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Vote on Desiree Davidson's Story
Were they afraid we were planning a coup d'etat?
I spent my first summer during Columbia Law School at a firm in Philadelphia described as one of the best places in the city for black lawyers. I believed that if there was any place where I would have an equal chance at opportunities, be treated fairly and succeed, this would be it. There were three black female summer associates out of sixty that year but any time all three of us were in an office talking, one of the partners would knock on the door to see how we were doing. It happened too often to be a coincidence that sometimes we would purposely agree to meet in so-and-so's office to test our theory that we were being monitored. Like clock work, ten minutes after we would get together a partner would stop by.
Jamison Sayers's Experiences
I had taken a graduate level engineering course at an Ivy League school and I went in to ask the professor a question. Now, I have an undergraduate major in physics and a minor in math. It wasn't like I didn't know what I was doing.
The managers from other departments always played basketball during lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'd be walking around and they'd invite me to play. So when I started to play, it made a huge difference.
I can't say anything negative really about my managers and the work I did in my corporate job. When my manager found out that I wanted to teach, he allowed me to take off early on Fridays to teach, to give a lecture at the local community college.
I had flexible work hours. I loved it. I could come in at 10AM and no one would complain as long as I didn't miss any key meetings and I got the job done. It was great and I had no complaints.
I left because it wasn't driving me. I wasn't doing what I was doing in order to move up - moving up didn't interest me, because I knew I was going to move on in five years. Ultimately, I decided to follow a dream I had since college.
I got $2 million dollars to start a company, two months after 9-11. The capitalists asked, "Can you run a company?" People think of you as a technology entrepreneur, but technology entrepreneurs are not thought of as being good at running companies.
I had another African-American friend in the class. We had to compare our problem sets and tests with other students to make sure they were graded fairly. They weren't. We had the same problems, the s
One of the things I did was join a very large engineering society. They have a division for engineering management. So I joined the local chapter and met a lot of other people who were engineering managers.
It's all about who you know. In one of our engineering groups, a lot of the managers came from one school.
When I started my company, we had one of the most diverse management teams ever. In my years in corporations, I never heard diversity talked about.