USC Workshop (Human Relations Skills) - Boston 1978

The first SIGUCCS conference Kay attended was in Kansas City, 1977, where Kay came under the wonderful mentoring wing of Lloyd Edwards.  One year later, she led one of the first workshops, on human relations skills, to include a university staff psychologist.  Her later years at George Washington University included attendance at the fall conferences, occasionally at the spring symposium (CSMS), and much encouragement of younger staff and new directors to attend and participate in SIGUCCS.

Kay's career encompassed eight directors, six departments (by name and functions), five job titles and four different physical locations, and that meant that all user services skills learned through SIGUCCS were as often applied internally, as well as to GWU's clients. Kay also took on the care and maintenance of a local user services spin-off, Washington Area Academic Computer Centers.  WAACC, in turn, brought smaller schools and centers into SIGUCCS and fostered participation.  The sharing of talent and resources was invaluable in the early years of academic computing, as was the friendships of so many which ebbed and flowed between local (WAACC) and national (SIGUCCS) functions.

Jim was first introduced to SIGUCCS when he attended the Fall User Services Conference in Monterey in 1997.  He did a presentation that year only because that was the only way his university would pay for the trip.  That experience, however, quickly hooked Jim on SIGUCCS and on active participation in the organization.  Jim has since presented at four other conferences, was Treasurer for the 2000 User Services Conference, then became heavily involved with the Computer Services Management Symposium serving as Technical Track Chair, Program Chair, and Conference Chair for the 2002 – 2004 Conferences.  Jim also served as Treasurer for the SIGUCCS Executive Committee, 2004-5. 

Jim is currently in the Office of Technology Services as Director, Student, Faculty, and Staff Services at Virginia Commonwealth University where he has been in various positions of increasing IT leadership since 1994.  Jim has worked primarily in Academic Computing, at various times being responsible for and growing research computing, web services, learning management systems, and email.  In his current position, Jim is responsible for user support for all technology services.  But Jim’s route into IT has been a circuitous one.  He graduated from Auburn University with a degree in Industrial Engineering in 1969 after attending the University of North Carolina and playing on Coach Dean Smith’s first Final Four basketball team.  Jim then worked for Westinghouse as a Manufacturing Engineer building steam turbines for 10 years before leaving to get a Masters in Biomedical Engineering from UNC.  He then taught high school math and computer science and coached basketball for another 10 years before moving into IT management at VCU.

Jim recommends SIGUCCS activities as a great professional development experience as well as an excellent way to meet colleagues and make true friends.  Jim comments, “It was not until I was Conference Chair for the Santa Fe CSMS that I realized that all the presentations and other volunteer positions for SIGUCCS were the greatest professional development experiences that I had ever participated in.  I had done a little something for SIGUCCS, but SIGUCCS had done a great deal for me.”

Glenn Ingram was active in SIGUCCS primarily in the early 1970’s, serving as a member of the Board of Directors and the Vice Chair from 1971 until 1973.  He also chaired the Symposium on Small College Computing in 1973 for SIGUCCS, and participated in numerous SIGUCCS conferences and symposia over the years.

Glenn was the second Ph.D. student in Mathematics at Washington State University, taking his dissertation topic from Numerical Computing.  That led to his being appointed as Director of the Computing Center at Montana State University, which began his long career in computing.  He later served as the Director of  the Computing Center at Washington State, and spent many years in the federal government, first at NSF and then with the National Bureau of Standards, from which he retired as Chief of Scientific Computing.

“Merv” Muller was one of the founders of SIGUCCS in 1963, which was then known as “SIGUCC”, for “Special Interest Group on University Computer Centers”, because only large universities had such organizations then.  He served as SIGUCC’s second Chairperson, from 1966-68, while at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

His career has been long and quite varied.  Academically, he has been at UCLA, Cornell, Princeton, George Mason, and Wisconsin, and he completed his academic career as Chair of Computer and Information Science (among other positions) at Ohio State, from which he took emeritus status in 1998.  In the “real” world, he spent four years as Director for project “Weld” at IBM, and fourteen years with the World Bank, as Director of Computing Activities and in other senior positions.