Here’s to the believers…In Remembrance of Dr. Mike Kassner
By Tara Chklovski
There are some people in your life who change the course of your life-river completely. They are the ones who not only encourage you and believe in you but they take on risk for themselves by taking a bet on you, and going far out onto a limb for you. It is so easy to say “dream big”. It’s a whole other thing to risk your own career and your reputation for someone who is not family.
This was Mike Kassner for me.
Earlier this week I learned Mike passed away. I don’t know what my life today would look like if I hadn’t known Mike. He was the Chair of the USC Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering department while I was a PhD student. He was also on my thesis committee.
When I decided to quit my PhD program, he was very supportive of an experiment I wanted to try—running a course for USC Aerospace & Mech Eng students to bring research to the local schools and families. I set up the nonprofit— Iridescent—and called the course “Engineers as Teachers”. I remember the first time I came to his office. I was nervous and already feeling stupid and a bit ashamed of switching tracks. He didn’t smile or express any emotion that would give me any clue to what he thought of my idea. He quickly agreed to offer this experiment as a legitimate course that students could take for technical credit. I was stunned.
We ran the course for many semesters and at each final presentation, I remember Mike would come right on time, and take the very first chair right in front of the screen. This would make me so nervous. He would not say a word throughout the whole presentation, and would look very grim.
The course continued to run, and Iridescent started to have a significant impact across Title 1 schools in Los Angeles, connecting engineering students to low-income communities through fun, hands-on programs that the engineers ran for both children and parents—Family Science. There was so much innovation in this format and so many people said that it wouldn’t work. But in his quiet, but decisive way, Mike supported me and laid the foundation for all the impact that was to follow.
By 2009, it had been about three years since I started Iridescent. Although it was a hopeful time with President Obama’s recent election, I was struggling to secure funding. The foundations in LA just didn’t understand what I was doing. It was not traditional math or literacy education, it was not teacher professional development, it was not a charter school, nor was it the traditional after school program. It was a large-scale program connecting university students to children AND parents from low-income communities to share cutting-edge science and engineering topics. We were training ~80 engineering students as well as industry mentors to support ~1,500 children and parents and I was only able to raise $100,000. I had no idea how to grow the program as I just kept hearing “no”.
One day I got a call from Mike. He said that he had been appointed Director of Research for the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and was tasked with scaling up innovative STEM programs for the country. (I had to look up what the ONR was and was impressed at how much innovation it had enabled for the world)
He asked me if I was ready to scale up the Family Science Program and I said yes! I had a detailed three year plan in place and just needed funding. He asked me to submit a proposal for $20,000. I worked out what I thought we could do and sent him a proposal for $60,000. He funded it.
We got to work and grew the Family Science Program rapidly to include more schools and communities.
He then asked me what it would take to scale the program to many cities and asked me to submit a proposal for $100,000. I worked out a detailed plan to scale up our Family Science Program, and to try a bunch of innovative ideas over the course of 3 years. I sent him a proposal for $7 million. He asked me to meet him to go over the strategy. I went to DC and he shared his thoughts on how he wanted to innovate in this space. He was curious to have Maker Spaces across the country (this was before the Maker movement was big). He wanted to experiment with “serious games” and was also interested in our girl-focused tech-entrepreneurship program. I refined the proposal and he funded it.
That was unbelievable. I had no idea how carefully he had listened to all our presentations in the previous years and also how deeply he cared! I couldn’t let him down.
What followed was the most innovative period in Iridescent’s history. We launched two studios—one in downtown Los Angeles and another in the Bronx (check out the launch video!). We launched one of the first educational apps on the apple play store that was providing beautiful educational content that was not just for kindergarteners, but for upper elementary school students. This app went on to be featured on the “app of the day” for its beauty. We went on to make 8 more educational apps trying to recreate the hands-on elements of Physics and engineering concepts for upper elementary and middle school students. We launched Technovation—a 3 month technology entrepreneurship competition for girls. We ran 14 different types of programs, collecting tons of data on what truly makes a difference in a child’s sense of identity as an innovator.
Mike went on to join our board, and becoming board chair.
Technovation wouldn’t be what it is today—a global organization with a deep ethos of innovation—without Mike’s support and belief in a little spark of an idea.
Thank you Mike. You believed in me with such wholeheartedness, that I had no choice but to give it my all, and to shoot for the moon.
I need to remember that everyday and make it happen for the next young woman with a world changing vision, and nothing else. That’s how you get to the moon.
