AI Everywhere: How San José State University Empowers Students and Educators - Ep. 275

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Over the course of almost one hundred seventy years since its founding as California's first public university, San Jose State University has evolved into the anchor of the tenth largest city in The United States, one of the nation's leading public universities, and holder of the title Silicon Valley's public university, which, as we'll talk about over the next half hour or so, is really a vital and fascinating place to be right now. Since January 2023, our guest has led SJSU through what's turned out to be quite an eventful few years, broadly speaking. Doctor Cynthia Teniente Matson is the thirty first president of San Jose State and its first Latina president. Doctor Teniente Matson is an internationally recognized Latina leader with extensive executive experience across multiple state university systems, and she's known as a champion for student success, institutional innovation, and industry partnerships that drive economic mobility. I'm delighted for the chance to speak with her to doctor Teniente Madsen. Cynthia, welcome, and thanks so much for joining the podcast. It's great to be here today. So let's start with your role. What brought you to San Jose State? We live in interesting times, as the saying goes, and you joined San Jose State at really a pivotal time. What called you to the role, and how has your own journey before this shaped your vision for what you want to bring to the SJSU community? So I'm a returner to California and the California State University system. I'm a native Texan. I was born in San Antonio, but like many people of that era and generation, my parents moved out to California when I was a small child for better opportunities. And that has really shaped and influenced my thinking about coming to San Jose State in particular, each incredible opportunity that exists not only in Silicon Valley, but as Silicon Valley's public university. So when I arrived back in January 2023, the whole chat GBT open AI explosion was just occurring and it was just happening. San Jose State was in the middle of some of that in terms of already having launched by that time, a master's in artificial intelligence and really already starting to build this coursework and this research across our institutional organization. Well, for me to come forward in a new leadership role, there was a lot of dynamic issues that we were addressing at the time, but from a curricular perspective, really ensuring that we understood our role in this catalytic geography has driven the vision for institutional priorities and continued academic program growth. And I think, you know, Noah, over this twenty five, thirty months, we've had much recognition. The Wall Street Journal, named San Jose State the number four public university in The US, and CodeSignal, recently, ranked our university software engineers amongst the best, beating out some of the private universities in the region and …