Gift support makes a difference

Harry Steudel's professorship funding enabled Ricardo Medina (right) to return to school. (25K JPG)

In 1994, Ricardo Medina had nearly completed his master's degree via the Manufacturing Systems Engineering Program when he received a job offer in his native Puerto Rico. Instead of finishing the degree, he took a job from U.S.-based firm Telular to help support his family. "I decided to go back to take the job because there were not that many opportunities back then in Puerto Rico," he says of his decision.

At the time, he was working on a three-credit independent project required for his degree. "I felt that I could finish the independent project from there," says Medina, who transferred to UW-Madison and earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1991.

However, he became engrossed in his new position as a quality-assurance manager and let the master's project slide. For nearly a decade, he received promotions and took better jobs, most recently as the engineering manager at Avant Technologies, and bought a house and settled down in the San Juan suburb, Guaynabo.

As a result, the prospect of uprooting his life and paying out-of-state tuition to return to Madison to finish his master's degree was somewhat daunting. But the desire always remained. "It was something that was bothering me, like a loose end that I needed to tighten," he says.

So to fulfill that and another goal, Medina resigned from Avant to study for the professional engineering exam, which he took and passed in October.

He began living on his savings and called Professor Harry Steudel to say that he wanted to finish his degree. "He gave me a project assistantship, which took care of the economic constraint I had with the cost of out-of-state tuition," Medina says.

With the assistantship, funded via Steudel's Emerson Electric Professorship in Total Quality, Medina took 12 credits this semester and began a new independent project with a company called Simtec. "We're implementing a quality-management system based on the requirements of the ISO 9001:2000 Standard," he says.

He already had done similar work at three companies in Puerto Rico. "It was the right fit for me," he says. Working with Steudel on the independent project provided Medina the opportunity to learn how to define a company's core processes and develop a process-oriented quality management system based on customer focus and continual improvement.

Although his funding came from Steudel's professorship, Medina hopes financial gifts will afford every student the opportunity for a scholarship or fellowship. In his case, that help made all the difference. "Harry was providing me the support that I needed," he says. "He put a lot of confidence in me."

Medina expects to finish his master's degree this summer and says that while moving up the corporate ladder and having financial security are nice, they aren't everything. "Those two things I did (the professional engineering exam and master's degree), although they are related to my profession, they were mine. They were more personal," he says. "I chose to feel good about myself."