‘Columbus, we’ve got some great ties,’ Georgia Tech president says during visit to city

Thursday’s visit to Columbus was the last stop on Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson’s four-day, 970-mile tour of the state, covering 44 counties and 12 cities.

Before his speech to the Muscogee Rotary Club at the Green Island Country Club, Peterson discussed with the Ledger-Enquirer the impact Georgia Tech makes on the state and the Columbus area, plus the institution’s recent successes and challenges. Here are excerpts from that interview, edited for brevity and clarity:

Q: So what’s your main message to Columbus today?

A: This is part of our state tour, traveling around the state, trying to learn more about Georgia and what we can do to help communities and industries around the state. … It’s something we’ve done every year. I’ve been at Georgia Tech for eight years, so this is our ninth state tour. … A lot of people think of Georgia Tech as being kind of this metro Atlanta-centric type of institution, but our freshman class this year has students from 101 of the 159 counties in Georgia.

Q: Obviously, Georgia Tech is a world-class institution, but how would you describe the impact it’s making in Georgia and specifically in the Columbus area?

A: … We want to make sure that no fewer than 60 percent of our students, our undergraduate students, are from the state of Georgia and no more than 10 percent are international. … We get great students from all over the state, and we’re trying to help build the industry and the economy so that they can stay in the state and work. Columbus, we’ve got some great ties, some great alums here in Columbus, and are involved with Synovus and some of the other companies.

Q: With technology changing at such a rapid pace, how does Georgia Tech keep up with it to teach that technology to students who are trying to keep up with it as well?

A: … One way it’s been phrased is that our job at places like Georgia Tech is to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist, that use technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems that we don’t even realize are problems yet. When you think about some of the issues we are seeing in the national news today – cybersecurity. Ten, 15 years ago, there weren’t degree programs in cybersecurity. It wasn’t something that people were talking a lot about, but I can guarantee you that every company in Columbus here is concerned about cybersecurity. One of the companies we visited on our tour, just the past couple of days, was hacked by ransomware, and it shut the company down completely for a week.

Q: The G. Wayne Clough Georgia Tech Promise Program scholarship (named after Peterson’s predecessor) is 10 years old. What’s been its impact?

A: … This is a scholarship program that provides scholarships for students whose family income is under 150 percent of the federal poverty level. These are Georgia residents, family income less than about $35,000, and if they can get into Georgia Tech, they can go for free. It’s books, fees, room, board, tuition. … They can graduate debt free. We’ll have 200 students in this program in the fall. Their average family income is around $21,000. … The first graduate is a young man from Brunswick. He was living in a car with his mother and sister the year before he came to Georgia Tech. Great story. Graduated in three years. … Went to work with Fidelity in North Carolina. Saved up some money. Sent his mother back to college. She graduated with a degree and taught in the Atlanta public school system this past year for the first time. After he was able to get his mom back in college, he went to law school at Berkeley (Calif.), and he’s now a practicing attorney in Atlanta. … So it’s just a great program. It’s funded entirely by private gifts; we can’t use any state funds. We have raised $65 million from our alums and supporters to support this program. … One of the really nice things about it is that the students don’t have to apply for this scholarship. They apply for admission to Georgia Tech, and because of the federal financial aid paperwork that they fill out, we know if they’re qualified. … We’ll send them a letter or deliver a letter, and that’s one of the things our admissions folks like to do. They sometimes will go to the high school, take a letter, call the kid down to the office: ‘Send Johnny down to the principal’s office.’ And then say, ‘By the way, congratulations on your acceptance to Georgia Tech. By the way, you’ve got a full scholarship.’ … We ask them to work in an office like mine or other professional offices on campus 10 hours a week, which is good experience, because most of them haven’t been in that type of professional setting.

Q: That’s life changing.

A: Oh, absolutely, and it changes not just their lives but the lives of their family for generations to come.

Q: What are you hearing from your faculty, how high schools can better prepare their students in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math)?

A: I’m not sure I’d focus on how they can better prepare students that are applying to Tech. I think the thing we can do and probably need to focus on is the number. I know not all those kids are going to be able to go to Tech, but we offer 75 different programs in the summer at Georgia Tech, primarily directed at middle school kids, because that’s when they have to decide if they’re going to go into science or engineering or mathematics or computing. If you don’t get the advanced math track in about eighth grade, then you’re not going to be able to take calculus in high school, you’re not going to be able to take physics and chemistry, and so a lot of folks don’t realize that you have to make that decision pretty early in order to get in the advanced track, and that gets you into the STEM fields.

Q: In your eight years at Tech, what’s the biggest success that Tech has had and people might not know about?

A: Probably the growth in Technology Square. Technology Square is right there at Fifth Street on the east side of the Connector. About 13 years ago, Georgia Tech started buying property there and opened the first buildings. The Scheller College of Business is there. The bookstore is there, the foundation, the hotel and conference center. And in the past five years, we’ve seen this dramatic growth of large companies that are putting in outposts there, with 20 to 50 employees so they can access the talent and technologies available at Georgia Tech. So it’s Home Depot, AT&T Mobility, Delta, Anthem, which is a healthcare provider, Panasonic, … UPS.

Q: And your biggest challenge in the next couple years? What are you most concerned about?

A: Again, I think it’s this challenge of trying to understand how we prepare students for a work environment that’s going to be very, very different from ours. We’re trying to look at some new ways to teach. We started an online master’s in computer science about 3½ years ago. We’ll have 5,000 students enrolled in that. These are students that take the entire program online, using the MOOC, the Massive Open Online Course format, and it’s been a huge success. We’ll start a similar program, a master’s program in data analytics, this fall, and then the next fall, same thing, an online master’s in cybersecurity.

Q: What do you want to tell folks who say, “I’m not interested in being an engineer, so I’m not going to look at Tech.”?

A: Well, 60 percent of our undergraduate student population are engineering students. Many of them do not go into engineering. We’ve got a lot of students that go into medicine and law. About 12-14 percent go into a professional school of some sort, medical, law, pharmacy. … Engineering is a great field of study for many, many backgrounds. Medical professions love engineering students. They think very logically. They think analytically. They’re very bright. The financial markets love these folks because of the same thing. So there’s a lot of alums from Georgia Tech that are not doing engineering and have been hugely successful.

Q: So do you have to be an engineer to be president of Georgia Tech?

A: I don’t know if you have to, but it certainly helps. (Laughs.) It certainly helps.

This story was originally published June 22, 2017 at 5:03 PM with the headline "‘Columbus, we’ve got some great ties,’ Georgia Tech president says during visit to city."