NEWS
For Immediate Release
April 24, 2014
CONTACT: Lisa Johnson,
Development Officer & External Relations
Release No: 28LJ-PR-2014
COA Alum Retires After 30 Years with IBM
Donald McCoy graduated from his Elizabeth City
Up until then, McCoy had been
preforming throughout Northeast North Carolina
and South Hampton Roads with his band – playing jazz and blues gigs throughout
the area. The band was pretty popular and McCoy figured he would continue
playing fulltime after graduating high school. But, that night as he and his
bandmates talked about their futures, he realized he was the only one who wasn’t headed off to college in the fall.
Looking back on it, McCoy said, he recalled his mom
telling him repeatedly his senior year that he needed to plan for his future.
“She’d said it before, but this night, I hear it,”
McCoy said. “She said, ‘You’re not going to lie around here.’ And I thought, I
need to get my act together.”
His best friend’s dad was nearby and offered some
advice, suggesting McCoy enroll at College of The Albemarle that fall because
no SAT scores were required, or prerequisite classes. He also suggested that
since McCoy had a knack for tinkering – often fixing the band’s amplifiers and
other equipment – he enroll in COA’s electronics program.
McCoy did just that and in 1976, the former high
school musician graduated from COA with his Associate’s of Applied Science
degree in Electronic Technology. McCoy
was tempted to stop his education there and work full-time at a nearby
electronics company in Elizabeth
City where he had worked
a few summers, but Dave Hodges, the former dean of the Electronic Technology
program at COA – and a mentor to McCoy – intervened.
He urged McCoy to pursue his Bachelor’s of Science in
Engineering Technology. Three years later, in December 1979, McCoy graduated
with the degree from Old Dominion University
in Norfolk, Va.
He took a job with the international computer hardware
company, IBM Corporation and remained there for the next 30 years.
The job provided him the opportunity to travel to 16
countries – including Russia, China,
Germany, France and The
Netherlands – as he handled assignments
for IBM’s corporate headquarters. It also sent him abroad to England in 1983, where he lived for two years as
he helped design a new hard drive for IBM, to sell in the United States.
In England,
he was part of an international team responsible for creating a new hard drive
that could be sold worldwide by IBM. The computer company brought in team of
engineers from their offices in Asia, Latin America and Germany, so
they could work together and create a new hard drive that could be sold in
their respective countries.
“Our voltage is different in the United States,”
McCoy said. “So everyone had to customize the product for their location.”
McCoy enjoyed his time living in the rural countryside
of Hursley and Havant, England where IBM had two offices. London was just over an hour away, so he would often head
there with friends on weekends to learn about British culture – visiting London theatres and going
to the city’s museums.
Likewise, almost monthly, he would host American
Nights at his home, teaching his British friends about American life by
watching American movies and eating uniquely American food like sloppy joes and
hamburgers.
McCoy remembers those years in England fondly
and 30 years later, he is still in touch with a number of friends he made while
living there.
In addition to his work as an electrical engineer for
IBM, helping create hardware products, McCoy also did competitive analysis for
the company, looking at other companies hardware and taking it apart to
determine how they made their product and estimating whether IBM could make
something similar that was cheaper, but of better quality. He also worked at
IBM as a quality engineer, assisting the company’s million-dollar customers who
were experiencing problems to investigate the cause and solve the issue.
“Most of those jobs led up to 1999,” McCoy said,
adding that that year, he transitioned from the engineering production side of
things, to an outreach position with the company, reaching out to schools
nationwide as part of IBM’s K-to-College technical education program. For 10
years – until his retirement from IBM in 2009 - McCoy worked with teachers and
administrators to prepare students for careers in STEM, or science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics professions.
McCoy said the decision to focus on outreach work was
a personal one and kept him busy talking to students across the country as he
visited numerous career days and science fairs.
“I had been doing outreach to schools, trying to
represent underrepresented groups in STEM classes,” McCoy said, adding that the
initiative was focused on encouraging girls, African-Americans, Hispanics,
Native Americans and the disabled, to consider pursuing careers in STEM.
McCoy found the work so personally rewarding, he was
only eight days into his retirement when he began getting calls from some of
the educational agencies he had worked with as part of the K-to-College
initiative, requesting his help to pursue their own STEM-related initiatives.
So, in 2010, he launched Donald McCoy and Associates,
LLC, and began assisting non-profits, educational institutions, corporations
and governmental agencies as a STEM education consultant. Since then, McCoy has
served on numerous projects with NASA, the U.S. Department of Education, the
National Science Foundation, K-12 schools and he also serves on six STEM
advisory boards and committees, including the South Carolina Advanced
Technological Education
National Resource
Center for Engineering
Technology Education. McCoy also finds time to teach robotics classes to
elementary school students and college students at North
Carolina A&T State University
and North Carolina
State University.
If he is able to serve as a role model to the students
he works with, McCoy said, he considers it a mission accomplished. Growing up
in the rural landscape of Elizabeth
City, he didn’t see many
African-Americans working as engineers. So serving as that role model to young
students who are just beginning to decide what they want to be when they grow
up, is important to him.
“I’m from Elizabeth
City, so you didn’t have
a lot of people like that,” McCoy said. “You can stimulate these kids because
they think, ‘Oh, he looks like me.’”
“To me,” he added, “it’s a way to give back. A lot of
people helped me along the line.”
Since his retirement, McCoy has supported more than
1,000 K-to-College STEM projects in the U.S.
and the Dominican Republic.
When he retired from IBM nearly five years ago, McCoy
said he didn’t have plans for a second career in consulting.
“I just wanted to keep having fun inspiring young
people and getting them excited about the possibilities of STEM careers,” McCoy
said. “But even before I retired, people started contacting me with requests to
continue my skills-based volunteering efforts through working with schools,
mentoring, serving on advisory boards and judging robotics competitions.”
“Maybe one day I’ll slow down,” he added. “But for
now, I’m having too much fun and getting too much satisfaction from serving my
community.”
McCoy said his 30-year career in engineering – and the
happiness and fulfillment he found there – is all because of his last-minute
decision to go to COA nearly four decades ago.
“COA provided me with the fuel to launch a successful
collegiate education and technical career that follows me today,” McCoy said.
“There’s no way I could have gotten the academic foundation needed, without
going to COA.”
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