Honors ICAT Students Network in Silicon Valley

Honors students Xander Mallett, Leanna Conti, Eliza Starr, and Matt Adamson.

Honors students Xander Mallett, Leanna Conti, Eliza Starr, and Matt Adamson outside of Facebook HQ. 

For students at the College, the acronym ICAT equals opportunity. Based in the School of Business, the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Technology (ICAT) is a progressive initiative that offers students an opportunity to engage in technology entrepreneurship in meaningful ways. One of those ways is ICAT Academy, an eight-to-ten-day session in which students travel to different parts of the world to interview entrepreneurs, learn about their respective businesses and make influential connections. This spring, ICAT Academy visited San Francisco and California’s renowned Silicon Valley.

“ICAT Academy is actually a Maymester course,” explains Starr. “The students earn three credits for this, but the biggest impact involves the insights they gain and the contacts that they make. Most of the individuals we work with to set up these visits are College alumni who are successfully working at these firms in the Bay Area.”Professor Chris Starr, who teaches in the Department of Supply Chain and Information Management, is the co-director of the ICAT program. In May, Starr and Honors professor and ELLC director Lancie Affonso accompanied 12 students to San Francisco to visit founders and employees at 10 different tech companies, including including Facebook, Google, Teradata Labs and NextDoor. This is the fifth trip that Starr has made with students to Silicon Valley.

Four of the students on the trip were Honors students, three of whom came from the inaugural class of ELLC students. To learn more about the ELLC, visit our website

For more of this story, visit The College Today!

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