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.
Jamison Sayers's Experience
My advice is to pick the right projects. If I had picked the right project, I may still be in the corporation today. You've got to pick what you want to do. I knew the other project was going to be hot, but I stayed where I was comfortable because I knew more about that project.
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.
It's all about who you know. In one of our engineering groups, a lot of the managers came from one school.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 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.