By Rena Wong
At a time when every other college student buys and sells stocks
on E-trade, Microsoft is a household brand and America Online and
Time Warner are on the verge of merging, it is easy to forget the
individuals who make up these entities.
We have all heard of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the
Stanford students who hatched Yahoo! Now, at UCLA, we have the
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. The
endless accounts of so-and-so who made it big in the tech industry
go on and on. But who are these people?
Caught up in the North Campus vs. South Campus superiority
scuffle, it was a little difficult for me to care about the
goings-on in the land of engineering.
But feeling hypocritical about being so closed-minded when I
tend to spout about the need to give everything a fair chance, I
decided to do a little research.
After all, if UCLA renamed another building, I at least wanted
to find out why.
So who is this person that UCLA renamed a whole school
after?’
In Samueli’s story, I found that the self-made man does
still exist.
The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland, he worked at his
family’s small liquor store in East Los Angeles before
enrolling at UCLA at 16. Here, he earned bachelor’s,
master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering.
Since 1985, he has been a professor in UCLA’s electrical
engineering department.
Samueli demonstrated that lack of money should not be a blockade
to higher education. He has also debunked the myth that
someone’s career is set in stone by the major pursued in
college. Although Samueli has published more than 100 papers on
broadband communication circuits and is an expert in the field, he
has not limited himself to engineering. By all standards, he is
also an entrepreneur.
A co-founder of Broadcom, a company that provides semiconductors
for the digital transmission of voice, data and video content,
Samueli is an example of the different choices available to those
who feel trapped by the field of studies they have chosen. A
college degree is only a stepping stone to further develop other
interests.
Still fuzzy about the career path I should follow, taking the
time to learn about Samueli has actually helped me realize that my
career does not have to involve political science if I tire of
it.
I can also understand why my roommate, an astrophysics major,
wants to teach first grade after she graduates.
When I first decided to find out more about Samueli, I had only
wanted to satisfy a passing curiosity about the renaming of the
engineering department.
I might never be directly affected by the monetary donation he
gave to UCLA, but I have been affected by his story. Maybe I will
get a chance to tell him so today when he comes to speak on
campus.