In Their Own Words: Alumni in Business

Rob Manegold '75

I was a Psych major, with enough credits for a Sociology major as well. After Dartmouth I earned my Masters of Education in Counseling Psychology and Student Personnel from the Un. of MN, Mpls. I wanted to transition to Psychological Assessment in the Personnel field, but I was denied acceptance directly into the PhD program and it was suggested I get some work experience in Personnel/Human Resources. After 2 years as Manager of Professional and Technical Recruiting for a Milwaukee company (Johnson Controls) where I was primarily responsible for hiring engineers into sales engineering and application engineering positions, I was approached by a Branch Manager to become a Sales Engineer myself. JCI only hired engineers for these positions and I was considered an experiment.

However, because of my exposure to hands on computer programming, (as a '75) I was a beneficiary of the Kemeny mandate that no mater what our field of study, we would learn about computers AND because of the unique availability of time-share computer processing we had access to computers which the rest of the batch processing world could only dream of. In essence, I had more computer use and programming exposure as an undergraduate at Dartmouth than the engineers I was hiring. At Minnesota, it was then, as I believe it still is, a very quantitative psychology department; home of the Strong Vocational Interest Inventory, and the MMPI. Again, I had a fair amount of computer use and statistical analysis.

I spent the next eight years as a very successful Sales Engineer, then Account Manager selling computers to run the HVAC, fire & life safety systems, and save significantly on energy use for large buildings and campuses of buildings. 

My goal of owning my own company before the age of 40 ultimately lead me to leave JCI, and purchase a small manufacturing company which I then sold in 2000.