JAMES F. LU

To LASV’s Alumni and Friends:

I graduated from Los Altos High in June, 2000, a fact most of you know. The tradition of excellence at LASV has been around for a long time before me. The week after I graduated, I asked myself “I love this place and how can I make sure this tradition of excellence carries on?” The answer turned out to be – with your help.

You can only believe one thing if you have been a member or a friend of LASV: investment in the people, with more contribution from all parties, increases the value of LASV for the time to come.

For the years that I am part of LASV, the program grew from building just one solar car to running three projects at once. We “dominated” the Chrysler Build Your Dream Vehicle competition for years in a row. We expanded ourselves into unfamiliar area of fabricating our own printed circuit board, leveraging advanced technology such as HP data acquisition system for on-board real-time data collection and analysis, and we even went all the way to the Siemens Westinghouse Science & Technology competition final. The most amazing thing about all of this is that it’s purely driven by a group of ambitious and motivated high school students. As entrepreneurial as it sounds, this is my LASV.

The question now is: should we still invest in LASV? There is another half of dozen high schools doing similar things as LASV. The technology barrier to do more advanced projects such as fuel-cell vehicle is much higher than before. LASV is not particularly the best high school with the most resource after all, despite our history of strong performance.

I do not believe investment in people will ever go out of style. I know that investment in educational value is always in style for the long run. A reliable growing organization like LASV must have the courage to invest. It took courage to let high school students run fuel-cell car projects, and we did it. It took courage to let high school students to start writing artificial intelligence algorithm for robots. Well, we did it. It also took courage to let high school students to go around the corporate executives and asking for funding that decides the future of LASV. Wait a minute, isn’t that the way we work in LASV?

Because of these investments in the students, LASV enjoys exceptional success as an organization. Today, LASV has made numerous professional engineers and responsible individuals, better citizens overall. Many of the alumni come back and contribute their knowledge back to LASV for the simple culture of “tradition of excellence”. It means taking away free time over the weekend for the alumni. It means taking away time with family and friends for the alumni. This is our culture, and this is your LASV.

Just for a moment here, let’s put everything behind and start asking ourselves one question: “How much have I contributed back to LASV?” I know many of you are too busy to go back on a regular basis, and that is fine. I know many of you have moved away from the general Los Angeles area. Some of you might not even be in the same country anymore. All of that is completely fine. Your contribution does not require your physical presence in Hacienda Heights. Perhaps just a phone call to Mr. Franz and let him know how he can reach you? Perhaps write a letter like this to let everyone else know how you feel towards LASV? Even better, pick up your checkbook and write a tax-deductible donation for the mother organization that has contributed so much but never asks anything back.

Friends, I probably have never met many of you who are reading this, although I would love to. This is my LASV, this is your LASV. The tradition of excellence lies on our shoulders. Invest in these students just like how we were being invested. Every quarter, every year, and every decade. This is your LASV.

James F. Lu
General Electric
March 17^th, 2007