In This Issue:

New Departmental Space

Presidential Fellows

Class of 2004

CVN is "Best of Web"

TAs Receive Awards

Heffner Hydrologic Lab

SEAS Teachers Honored

Free Email Forwarding

High School Students Build Robot

Annual Fund Hits New High

Alumni Briefs

Camp Columbia Reunion

Loyal Alumni Boost Annual Fund To New High

"I am so proud of our alumni and friends," said Engineering Fund Chair James M. Li '68, '70, '76 as he announced the record- breaking $1.6 million Annual Fund total for the fiscal year 2000 that ended on June 30. "These results show that many alumni feel as I do, that we want to give back to the School that gave us our start."

The most recent alumnus to enunciate the same message is Vikram S. Kumar '99, a second year medical student in Harvard Medical School-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Mr. Kumar, as the recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, received half his graduate school tuition and a stipend of $20,000. He gave $1,080 of that money to each of the five schools he credits for his education.

Vikram Kumar

In the note accompanying his contribution, Mr. Kumar wrote: "Now I am so proud to be able to give back! . . .With professors like Dr. (Perwez) Shahabuddin (IEOR) and mentors like Professor Rafael Yuste (Biological Sciences), Professor Hamid Dabashi (Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture) and Professor Lewis Freeman (lecturer for Professional Presentation for Engineers), my education at Columbia has been the best!"

"In Hinduism, there is Guru Dakshina, which means giving to the teacher," he said. "This is my way of acknowledging the Engineering School. I chose to give $1,080 because it is a variation of the number of breaths a person averages per year according to Hindu thought, which is 10,800,000."

Besides Columbia SEAS, he gave donations to the Modern School, his high school in India; the Indian Institute of Technology, where he spent his first year of college before transferring to SEAS; MIT, and Harvard.

"I am heartened by young alumni like Vikram Kumar," said Mr. Li. "While I am very pleased at our overall Fund total, we are still facing the challenge of increasing the number of alumni who give, because, like it or not, alumni participation in the Annual Fund translates into 'alumni satisfaction' that national rankings use to rate engineering schools."