Students

Upstairs at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, in a converted office with black soundproofing material cascading down the walls and a hunk of electronics on a table, Nandeeni Patel ’21 and Zach Wong ’19, quickly review their notes. All set.

Today’s guest, Benn Steil, senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council of Foreign Relations, arrives. It’s 4:28 p.m. The trio exchanges handshakes and hellos before they settle at the round table and adjust their mics. How’s the sound? Good.

And they’re live.

Senior year is moving fast. Soon-to-be graduates reflect on their biggest takeaways from life at CMC – and for a future beyond Claremont.

Like many students, Biniyam Asnake ’20 was astounded by the high cost of textbooks, which can sometimes top $200 a piece. Trying to buy used books from other students through online marketplaces, he found, wasn’t much help. “You could spend an hour looking for a book and you may never find it,” he said.

Why, he wondered, couldn’t there be a search tool as easy to use as Google? The Computer Science major from Los Angeles decided last year to create one.

Andrew Choi ’21 is a biochemistry/economics double major who’s also into applied mathematics. He spent the summer in a Cedars-Sinai research lab testing a little-known gene while trying out one of many career paths he is considering.

After her second year at CMC, Vicky Flores Najas ’20 knew she was drawn to the world of finance. Back-to-back internships at AXA Investment Managers and Bain & Co. helped her delve into different specialties to find the best fit.

Some of Mohamad Batal’s favorite memories at CMC involve Beckett Hall patio barbecues, watching Champions League matches on the Appleby balcony, and spending “deliriously late nights” in the Salvatori Center. But he gets the biggest jolt of CMC excitement while thinking about his senior thesis, the basis of which earned him a first-place award for Best Presentation at the inaugural Undergraduate Scholars Conference in Israel Studies at UCLA earlier this summer.

The final day of the 2017-18 athletic year came to a dramatic close on Saturday for Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. Three Athenas won individual national championships in track & field, and the team placed fourth at the NCAA Division III Championships for the highest finish in program history.

Creating engaging and accessible therapy for children on the autism spectrum is a vexing challenge, but five CMC seniors have used their education to craft an innovative new approach: a video game.

Their game, called Social Cipher, virtually recreates social situations so that gamers can better understand emotional reactions and build empathy. Social Cipher recently placed eighth in the National Geographic Chasing Genius: Unlimited Innovation challenge, which had more than 1,000 entrants.

The Claremont Colleges’ After School Specials! have qualified to compete at the 2018 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA) Finals.

Nine colleges, including Berklee College of Music, King’s College, London, the University of Chicago, Temple University, and reigning champions USC will vie for the title at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on April 21.

The After School Specials! had advanced to the semifinals in 2014 and 2016.

“A nuclear reactor is like a knife — it is a necessary utensil for cutting bread, but it can also be used to cut a throat.”

Shawn “Mickey” McFall ’18 invokes those chilling words, written by an exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist, in his own research paper on the potential threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Mining operations are growing in sub-Saharan Africa, bringing both prosperity and challenges to the region. A Claremont McKenna College student found himself presenting on the subject alongside some of the world’s leading experts on the mining industry at a conference in London.