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Back to Colorado College Stories home Carol Lally '90 graduated with a degree in English. She is now an intellectual property lawyer. Neal Baer '78 earned his degree in political science. He has been the executive producer and writer for the hit shows "ER" and "Law & Order SVU." Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar graduated from CC in 1977. Holly Ornstein Carter '85 received her degree in political science and is now a writer and documentary filmmaker. Karen Andersen Medville, a research scientist at Arizona State University, graduated in 1985. Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, earned her degree in physics in 1974. Jay Engeln graduated in 1974 with a degree in biology. He is the 2000 National High School Principal of the Year. Basketball star Verdel Baskin, an English major from the Class of 1999, is now an El Pomar Fellow. Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist, graduated in 1983 with a degree in history. Jazz singer Lorna Kollmeyer, a liberal arts major from the Class of 1980, owns an ornamental plasterwork company. Richard Koo, 1982 alumnus with a degree in math, is the co-founder of Vitria.com. Mountain climber Jake Norton, Class of 1996, was a history-philosophy major. Paul Markovich graduated in 1988 with an international political economy major and is the co-founder of MyWayHealth. J. Ralph Armijo, a business administration major, graduated in 1974 and founded Navidec, Inc. and DriveOff.com. Theatre artist Liz Stanton earned her degree in business and economics in 1988.
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A no-nonsense scientist hopeful who found Colorado College because of
a hockey rivalry? That’s the story of Marcia McNutt, a native
Minnesotan who was looking for a liberal arts college with rigorous
academics that wasn’t too far away to get home for Thanksgiving and
Easter. “CC has a fairly wide reputation in Minnesota because they
play in the same hockey league as the university,” she says. “For
me, it seemed a good choice from the standpoint of logistics as well as
reputation.”
After graduating in just three years, Marcia went to the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, then took a circuitous route to MIT, where
she taught for 15 years and directed the Joint Program in Oceanography
with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Sought out for the
directorship of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI),
Marcia manages 175 scientists, engineers, and marine technical and
administrative staff, as well as a $30 million annual budget. Her liberal arts background enables Marcia to see the big picture as
well as work with this variety of employees. “At MBARI, we’ve tried
to break down the disciplinary and cultural boundaries between science
and engineering,” she explains. “We want to put our effort where
there’s the biggest chance of new technology leading to fundamental
discovery. All we have to do is go that extra step of making high tech
devices developed elsewhere for other purposes work autonomously
underwater.” Marcia recently served as vice chair of the Advisory Committee for
Geosciences at the National Science Foundation and is also president of
the American Geophysical Union, the largest society of Earth science
professionals at nearly 35,000 members. “It’s quite an honor and an
important role being president of the AGU,” she says, “because the
president speaks for the top geoscientists in the world, even testifies
before Congress.” One of the first women to graduate from the CC physics department,
Marcia credits the advice of her professors for shaping her future
career. “They showed me that the era of big discoveries in nuclear
physics was coming to an end without massive collaboration projects,”
she says. “But they identified ocean sciences as an up-and-coming
area.” And she can’t say enough about “the boon to physics and geology
the Block Plan is. Under a semester or quarter system, it can take
forever to get through a sequence of physics prerequisites,” she
continues, “whereas if you can take them one block at a time, you can
get to upper-level courses in no time at all.” She also believes that
“the Block Plan mimics the real day life of a scientist, where you
spend all day thinking about and trying to solve problems in one area.
And the opportunities CC and the Block Plan afford to get out into the
field are absolutely unparalleled.” Back to Colorado College Stories home |
Marcia
McNutt
At
Colorado College, Marcia gained the tools that help her create high-tech
tools today. She believes that the learning skills she gained in college
proved far more important than the actual facts she learned. How so?
Plate tectonics was considered heretical by geologists at the time --
but it wasn’t by physicists. “By today’s standards,” she explains, “any
specific facts we learned in geology class would be considered either
irrelevant or out of date, but we were taught to use our senses, our
powers of observation, and fundamental scientific principles.”