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How did you decide to go into engineering?
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math. And when I went to my guidance counselor, who was a nun, we talked about what do you do for a career. One was nursing. Another one was teaching. And the other one was to be a nun. I realized that I had to look at what I wanted to do for myself. I went to the library and looked in the Barron’s Guide to Colleges and books about careers.

So what did you choose?
I chose chemical engineering. Literally I had no idea what I was doing, except that it seemed like it was pretty cool and it had math in it. So the rest is history. I didn’t like chemical engineering, but I liked mechanical engineering. Flipped over to mechanical engineering. And then I picked a great company.

Some people have said you had three strikes against you: You are African American. You’re a woman. And you grew up poor.
My mother was amazing. I guess in our community, if you wanted to get by you had to work hard. So she cleaned offices. She did everything that you could imagine. We were really poor. But she would say, “Where you are is not who you are.” And, “Don’t get confused when you’re rich and famous.”

You’ve said Xerox (XRX) was a company where you could grow into yourself. What does that mean?
They didn’t try to spend a lot of time trying to make me into something else—kind of fit into whatever would have been a normal hire. When I first entered the company, they just thought I was smart and said, “You go do some stuff.” And they kept giving me things to do. And I never really felt—and this sounded like a cop-out when I said it in the beginning and I would get pushed on it from certain groups—they said, “Did you ever feel discrimination?” And of course there was discrimination. The question that they asked was, “Did I ever feel it?” And not at work, I didn’t.

Not at work?
There were not a lot of women, and there were hardly any black women, but the biggest push that I got at work was my age. It was that I was too young to have this kind of responsibility.

You went from being an engineer to becoming executive assistant to the president of marketing. How did that come about?

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