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Rochester Review
Fall
2003
Vol. 66, No. 1

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Teaching to the Tech

Margaret Cozzens ’62

Cozzens

When the going gets tough in Colorado, the high-tech workers turn to the Colorado Institute of Technology, and Margaret Barry Cozzens ’62 is leading the charge.

“It’s not a normal institution of higher education,” says Cozzens, who was named president in March.

Funded by private companies including Oracle, Qwest, and Sun Microsystems, the institute doesn’t have instructors or a campus. Instead, it supplies other Colorado schools with programs to train high-tech workers for those, and other, Colorado industries.

Cozzens’s education at Rochester prepared her for her new role, even if she hadn’t thought of heading up a high-tech institution while an undergrad.

“I majored in mathematics at Rochester, with minors in English and education,” she says. “At that point my goal was teaching, initially high school math.”

She found herself in educational administration, including a term as chief academic officer at CIT in 2001.

In 1999, Colorado Governor Bill Owens began CIT as a way to groom more professionals for Colorado’s high-tech fields. But with the economy in a slump, the aim has been shifted to retraining those high-tech workers in such fields as global telecommunications, digital media, and bioinformatics.

“One of our goals is to ensure that Colorado becomes a worldwide center for high-tech innovation and development,” Cozzens says.

The latest task for the institute is an even bigger one, Cozzens says.

“The governor of Colorado has asked us to coordinate the state’s homeland security. The institute will be the central point of contact for all the educational institutions, business, industry, and government agencies in the state.

“This is the most exciting time to be leading CIT,” says Cozzens. “I believe that we will become a national model for this new form of cooperation between education and industry.”


 
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