The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/456562
news from HIGGINS HOUSE 58 Winter 2015 B OB DIAMOND has lived a life full of impressive achiev- ments—as the CEO of major companies, as the force behind technologies we take for granted today, as an award-winner. But before his career milestones, Diamond was just a young kid going through life in Worcester during the Great Depression. Higher education—not to mention such professional triumph— wasn't exactly at the forefront of his mind. "I almost didn't go to college," he says . After graduating from high school, he joined the workforce—con- struction jobs and bakery gigs—because at that point, Diamond says, "you were lucky to just have a job." But then a friend told him about Worcester Junior College. WJC, then located at the YMCA on Main Street, offered an irresistible deal: if it didn't work out, he could get his semester's tuition back. College did, however, work out and Diamond transferred to WPI as a sophomore. He graduated second in his class. "But it wasn't something I planned on," he says. "I didn't think I was college material." Yet 2014, almost 60 years after graduating from WPI, saw Diamond as the generous donor of $500,000 for the Foisie Innovation Studio. Diamond's donated to WPI before, but this generous gift is a standout— it's the frst major contribution to the Alden Trust Challenge, a grant that will help create the frst-ever, state-of-the-art home for WPI's proj- ect-based curriculum (see page 54). The Alden Trust will give $3 million to the project when alumni raise $9 million by April 2016. Diamond remembers his time at WPI fondly. Yet while he says that WPI has changed tremendously in nearly six decades—"it's no longer men-only, for a start"—the core of WPI is pretty much the same: rigor- ous teaching. "We were expected to learn what we were taught," he says. While the school has diversifed and signifcantly expanded its vision and reach, Diamond believes it's still the same place that readied him for work. "I found when I was at my frst job, I seemed to have been better prepared than some of my peers—than most of my peers—to actually be an engineer and do engineering work," he says. "Most of the other guys I started with at that frst job seemed to require much more train- ing to be productive in the work they would do." Today college can be seen as par for the course for high school gradu- ates, but for Diamond, WPI was a whole other animal. "Attending WPI obviously had a very dramatic effect on me, it changed the trajectory of my career, my outlook," he says. "Prior to WPI, I—like a lot of people in Worcester at that time—was quite poor. WPI opened a new vista for me where I was able to enter a profession." While there's a whole host of differences between the late 1950s and 2014, Diamond highlights one in particular: an engineer's encouraged entrepreneurial spirit. In the middle of the 20th century, engineers had a fairly limited professional scope—they were focused mainly on practical public projects like building bridges, mines, and the like. According to Diamond, the consumer world and engineering weren't the cozy bedfellows they are today. "It wasn't particularly entre- preneurial back in 1956," he says. "We were expected to go out and get a job." And yet, entrepreneurial is an ideal way to describe Diamond and his career trajectory. He got his start working for companies like Philco and Philips, helping develop a reliable color TV camera for the latter. He struck out on his own in the late 1960s as a consultant and went on to pioneer emerging technologies: the caller ID we take for granted today, and the cloud-based home security and management system that is still very fresh. Diamond's latest venture concerns LED technol- ogy, which he develops with his company, Xeleum Lighting. Diamond, who was the WPI 2013 Innovator of the Year, has proven himself a forward-thinking entrepreneur, which is why the focus of the Foisie Innovation Studio is so inspiring to him—he sees it as a complete 180 degrees from the encouraged role of engineers half a century ago. "The concept of engineers as businessmen starting companies was very, very limited back in the 1950s, even in the 1960s," he says. "Now, engineers, computer scientists, people in the technologies are some of the great entrepreneurs of our day. That's sort of new to this last generation, so I'm just very happy to see that." —Alison Baitz Engineering a Gift Robert Diamond '56 helps kick off Alden Trust Challenge Grant