Giving Back is Our Responsibility Randy Robinson, May 14, 2016 Our Heritage Each of us have people and institutions that helped prepare us to be successful in our careers. It is extremely important to find ways to contribute to those who helped us along the way. My Origin Story I attended a private school for boys in Chattanooga, Tennessee, thanks to a generous uncle. This opportunity provided me with a first class secondary education. It was during high school that I decided to go into computer science. As I began my college search, I looked at schools in the Southeastern U.S. with strong engineering programs.

I received multiple scholarship offers from private universities, but none from my two leading choices: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Auburn University. I visited both campuses and liked both schools. As high school graduation neared, freshman orientation was scheduled for me at both universities. Auburn was first.

I drove to Auburn for the orientation and knew after the first day that this was my new home. There was something different about Auburn that is hard to describe to people who have never been there. While it certainly earns its moniker of being “the loveliest village on the plains,” it is the people that make Auburn such a special place. During the next few years, I studied computer science in the College of Engineering, acquired a top notch engineering education, made lifetime friends with a number of people and, most importantly, met my future wife.

The Career After graduating from Auburn, I secured a programming job with a fortune 500 transportation company in Atlanta, Georgia. It was there that I began to hone my mainframe programming skills while my fiancé attended graduate school at the University of Georgia where she was pursuing her MBA. After we were married, we decided to move back to Tennessee, where I obtained another programming position with a fortune 500 insurance company. I was fortunate enough to be part of our company’s first PC/distributed application development project. Over the next several years, I continued to develop my coding skills and branched out into project management and ultimately people management. Seven years into this career, I was promoted to Assistant Vice President and then to Vice President nine months later. I’ve worked for the same company for almost twenty-five years, and have been an IT executive for the last sixteen. Giving Back As our children began to explore colleges, Auburn University was a top contender (and ultimate choice) for both. We took our daughter to Auburn for a college visit during her junior year in high school. While there, I took my 15-year-old son to the Computer Science department and introduced him to the department chair, who was one of my professors. This action led to an invitation to join Auburn University’s Computer Science and Software Engineering Industrial Advisory Board.

As a board member, I have the opportunity to visit Auburn University twice a year for board meetings. While our meetings are focused on the state of the department, enrollment, budgets, curriculum, etc., the highlight of these meetings is spending time with students in the classroom and in after-hour hosted pizza-party workshops. The young men and women we meet are passionate about their chosen career direction, but in many cases, lack real world knowledge to help them be successful

quickly in the professional world. It is a tremendous opportunity to meet with the students to answer questions and talk with them about what they can expect in the “real world.”

Scholarship Opportunities Considering the age of the computer industry compared to the other engineering disciplines, it is remarkable that we have an endowment fund at all. I enrolled in Auburn during the second or third year of the Computer Science program. The board strives to give as many scholarships to deserving students each year, but it is difficult for us to compete with other engineering departments that have been in place for 100-plus years and have significantly larger scholarship endowment funds. As a donor and supporter of the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering CSSE IAB Scholarship Fund, I want to encourage everyone, especially Auburn alumni, reading this post to contribute towards the education of deserving high school students who have demonstrated the aptitude and grades to be successful in Auburn University’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

How to Give Visit Auburn University Foundation at www.auburnuniversityfoundation.org. Click on the “Give Online Link” and follow the instructions. In order to designate your gift to the Computer Science and Software Engineering Industrial Advisory Board Scholarship fund, please specify “Samuel Ginn College of Engineering CSSE IAB Scholarship Endowment Fund” in the “other” category. Your gifts are tax deductible and will assist deserving high school seniors to attend one of the finest universities in the Southeast.