Biography|Patrick Lo — The Electrical Engineering Degree Finished on This Green

People treat networking CEOs as products of Silicon Valley labs. Patrick C.S. Lo finished first as an electrical engineer on College Hill.

He left Mao-era Guangdong as a child in 1965, age nine, and reached Macao with his grandparents. His parents were sent to labor camps in Guangdong and were not released until after Mao died.

The family later settled in Hong Kong. Lo finished high school there and won a full scholarship to Brown University in 1976.

A Hong Kong fundraiser covered a four-hundred-dollar plane ticket. After the taxi from the airport he arrived in Providence with about one hundred seventy dollars.

Brown confers undergraduate degrees on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, on and around this College Green at 75 Waterman Street. In 1979 that Sunday fell on 27 May.

He compressed the electrical-engineering course into three years instead of four. The 1979 Liber Brunensis records the class that stood on this lawn.

The degree is the only university credential his later SEC biographies list. There is no MBA line, no second campus.

Hewlett-Packard hired him in 1983. The next twelve years ran through HP sales, support, product management, and marketing posts in Asia and the United States, ending as Asia-Pacific marketing director for Unix servers.

The green is still the place the procession returns to. The fence, the halls, and the conferral ritual are what a visitor can still stand in.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons