The AFAM Silicon Valley chapter met informally over dinner on June 18, 2009 at Hotel Cabana in Mountain View. Attendance included Frank Chevalier (Neopost), Jean Lachaud and his wife (NASA), Jean Marc Ludwig (Nvidia), Sebastien Boucher and his wife (all the way from Modesto, CA), Philippe Brun, Claude Leglise, Xavier Wartelle, and Eric Benhamou.
Patrick Corsi is a world renowned entrepreneur and consultant with deep expertise in Virtual Reality. He is affiliated with Arts et Metiers ParisTech and conducts collaborative research between his lab in Laval, France and Virginia Tech, one of Arts et Metiers ParisTech’s closest academic partners in the U.S. This is an excerpt from his most recent trip report in March 2009.
Some 225 years after the duke of La Rochefoucauld, Arts et Métiers Paristech Managing Director Jean-Paul Hautier is setting out to complete his first official visit to the New World in April, 2008. In the United States, the Arts et Métiers brand (just like most of the other French «Grandes Ecoles») does not exist. It is yet to build. With a few rare exceptions, we are not known, and we are not counted.
In parallel, the Arts et Métiers community residing in the United States has never been properly surveyed. It exists, it is growing in numbers and influence, and it has grown accustomed to the cultural tradition that alumni have of supporting their Alma Mater. But it is spread across the continent. It must be unified, and reconnected to the school in a more structured manner.