Clinic Program Anniversary


50 th


marching to a different drum >>


Written by STEPHANIE L. GRAHAM


An innovation of Harvey Mudd College, the Clinic Program was a daring experiment that worked. the program’s future is no less intriguing.


It All Began As A Casual Conversation Between Two Engineering Professors during The Claremont Colleges’ homecoming celebration in 1961. Jack Alford and Mack Gilkeson discussed how marvelous it would be to capture the engineering students’ float-building passion and apply it to the educational program. That spark of an idea ignited to become the Harvey Mudd College Clinic Program, which now spans four academic departments and includes partner schools abroad. The program’s growth has been tremendous. Completion of the Libra Project in 1972 (Galileo Hall and Keck Laboratories) provided new offices, labs, shops and library that enabled the Clinic Program to expand. At the start, a handful of industrial companies supported


the program and helped provide projects for many years. As the business climate in Southern California changed, so did the nature of the Clinic projects. During the 1980s, many projects came from large aerospace companies, local utilities and large information technology firms. National laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, signed on and have been steady sponsors since the eighties as well. During the 1990s, sponsors emerged from a wider range of small- and medium-sized companies from the environmental, computer, communications and biomedical engineering fields. This trend continues, evidenced by a broader mix of sponsors—based mainly in the western states of


clinic & beyond


Several sponsors have commer- cialized Clinic projects. Find more success stories at hmc.edu/ Clinic-success.


Sponsor: Laserfiche. During 2009- 2010, students on this Computer Science Clinic team created code for the iPhone app Laserfiche Mobile, enabling transparent records man- agement and allowing mobile content


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management within a secure environment.


Sponsor: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2001, NASA linked two 33-foot telescopes together— creating an interferometer—and caught the first glimpses of HD61294, a faint star in the constellation Lynx. The sighting was made possible by an optics system, designed by a


Har vey Mudd College SUMMER 2013


Physics/Engineering Clinic team, that combines infrared light from twin telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.


Sponsor: UVP Inc. An Engineering Clinic team designed systems that illuminate genetic markers in plants and animals. Used to study cancer and other ailments, FirstLight UV Illuminator won the 2005 Photonics


California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico—and a wider range of problems. Now a fixture of the HMC curriculum, Clinic seamlessly completes the design stem of the engineering program—from first-year projects to sophomore lab to junior/senior Clinics. Students experience the full life cycle of an interdisciplinary project—from creation to execution to management. HMC students have always been a strength of the program.


Their strong science and mathematics skills have allowed the College to provide solutions to authentic design problems that reflect current technical interests and trends. The program’s more than 1,400 projects include many success stories (just a few are noted below). Students dive wholeheartedly into projects undertaken in a low-risk environment that permits mistakes. In surveys, alumni rank the Clinic Program the single most useful part of their education with respect to prepara- tion for professional practice. This value is demonstrated in the number of alumni who become sponsors and liaisons; today, alumni are involved in more than 25 percent of projects.


rain on the parade With Growth, However, Come Challenges.


ABET, an accrediting agency that provides assurance that a college or university program meets specified quality standards, requires capstone projects for engineering program accreditation.


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