On Sunday, Dec. 1, the 5Cs will experience a planned power outage from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The outage comes one day before a senior thesis deadline at Claremont McKenna College, and a handful of days before finals week.
According to CMC’s Senior Project Manager Andres Ramirez, the outage is necessary to expedite the construction of the CMC Robert Day Sciences Center, which will house the college’s new Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences.
“As work progresses on the Robert Day Sciences Center, one of the critical components is the providing of power to the building,” Ramirez said in an email to the CMC community on Oct. 8. “In order to accomplish this, there will need to be a consortium wide power outage in order to make the final connections to the building and the power substation.”
The Dec. 1 date was unavoidable, CMC’s Dean of Students team said in an email to students the following day.
“This time was selected by the Consortium and considered a variety of factors including when Southern California Edison, the power company, would be available for the work,” they said.
CMC Dean of Students Jimmy Doan gave insight into why the thesis deadline could not be shifted.
“There’s no ideal date to ever shut down, right?” Doan said. “Thesis party is set for three o’clock on Dec. 2, so plans are already in place for that. There’s ripple effects for faculty, if you move the date of thesis and all the work that readers and whatnot are doing already.”
Reactions from seniors, according to Doan, have ranged from neutral to even positive.
Margo Cohen CM ’25 said she believes the outage is a nuisance, but not a major obstacle. Cohen, who is writing a yearlong thesis, must submit the first chapter of her thesis the following day after the outage.
“Not everybody is impacted by it, but there certainly is a good amount of people who are,“ Cohen said. “It just requires for people who are impacted to manage time really, really well and know exactly what you need to do before that Sunday.”
Once it was clear that the date of the outage was set, Doan said that he and the DOS team began working to ensure students would “have the best support and least disruption possible” during the outage.
125 students are completing their fall thesis at CMC this semester. While approximately half of them live in the Senior or Alexan Kendry Apartments where they will have access to Wi-Fi, the other half cannot rely on their dorms as powered spaces.
As Collins Dining Hall is run on a backup generator, Facilities and Campus Services worked with DOS and Dining Services to create an additional workspace for students within it.
“We are setting up Collins to be used for students needing a powered workspace for the duration of the outage, including outside of mealtimes,” DOS said in their Oct. 9 email to students. “We’ll provide additional power strips, printers, and reliable Wi-Fi to ensure you have everything you need to continue work with charged devices.”
To get the input of thesis writers about what support they would need during the outage, DOS has been engaging in outreach, both in casual one-on-one conversations and through surveying. During CMC’s Thesis Surge on Sunday, Oct. 27 — a tradition during which seniors come together to collectively write thesis with a track kept of pages written and read — the Academic Success team surveyed students on their progress and needs, and two-thirds mentioned that another workspace on campus aside from Collins would be a helpful resource. This discussion resulted in facilities creating plans to power CMC’s Adams Hall which holds Poppa Computer Lab.
Doan clarified other measures put in place to ensure as little disruption as possible for CMC students, thesis writers and others.
“[The outage] is all daylight hours, so while students won’t have power to light their rooms, there should be daylight,” Doan said. “Collins will continue to be a space where students can plug in phones and laptops. Access to buildings will not be impacted at all, so students can hang out in lounges.”
Now finishing his first semester as CMC’s Dean of Students, Doan said this experience was an invigorating one.
“There’s something cool about seeing a community of staff kind think creatively about something, and be able to work on that together and create a solution,” Doan said.
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