I just completed two years at Wellesley. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone by.

There are certain things that you always remember no matter what. One of them is my first Thanksgiving. I had arrived in NY during early September in 1978 to do my graduate work at Hunter College. I knew the exact area where I wanted to do my work, so I had written to Prof David Beveridge there and he had accepted me into his group. So, right from the get go, I was part of his group. He invited the group to his house in Westport. It was barely two months after I arrived here. Deeply homesick and highly suspicious of the so-called vegetarian choices, I joined others for a ride to CT. Prof Beveridge and his wife had cooked up a storm and had plenty of vegetarian choices. We had a good time walking outside the house. Coming from a small basement apartment in Queens, the backyard looked so beautiful and vast! We had a great time, lots of stories and good food. The Turkey (picture on the left is from Wikipedia) looked foreign to me at that time and I took a seat far away from it. I may have nibbled on some of the food, but what I remember is living that evening on delicious apples!

I always say how thankful I am to Prof Beveridge. He is the reason why I came to this country and he has been a true mentor all along. He is the reason why we moved to Wesleyan, which, we consider to be the best move we made. We are still connected to them and meet up for dinners.

Last week, the CIOs as well as systems and networks staff from Amherst, Brandeis, Middlebury, Wellesley, Williams and Wesleyan met in Amherst College to discuss common areas of interest. We had a great meeting where the topics covered were the likes of online learning, and resource management. The issues have a lot of commonality, but the way we all approach them has a lot to do with local culture and governance. I told them how lucky we are to have such great partnership with our LTP committee.

We had some interesting discussions about how we are handling software project requests. I won’t bore you to death again with this, suffice it to say that not everyone agrees on how best to handle the requests. I feel very comfortable with what we are doing and the progress we are making. I am also very comfortable in believing that our strategy of developing apps using open source software outside ERP is the best hope we have to meet the demands. Not everyone believes that this is a viable long term strategy. I feel comfortable that having several people knowledgeable in what we do (in our case 4-6 staff) provides redundancy and the fact that regardless of how you meet the demand, upgrades to ERP will require some work to make sure the apps continue to work. So, let us march on! Oh, by the way, Ellucian realizing this and strategizing on WebServices to expose Banner data is in line with the strategy…

I am getting ready to do the cooking and enjoy the company of family & friends who begin arriving this afternoon. Then, I am off to Bryn Mawr for a couple of days early next week for a gathering of seven siblings where I hope to meet with the CIOs from a different set of Colleges. Looking forward to it.

Finally, I always take a few moments to sit back and reflect during these times. It has been 34 years since I arrived in this country and my family and I have a lot to be thankful for. One of the major component of each of our lives is work & I have been fortunate to have excellent colleagues & bosses in all three places I have worked. It continues at Wellesley and on Thursday I will drink to that!