Corporate leaders discuss MESA’s importance to industry, economy

At a recent MESA Board of Directors meeting, four corporate board members discussed why MESA is important to industry. The members are David Morse, CEO of Pocketfinder, Inc. and MESA Board Chair; Yno Gonzalez, President of AT&T’s Data and Network Services, Brenda Mize, General Manager of ITC Global Delivery for Chevron; and Joe Rivera, Director of Gas Engineering for Sempra Energy Utility Ventures, Southern California Gas Company.

JOE RIVERA: I’ve worked with MESA for 16 years, since 1990 when I became manager for engineering services for Southern California Gas Company. I’ve been on the board since 1995.

There’s a real shortage of engineers and scientists in our industry. In the past, we had several candidates to pick from for any given position. Now there are fewer and fewer.

MESA wasn’t around when I was getting my engineering degree. It was tough without that support system.

In the early 90s, we hired our first MESA alumna, a graduate of Cal State L.A. with a degree in electrical engineering. She now has a great career. She is the manager of technical services in one of our operating regions. She has really flourished. It was obvious from the first day that not only was she going to be a great engineer, but MESA had also done a great job of preparing her to be a professional.

The California economy is driven by technology and by companies who are enabled by technology. Obviously, the technology companies, like aerospace, the IT industry, hardware companies and software companies need engineers and scientists to drive their industries.

When these industries prosper, so does the state. Our company is not a technology company but it requires technology to succeed. MESA has helped us to mentor and recruit qualified, professional engineers.

YNO GONZALEZ: I’ve personally been involved with MESA for five years. MESA has a legacy. It’s been around for a long time and has continued to demonstrate consistent results. MESA has maintained its rigor and the quality of its programs, even during declining economic times and in a declining funding arrangement with the State of California. That’s one reason AT&T is supportive of MESA.

There is a need that AT&T has that MESA helps to fill. We’re striving to be the only communications and entertainment company our customers need. Technology is the cornerstone of being able to achieve that. MESA’s mission to help people achieve in mathematics, engineering and science is very consistent with AT&T’s mission. MESA plays a significant role in helping us to find people who can be engineers and engineering managers. MESA brings along students who are able to stay abreast of fast-paced technological changes.

BRENDA MIZE: Chevron has been very supportive of MESA since 1978. In fact, we helped to form the first industry advisory board. Since that time, we’ve been very involved in the MESA Board of Directors as well as supporting MESA pre-college programs and on college campuses.

Chevron is excited about working with MESA because MESA serves an important role in expanding the talent pool of engineers. Our focus is on ensuring there is diversity in our workforce and on attracting, developing and retaining employees in technical fields.

Today only eighteen percent of the people going into the engineering disciplines are minorities and at the graduate level, it’s only three percent. Chevron’s recruiting targets have doubled over the last year and seventy-five to eighty percent of our college recruits come from technical disciplines. That makes our partnership with MESA a good match for us.

DAVID MORSE: I’ve been involved with MESA for almost 25 years, since I was an executive at Pacific Bell. Initially the drive for my involvement was a corporate interest. We were, as a business council, in discussions around the need to recruit and retain more underrepresented minorities within our engineering organization at Pacific Bell. We felt that if we were going to adapt and represent the society that we were selling our products to, we needed to represent them within the infrastructure of the corporation.

So a strategic direction that the corporation embraced was to go after black, Hispanic and American Indian engineers. As we looked around at the traditional universities that we were recruiting from, we found that there were very few of the kind of people we wanted to attract. So we had to get some new resources and develop some new strategic alliances.

I started to make calls to engineering deans and programs, asking them what they had going at their universities that attracted underrepresented minorities. I was directed to the director of the MESA Engineering Program at UC Davis. She spent hours educating me about MESA, introduced me to MESA students, and shared with me some of the needs of the program. That was my introduction to MESA and it grew from there.

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