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Caltech is in Pasadena near Los Angeles, not far from the Jet Propulsion Lab it operates with NASA. Caltech’s affiliation with the Summer Science Program dates all the way back to SSP’s founding in 1958-9. Caltech’s President at the time, Dr. Lee DuBridge, donated astronomical equipment and recruited Caltech faculty to teach at SSP and chair its Executive Committee. Caltech even served as the first legal “parent” of SSP, four decades before it became an independent nonprofit.
And the connection has continued ever since. Numerous Caltech faculty have lectured at SSP, including Astronomer Maarten Schmidt (33 times), Physicist David Politzer (9 times) and the fondly remembered Richard Feynman (9 times).
Caltech is a small school, but over 200 SSP alumni have gone on to enroll there as undergrads, second only to (the much larger) MIT.
SSP’s ties with Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California go back to the 1960s, when HMC helped to operate and fund SSP in an informal consortium with Caltech, Pomona College, and Thacher School (the original host campus). Over the decades, dozens of SSP alumni have enrolled there, in part because of cultural compatibility; while small for a college, Harvey Mudd is in many ways a larger version of SSP. In 2017 Harvey Mudd returned to a direct relationship as SSP’s “academic partner,” incorporating several areas of cooperation.
MIT is a long way from SSP’s original home in Southern California, but SSPers have been enrolling there for decades … and teaching there too. Before Ed Bertschinger headed MIT’s Department of Physics, he was SSP class of ’75 and a Teaching Assistant from ’79 to ’82.
SSP International is a nonprofit offering inspiring science immersion experiences. Founded in 1959, its mission is to provide opportunities to accelerate learning, doing and belonging in science. SSP International’s flagship program is Summer Science Program, a leading education experience for exceptional high school students in astrophysics, biochemistry, genomics and more.
