Inside San Francisco with City Director Matthew Paffhouse

You’ve lived many lives. As a raft guide, global traveler, educator, and now City Director. Looking back, which personal experiences have most shaped the way you lead and connect with students at Minerva today?

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The easy answer is my travels, as the drive to understand the world is practically hardwired into Minervans, and familiarity with different foods, cities, and cultural traditions goes a long way to connecting with the community. But the deeper connection is a shared comfort with charting a less conventional life. Minervans don’t stumble into this place, they chose it because they’re genuinely curious about the world and authoring their own story rather than following the one handed to them. I have enormous respect for that. They remind me of my younger self.

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Minerva partners with local San Francisco partners – including employees from Waymo, Google and Adobe. From your perspective, what makes these experiences especially valuable for students at this stage of their education?

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These partnerships happen during freshman year, and that’s the most important part of the equation. Most students don't get access to experiences like this until their junior or senior year, if ever. Minerva flips that. From the very beginning, students are applying the hc’s (Minerva’s Foundational Concepts and Habits of Mind) like #breakitdown and #rightproblem, to real civic challenges, with incredible organizations. It’s not just intellectual and creative work, either, they’re also practising #professionalism and #responsibility in ways most undergraduates never get the chance to. Our civic partners notice. They consistently remark on how prepared our students are.

What’s really cool is what happens after, how our partners keep coming back, year after year. That’s not because we asked them to, but because they genuinely got something out of working with our students. When any organization that collaborates with a Minervan is eager to do it again, that's not a selling point. That’s a signal. Minervans are built differently. Ambitious, thoughtful, and ready in a way that consistently surprises people who don't know Minerva yet.

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How do you intentionally design opportunities for students to engage with San Francisco’s culture, history, and everyday life?

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We start with a simple idea: we want to cultivate a traveling spirit more than a tourist's, wisdom more than rote knowledge. We're deliberate about the story we're telling students about San Francisco. Because this city has many stories, and we don't want students leaving thinking it's just the birthplace of hippies or tech careers.

We take students to the Museum of the African Diaspora. We work with Mount Tamalpais College, which operates inside San Quentin. We practice poetry on Angel Island. We do environmental and humanitarian service projects across the city. We explore the neighborhoods. We care about depth over surface, complexity over convenience.

And then layer on top of all of that the fact that you're experiencing San Francisco alongside what I'd argue is the most globally diverse student body in the world. Students are processing the same neighborhoods, the same histories, the same tensions, just through completely different lenses. That cross-pollination of perspective is something you genuinely cannot manufacture.

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Is there a city experience, partnership, or event this semester that really captures what makes San Francisco special for Minerva students?

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The one that comes to mind is an overnight camping trip on Angel Island. For those who aren't familiar, Angel Island is essentially the Ellis Island of the West Coast: the main immigration processing center for people coming into the United States from the Pacific. It holds both beautiful and deeply painful stories. The history of the American immigrant experience lives there, including real stories of racism and abuse that are hard to sit with.

For a student body that is as international as ours, standing on that island hits differently. Many of our students know what it means to navigate a new country, a new culture, a new identity. The history there isn't abstract to them. It's real. And so on our Angel Island programs we have them sit and write poetry of their experience, to foster their reflection, to make history personal.

We also hike to the peak of the island and take in a 360-degree view of the Bay Area. We cook together, eat together, play games and laugh together. It’s really a tiny version of the entire Minerva experience. The city as a classroom. History made personal. A global community processing something together that none of them would have processed the same way alone.

What surprises you most about how students grow once they’ve spent time navigating San Francisco, both academically and personally?

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What strikes me most is how much I learn about the city through them. Minervans arrive with plenty of curiosities, and San Francisco either deepens those or ignites entirely new ones. A student a couple of years ago led her cohort into the world of line dancing. We’ve had diehard hack-a-thoners, hidden park explorers, and quasi-anarchists who find their people in the city’s collectivist organizations. There’s graffiti fans and networking aficionados. Published authors who know every writing group in the city. Students who seek out spiritual communities that become bedrocks of their SF experience. 

The surprise isn’t so much that they grow; it’s how they each grow in their own ways, drawn to their own individual lights. 

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Where would you recommend students go for 

• (1) a good place to study with WiFi
  
  • I’m keeping it close–The Fueling Station on Polk. But my favorite cafe if they want to travel is Simple Pleasures in the Richmond.
• (2) a place to relax outdoors
  
  • Being a west side denizen, I’m going straight to the Great Highway on a weekend sunset. It’s car free now, and there are DJ’s spinning beats along the boardwalk.
• and (3) a must-try San Francisco food spot?
  
  • Saigon Sandwich, baby! The best Banh Mi’s in the city!

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In your Humans of Minerva episode, you described travel as something that changed not just where you were, but who you became. How have those years of traveling light and living deeply shaped your understanding of education and growth?

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There’s actually a really tangible way Minerva students understand this. When they arrive in San Francisco their first year, many of them show up with three suitcases, four carry-on bags, and everything they've ever owned. But watch what happens over the next four years as they move around the world. They shed a little more. They carry a little less. And by the end, they're down to just a few suitcases and bags.

I think that physical process mirrors something that happens internally. You leave home carrying a lot: expectations, identities, habits, assumptions about who you are and how the world works. And as you move, you start shedding the stuff that was never really yours to begin with, until you're left with only the essentials. The curiosities that actually light you up. The values that held up under pressure. The version of yourself that survived the discomfort.

Traveling light isn't about minimalism. It's about cutting the excess until you get to clarity. I think education works the same way. It's not about accumulating more knowledge, more credentials, or more answers. It's about getting clear on what actually matters to you and going deeper into that. That's what I've tried to carry into the work I do with students. Help them shed what doesn't serve them, and go deeper into what does

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You have once mentioned that Minervans inspire you with their creativity, ambition, and openness to the new. What have students taught you about staying curious and continuing to evolve?

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Honestly, more than I could have anticipated when I took this role. Every student who opens up and shares their story–their ambitions, their hopes, where they come from and where they want to go–I walk away from those conversations a little different. There’s something about the way Minervans think about success that gets to me. It's rarely just about themselves. They want to go out into the world, do something meaningful, and bring it back home. That orientation toward contribution I find inspiring.

And then there's the part that just makes me laugh at myself a little. You'll be in a conversation with someone who's casually telling you they were admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society or just won a NASA Space App hackathon, and then a month later they're performing a dance they learned from their mother. Despite all their successes, they don’t specialize. They are renaissance with their humanity. They keep the whole thing alive. I love that. I try to take notes.

What do you hope students carry with them from San Francisco long after the semester ends?

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San Francisco has been captivating people’s imaginations for hundreds of years. There’s a reason for that. The light here is different. The seasons are different. The feeling of strolling through the fog and the hills gets into you in a way that's hard to explain until you've lived it. And so what I hope students carry with them is their own California story. Because everyone who has ever been truly moved by this place has one. And I want Minervans to know that theirs belongs right alongside all of them. The dreamers, the builders, the wanderers who came before and couldn't leave.