CATLab CATLab Director's Note: Summer 2024
Welcome to the CATLab Director's Note Newsletter! I'll be sending 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, featured in the 2024 CATLab Magazine, I'm joined by Mike Ryu, CATLab's new Director of Engineering. (Does that mean we should change the name to Directors' Notes?) We each reflect on the summer and what we've learned along the way.
-Zak
From Zak
CATLab underwent three profound shifts this year:
New Leadership
Mike Ryu joined Westmont this year as an associate computer science professor and immediately began seeking out ways to be maximally effective. We, discussed CATLab, and I asked if he would lead the engineering effort during his faculty "off season." His willingness to join CATLab has helpfully sharpened the culture, the technical competence, and the transformational power of the program. He brings industry experience, purposeful focus, and a Christian perspective to our work; I cannot emphasize enough the game-changing lift it is to no longer be leading this program in isolation. CATLab is now, truly, a program co-led by staff and faculty. The combo is dynamic.
New Technology
The Salesforce era of CATLab is over. We literally worked ourselves out of a job, moving every module from our old database to the modern Salesforce platform. The entire school runs on Salesforce now! This is largely due to the innovative energy of students in CATLab. CATLab will perpetually need a small Salesforce team committed to moving incremental improvement on our college's now-core system of record. However, Salesforce development was not the focus of our engineers this year. Instead, they built a new Westmont mobile app, building on the work of CATLab last year, working mostly in React Native. They also built four new AI focused projects, connecting our data to ChatGPT's API and retrieving natural language results. A new era of technological innovation has begun.
New Hope for the Future
The surge of energy from students this summer, the infusion of true coding proficiency thanks to Mike Ryu, the departure from Salesforce-specific projects, and the establishment of the CATLab endowment has given us a vision for the future. Instead of a program dedicated to retiring technical debt, CATLab is now leading innovation efforts for the college. We are experimenting with new technologies. We are serving our community more effectively. And, with a growing endowment account, we are ensuring that this program can continue long into the future.
From Mike
I've worked and seen many internships myself in my formative days. Looking from the outside, CATLab may seem to be one of those garden-variety internships: college students working over the summer and getting some pseudo-professional experience for the resume. While this isn't strictly untrue, I have since learned that the CATLab experience goes much deeper than that.
How? We open our days with a prayer to lift up what we bring as individuals and what we hope to accomplish as a team. We spend intentional time learning from professionals who have already walked exemplary paths; we hope to someday find ourselves on. We break bread with each other to share glimpses of our lives. We volunteer our own personal times to share a book to learn and grow together. We travel to far away cities to marvel at the human accomplishments in towering technologies but also to be challenged by the juxtaposition of poverty, hunger, and brokenness right alongside. We pause to reflect on what each interaction we have is teaching us. We take those learnings into actions to bring about change. And we always end our days with appreciation and acknowledgement of all that is involved in making us who we are.
CATLab, as I've experienced it now, is a place where passionate students come to grow not only their skills and experience but also their dreams and aspirations for the future—not simply for riches or fame, but for a higher calling of maturing to be a Kingdom Citizen.
Thanks to this higher calling, I am so grateful to have been serving as the Director of Engineering of this enterprise. I get to equip every single individual in CATLab with the right skills and experiences, which they will use to supercharge their early career and launch them into leadership positions to exert the righteous influences and redemptive forces in the industries that have blindly pursued profit margins and market shares for far too long.
I am confident that the skills and perspectives the students have gained from CATLab will catalyze meaningful conversations and remarkable coursework all throughout the coming academic year. They will inspire many others at Westmont to be even more strongly committed to its mission of "serving God's kingdom by [becoming] thoughtful scholars, grateful servants and faithful leaders for global engagement with the academy, church and world."