Sandy Smith

The Wistar Institute had a nagging headache: It had a hard time keeping research technicians. So it turned to the Community College of Philadelphia for a cure. And now six CCP students are on their way to careers in biomedical research.

Benjamin Pierce had a problem that besets almost everyone who works with files on more than one computer. He couldn’t keep track of the various versions of files on his laptop and workstation. Pierce, being an assistant professor of computer and information science, however, knew how to solve the problem. He could create new software.

It was a homecoming of sorts. Here was C.K. Williams (C’58), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, sipping coffee in a Starbucks on South Street, a street he remembers well from his 25 years of residence in Philadelphia. But today’s South Street is a far cry from the funky, artsy strip he remembers. “The word ‘tawdry’ came to mind as I was walking up, which is sad,” he said.

Two former mayors staged a bipartisan lovefest at Irvine Auditorium July 31, but a prominent critic of one of them managed to get in a few zingers.

To get a plum job, it helps to make the right connections. Unfortunately, most Philadelphia high school students have little or no opportunity to make them.

Peter G. Traber, M.D., is going back to pure research. President Judith Rodin announced July 26 that Traber, CEO of the Health System and interim dean of the School of Medicine since February, has accepted an offer from GlaxoSmithKline to head its clinical pharmacology and experimental medicine division.

When Britain’s Monty Python comedy troupe wrote, “Everyone must hanker for the butchness of a banker/ It’s accountancy that makes the world go ’round,” they probably could not have envisioned a time when millions of dollars of assets vanish in a day just because Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made some off-hand remark.

I spent a sweltering June Monday in search of techno-geeks, and discovered that the taped-glasses-and-pocket-protector stereotype is passé. Instead, by their Palm Pilots shall ye know them.

Reformed workaholic John Fry, executive vice president of the University, now keeps his work life and his family life strictly separated, and he thinks everyone else should be able to as well. “Those who are the most successful [on the job] are … those with the best balance between work and family,” Fry told a lunchtime audience of about 50 aspiring go-getters May 15.

The last American civilization major at the University of Pennsylvania loves his alma mater and employer truly, madly, deeply, the way a father loves his child.