The Basics
How many years have you been with your current company? 8 years
First job? Applications Engineer at TI
Where were you born? Santa Clara, CA
Where did you grow up? Fremont, CA in early childhood and then Raleigh, NC for my teenage years. South Bend, IN for college then Dallas, TX for my early career.
Corporate Perspective
What are your future plans to assist in virtual learning, knowing it will be around for the foreseeable future?
TI University Program has been very supportive of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) since the early days of their popularity. In particular, we have been looking at ways to support lab-based courses that provide hands-on experiences to reinforce the course concepts. We’ve been helping pioneer some of these activities for remote classwork with faculty partners, pairing low cost and portable TI microcontroller boards with the lab exercises students can use to get real-world training and practice. The best practices learned in MOOCs has been very translatable to how TI is able to help faculty as they are adjusting their courses for fully remote teaching and hybrid classrooms.
What do you want the academic community to know or understand about your company?
TI offers one of the longest standing University Programs and support infrastructure specifically for the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) community. With that multi-decade legacy and commitment to excellent customer service, TI is a motivated partner to provide the best solutions for industry relevant curriculum and lab technologies to help train the engineers of tomorrow. We welcome department heads, faculty, lab staff, researchers and students to reach out any time for TI support. Through our generous tools sampling program, extensive online documentation, training, workshops, curriculum and customized expert support, we can help locate or recommend workable solutions to most ECE related academic questions.
Why is ECEDHA important to you or your organization?
ECEDHA is the best place to meet with the key people we need to engage with to actively participate in the education pipeline for the semiconductor industry.
If you had to choose another profession, what would you choose?
I would try hotel hospitality, because I have always found that to be a professional and interesting global business. While most of the day-to-day tasks may seem repetitive, I find the flexibility, customer service and international opportunities of the work to be engaging. I read an autobiography by Conrad Hilton (“Be My Guest”) about the journey to build that company and found it to be very inspirational.
Beyond the Desk
Philosophy of life in a nutshell?
Is luck or skill more important for results? I believe in the saying: luck is the meeting of opportunity and preparation. You have to motivate and prepare yourself to be in a position to be lucky or have good fortune. You can also increase your chances of success simply by reducing your mistakes. It’s actually amazing how far you can get by doing your best to not make errors. This is true in sports and true in life. Sometimes, mistakes are inevitable, but if you can plan ahead with a good strategy and be cautious and patient, that can be a huge difference maker in the overall outcomes.
If there is one thing I learned in life, it’s that...
You have to treat your pace through life as a marathon and not a sprint. If you put in positive progress day-by-day, you can achieve the results you want before you know it. You will need determination and focus and sometimes personal courage to achieve your goals.
In my opinion, the greatest invention of all time is...
At TI, we often say the integrated circuit, followed by the handheld calculator. However, there are so many great inventions and that’s what makes engineering so fascinating. Sometimes, incremental improvements and new tools can inspire new technologies and applications that are high impact. Of course, the big inventions are key to our history and progress as a society, but the small ones that do their job to add convenience are still very important.
Favorite movie...
Star Wars (the original trilogy) is my favorite. Lord of the Rings trilogy is a very close second.