From Paris to Cuyamaca College, With Love

Wulfran Trenet was a successful composer working in Paris when he learned about Cuyamaca College, moved halfway across the world and enrolled at the Rancho San Diego campus to study the sciences. His life hasn’t been the same since.

After completing his studies at Cuyamaca, Trenet earned a chemical engineering degree from UC San Diego and is now applying to graduate school with hopes of being accepted to Johns Hopkins University. In the meantime, he’s 

Wulfran Trenet

back at Cuyamaca as a tutor working with students studying chemistry, engineering and physics.


“This college means so much to me, and I was missing it even when I was at UCSD,” Trenet said. “I love this campus, I love the location, I love the instructors. So I came back to pass on the knowledge that I learned here. I wanted to pay back what I had received.”


Trenet, 47, had never heard about Cuyamaca College while growing up in Paris and embarking on a successful career as a composer – he’s recorded more than 400 tracks in all – for a company that provides music for television shows, fashion events, movies and more.
The nephew of famed French singer and songwriter Charles Trenet, Trenet said he began to take an interest in neuroscience when his father was battling depression. “When you think about it, music has a lot in common with neuroscience,” Trenet said. “First of all, music is very mathematical – the distance and time between the notes and silences, for example. And the combination of notes in making a chord is very similar in many ways to how atoms combine to make a compound or molecule.”

Grossmont, Cuyamaca colleges laud winning faculty

Tom Bugzavich

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Herrin

Janet Gelb

Cuyamaca College instructors in health education and graphic design and an expert in online learning at Grossmont College have been lauded as among the academic year’s top faculty at the two East County campuses.

Janet Gelb, distance education coordinator at Grossmont College, received the President’s Leadership Award, one of the highest honors recognizing distinguished service to the college. At Cuyamaca College, Scott Herrin, a former dean who decided last year to return to the classroom as a health education instructor, received the 2018 Award for Teaching Excellence. Tom Bugzavich, a graphic design instructor, was the part-time faculty recipient of the same award.

Cuyamaca College launches groundbreaking new concert series

An East County benefactor who has helped transform the San Diego chamber music landscape is underwriting a new series of concerts at Cuyamaca College’s Performing Arts Theatre featuring renowned international musicians who have impressed audiences as far away as the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow.

            The concerts are part of a newly launched ECHO Chamber Music Series, with ECHO being an acronym for the East County Harmonics Organization. The series begins Feb. 17 with Bomsori Kim (violin) and Drew Petersen (piano). Kim captured the 62nd ARD International Music Competition, a prestigious classical music event in Munich, Germany; Petersen won the 2017 American Pianists Award for classical music.