Supporters Create Business Scholarship With Engineers in Mind

Terry and Claire Rock's endowment aims to help techies transition into
management

by Jeanne Spreier


Terry Rock was reading business magazines when he was 18 years old. That
was more than 30 years ago, before he attended South Dakota School of
Mines and Technology, where he earned his mechanical engineering degree.

"An engineering degree is very, very good basic education," says Mr. Rock,
who, with his wife, recently established the Terry and Claire Rock
Scholarship through The School of Management at The University of Texas at
Dallas.

In 1970, he took his engineering degree to Dallas, joining Texas
Instruments Incorporated. While working at TI, which he left in 1981, his
initial belief, first formed in college, was reinforced. "Brilliant
engineers didn't understand the transition from technology to business,"
Mr. Rock recalls.

In order to change that blind spot, this new ongoing scholarship will pay
engineers or engineering students $1,500 for a semester to pursue an
advanced business degree or to work toward a dual engineering-management
degree. Scholarship recipients must, Mr. Rock says, show an
entrepreneurial orientation.

Claire Rock says her own business world experience mirrors this need. "I
worked for an electronic engineering publication for 17 years," she says,
"so I dealt with a lot of engineers. ... For them to excel within
companies ... they needed to have some kind of a business background."

Mrs. Rock, who received her marketing degree from The College of St.
Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., served as associate publisher of Electronic
Engineering Times, a widely distributed electronic engineering
publication. She says the magazine included stories and information on
computers, telecommunications and semiconductors, and many readers were
engineers starting their own companies. What she saw repeatedly was that
engineers, in order to make a go of their own start-ups, were returning to
school to get management and business training. After gaining that
knowledge, she recalls, "they really had an edge."

Mr. Rock, a general partner for CenterPoint Ventures, a large, early stage
venture capital firm in Dallas and Austin, now is looking for start-up
owners who embrace both qualities -- technological savvy and
entrepreneurial spirit. "Great technology may or may not be great
business," he says. "You want everybody to understand the needs of the
customer."

Mr. Rock's background showcases business acumen. After leaving TI, he went
to a computer start-up, Convex Computer Corp., which built its world
headquarters adjacent to UTD on land purchased from the university. In
1996, Convex was sold to Hewlett-Packard, which occupies the facility
today. In addition to his work with CenterPoint, Mr. Rock serves on the
boards of several information technology corporations and is a member of
UTD's School of Management Advisory Council.

Students interested in applying for the Terry and Claire Rock Scholarship
should contact Dr. David Ritchey in The School of Management Advising
Office at 972-883-2701.