests of this ticketing platform! True to the CATLab spirit, we're trying out the tech on ourselves first. Reserve your free ticket and expect to have your ticket scanned at the door.

While you're reserving your free ticket, go ahead and throw a piece of pie or CATLab swag onto your order. Maybe even add a few bucks to the endowment.

There are 103 seats in the Winter Hall UN Room - let's pack it out!

News and Need

Cohort 8 hiring is in full swing! There are THIRTY SIX applicants to CATLab this year, and they are highly, highly qualified. This is powerful evidence that interest in the program is growing and that the practical experience CATLab delivers is highly needed at Westmont.

CATLab is one of Westmont's best job/career launch points, and we love when this happens. Mike Ryu, our director of engineering, just wrote a LinkedIn post about a dream he had where students abandoned CATLab in favor of heading into the marketplace. Yes! Our heart in this is to include every student who applies and make this transformational moment happen for as many as possible.

Money and space are limiters. Every participant costs the college about $12K to participate in CATLab between wages, housing stipend (new this year), and professional development like the SF trip. If we included all 36 applicants, the college would be investing almost half a million dollars in this program!

We're working hard to explore every angle we can to pay for student involvement: donor gifts, foundation grants, corporate sponsorships, a long term endowment, and proceeds from the Impact conference. To all those who are helping provide and find funds to help, thank you. The launch for these students is worth it.

Please pray for wisdom in this season of decision-making: that we'd select the right students to participate. That God would bring the right generous people. That foundations would be open to programs just like this. That the projects we choose to work on will actually bring the Westmont community closer together.

Potential Summer '25 Projects

What will we work on this summer? Here are some ideas:

Complete V1 of the Westmont.ai chatbot and bring it to the student body via the myWestmont portal. 
By Fall, we should have a prototype in place, and I predict this will be the primary way students interact with the portal in the future.

Bring the LLM local. 
Rather than calling out to OpenAI as we are doing now, we can run a locally hosted LLM that will be cheaper in the long run for Westmont.

Bring SIS to the Westmont Mobile App. 
We want students to be able to check their class schedule, search for classes, and more in the mobile app.

Exploring the development of a Mentorship-Connection app (name tbd). 
Goal is to build a better bridge to the marketplace for Westmont students. Something between LinkedIn and in person networking events.

A few Salesforce-specific projects. 
These could be pilots in Agentforce, lwc dev, creating a test data factory, a major Marketing Cloud re-factor, and maybe even spinning out a managed package.

Mentorship '24 Wrap Up and Invitation

Thank you to all those who committed to mentor a student from Summer 2024. You're down to your last two sessions! Whether you've never missed an appointment or you only made one or two happen this year... this is your moment to show up.

All of these students are wrapping up their school year. They all have grown in so many ways. Ask them about it.

What about meeting your mentee at the Passing the Torch event?

And then looking forward to the cohort of 2025: I'll be reaching out individually in the next month or two about continuing commitments to mentorship or starting up for the first time. All I can ask is that if you get the call from me, at least pick up. :)

Faithfulness on the Wall

The wall of monthly donors in the library continues to grow. Right now, we have twenty-eight monthly donors. Twelve of these monthly donors are CATLab alum within their first five years of graduation.

These young donors are inspiring. The fact that young grads are giving supercharges all my conversations with outside supporters. In a national climate of institutional distrust, they are investing in their institution. This is a powerful, prophetic statement.

CATLab Donor Wall

A grand ol' time

Thanks to everyone who showed up for a pancake breakfast on the fourth floor of Westmont downtown a couple weeks ago. It was so great to see everyone!

  • Jordan Douthit '21 - now working as a Salesforce UX/UI designer with Robert Half; pursuing her masters in human computer interaction at UCI (which puts her back in contact with Don Patterson!)
  • Dan Shank '06 - Design Lead at Tyler Technologies; occasional adjunct at Westmont, Tech Talk speaker
  • James Lopez '22 - Software Engineer at Slalom
  • Kaylee Lopez '22 - Adopted CATLab member (she graduated bio from Westmont, is pursuing her advanced medical degree, and married into CATLab)
  • Ryan Kleinberg '19 - First class CATLab; Software Engineer at Appfolio.
  • Kristen Mohrhoff '21 - Interned with Salesforce at Thornhill during CATLab and ended up working there almost five years! Now she's on to her next challenge at Atomica.
  • Donovan Howat '24 - now working at Webconnex as an SDR
  • Tamia Sanders '24 - Film Producer with Verite studios
  • Hannah Fisk '20 - CRM Admin at CompanyCam
  • Mike Ryu - CS Professor and Director of Engineering at Westmont
  • Ryley Oroku '20 - Integration Development & Business Analyst at Westmont
  • Andy Rusch - VP and Partner at Outside Open
  • Dawn Gendron - Business Analyst at Westmont
  • Nick Burwell '06 - Lead Architect at Invoca
  • Christian Neumann '24 - interned at Tondro while at CATLab, now working at Yardi

 

 

CATLab Pancake Breakfast
CATLab Pancake Breakfast 2
CATLab Pancake Breakfast 4
CATLab Pancake Breakfast 3

 

Industry Thoughts

For those that enjoy a deeper dive into higher ed and technology, this section's for you.

I just returned from Salesforce's Education Summit, held this past week in Chicago. I came away with a complicated reaction to where we are with tech: so impressed and excited (that's amazing a machine can do that!), a little skeptical (how much data cleanup and money will it cost for us to get there?), philosophically troubled (what does this mean for people?), and thrilled I'm in technology for a career (there is so much to figure out!).

One slide in particular caught my attention. When describing the evolution of AI, Salesforce is promoting these four waves:

1 - Chatbots
2 - Agents
3 - Robotics
4 - AGI or Artificial General Intelligence

We are moving into Wave 2 at a rapid pace - which is why everything in Salesforce marketing refers to AgentForce. But what does that mean?

ChatGPT and the many other models out there are great at summarizing knowledge that exists. We've all been playing with this over the last couple of years with amazement: "Write me an email that..." or "summarize this article..." or "write me a poem that..." This WAVE 1 iteration is all about the machines crossing the Turing test and impressing us that these machines can sound human and instantly do what would have taken humans HOURS to do.

Agents are when the machines can DO things for us. In our context it might sound like:

"Find four courses that will satisfy major or GE requirements I still need and then register me for those courses when registration opens."

It was helpful for me to understand that any time we're entering data into a form, that's a great opportunity for an agent to take over. It may not be long before a student can simply say to their agent, "Apply to Westmont for me."

Thanks!

I hope you enjoy the new email newsletter format. I welcome your suggestions on what is most fun for you to hear about CATLab, Westmont, or current development efforts. Also, if you have connections you think would benefit CATLab students, I'd love to hear about them.

Until next time.

-Zak