biggest gift yet

A multi-faceted Mr. William Dietrich II announced a plan to provide Mellon University with the largest gift yet.

Given that most of the private higher education institutes in this country operate on the basis of endowments, such a big boost will provide significant financial flexibility to the future administrations. This gift becomes effective after Mr. Dietrich passes away. Also, this gift will bring CMU's $1 b fundraising campaign to the $950 m mark.

This puts Mr. Dietrich II in the elite category of being in top 10 largest gifts by an individual to any higher educational institute. The edited version of the event, which was held on Sep 7, 2011, can be seen below.



This is a big boon for inter-disciplinary education especially because Mr. Dietrich gave this gift to primarily support inter-disciplinary studies. He mentioned that it was inspired by the quality of faculty members and alums; in addition, he liked the global approach adopted by the institute.

I am particularly happy because these were the exact reasons why I chose to gather CMU for my graduate education. Given an opportunity, I would back to campus in a heartbeat.

a graduate program in service management!

Check here for the new program at CMU for experienced candidates in the field of Service Management. It is being offered by Institute of Software Research in the School of Computer Science.

Already, ITIL v3's Service Strategy was successfully bid for authorship by one of the CMU folks (Majid Iqbal) earlier this decade. Now, ITSQC in conjunction with ISR and SCS has introduced this new program. The pitch sounds convincing. I wouldn't be surprised if PRC govt sends its folks to learn in this program in order to support their budgeted 5-year plan to increase services in China.