Biography | Justin Hotard — The Electrical Engineering Building Where He Took the Degree

People treat a telecom chief executive as someone trained first in a business school.

Justin Hotard took the engineering degree on this Urbana block.

Nokia's official leadership page and Intel's 3 January 2024 appointment release both record a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He was born in 1974.

Public sources do not publish a commencement program with his name, so this memory does not invent a graduation day.

The department's home while he was a student was this building.

It was dedicated on 19 May 1949 as the Electrical Engineering Building.

In 1988 the university renamed it Everitt Laboratory for dean William L. Everitt.

The street plate is 1406 West Green Street.

OpenStreetMap pins the laboratory at 40.11097, -88.22826.

Illinois ECE taught its first electrical courses in 1891 and awarded its first degrees in 1893.

By the mid-1990s the work still ran through these corridors, labs, and lecture rooms.

Electrical and computer engineering left the building in 2014 for a new facility at 306 Wright Street.

That replacement was dedicated on 10 October 2014.

Everitt Laboratory now houses bioengineering after a renovation finished in 2018.

A visitor who walks Green Street is looking at a working campus building, not a preserved classroom from Hotard's years.

The later MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management sits on top of this first degree.

The sequence matters because the public record of his first job is not a strategy office.

Nokia's biography says he began at Motorola as an engineer deploying mobile networks for United States carriers.

That work sits after the bachelor's, not instead of it.

The pin is the older laboratory, not the 2014 replacement and not a private address.

Photo: Dori, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons