ABOUT CLIMB

VISION
This program is to educate top flight students, engage alumni of great colleges and universities, and improve Denver and Colorado.  The top students of this generation will be the top leaders of the next generation.  As students increasingly apply to some top colleges and universities that are greatly reducing tuition and costs of attendance, the top leaders of tomorrow are aggregating in a few schools.  Thus, now we invite students from Yale, Stanford, MIT and Middlebury to apply to the CLIMB program.  By finding good profit and nonprofit jobs, excellent housing, mentors, and great events, we attract top students to the program.  We hope to enlarge the program to help students of a few other top colleges and universities. 

CLIMB engages alumni of the colleges, as employers, job recruiters, as mentors, as event organizers, and as donors to subsidize student housing and events.  Some individual alumni find these activities more thought provoking, more socially interactive, more involved with students, more time consuming, and more satisfying than some other alumni activities.  Sometimes the colleges or alumni associations actively help; sometimes the activities are independent of the colleges and alumni associations.

We believe this program will have major benefits to Denver and Colorado.  The growth and excellence of Silicon Valley was generated, in no small part, by Frederick Terman who nurtured and encouraged entrepreneurs, engineers and young leaders of Stanford and other universities to settle in Silicon Valley to build their businesses and lives.  Denver is a beautiful and suitable place for the leaders of tomorrow to get to know, to appreciate, and to return to.  CLIMB will help students, entrepreneurs, leaders, and creators, and encourage them to return and improve Denver.

HISTORY
Begun in Louisville, Kentucky in 1999 by Rowan Claypool and alumni from Yale, "Bulldogs in the Bluegrass" was the first program of this kind. Similar structured summer internship programs now exist in Louisville, Denver, Cleveland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston and New Orleans.  Cleveland's Summer on the Cuyahoga was a model for Denver, in that six universities joined and bring 70 students per year to Cleveland, about half of whom return to permanent jobs there.

2006 was the inaugural year for the Denver internship program.  It was a tremendous success with 13 interns from Yale in the Denver area. The program doubled in the summer of 2007 with 24 student interns (20 from Yale and 4 from Middlebury). These students worked for a wide diversity of employers. Half of them were for profit, and half were non-profit.