THE RIGHT THING TO DO
Jack Guillaumin has seven good reasons to support Michigan Tech: That's the number of scholarships that he helps to fund by facilitating donations from alumni and arranging for matching gifts from their employer, in his case DTE Energy, the parent company of Detroit Edison Co.
Each gift and the 100-percent match go to a merit-based scholarship fund for sons and daughters of current and former employees of the utility, where Guillaumin, 58, has worked since graduating in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, when his primary goal was to “get out of school and make money.”
His career proved to be a wide-ranging proposition: He has had 33 different jobs in 35 years—from overseeing the licensing of power plants to lobbying in Washington. ”I had the opportunity to learn a whole lot of things,” he says. “I've had lots of success, and I've made a lot of mistakes. I've learned more from one of my mistakes than from all my successes.”
One offshoot of his work: “I'm very comfortable with change.” And one change in particular that he likes is Tech's new engineering enterprise program, in which students from different disciplines work on real-world projects supplied by industry. “You learn by doing,” he says, “and that kind of endeavor teaches teamwork, communication, and the importance of diversity.”
The engineering enterprise program appeals to his nature (“I like to go where the work gets done”), and it underscores the tradition of a Tech education, which, he says, has always been characterized by “hands-on people, not theoreticians.”
In that vein, he hopes students learn that success hinges on the practical task of building relationships with people. “It gets back to community,” he says, “and learning to sit down and listen rather than talk. You have to know what drives people, what they like or do not like.”
Guillaumin has been involved with Tech's matching gift program for more than a decade. He also is on the Industrial Advisory Board for the College of Engineering, and he maintains ties with Phi Kappa Tau fraternity.
He came to Tech in part because of its small size and good reputation, which he says was “welldeserved.” A scholarship supplemented his own earnings. “I worked ever since I was eleven,” he recalls.
Spartan times? Not really. He married his senior year and he and his wife had a combined income of $20 a week. “We lived high on the hog,” he says.
These days, from the vantage point of the matching gift program, he helps his alma mater. “It is,” he says, “the right thing to do.”
Jack Guillaumin, of DTE Energy, visited in October with seven students (one was his daughter Meg) who receive support from the Detroit utility's merit-based scholarship fund, which helps the children of DTE employees. Guillaumin is on the Industrial Advisory Board of the College of Engineering, and he said it was helpful to get the students' viewpoint of Michigan Tech. He described the seven youths as level-headed and selfassured. The get-together was arranged by Debbie Maki, matching gift coordinator. "She was a gracious host, the students all cleaned their plates, and a good time was had by all," Guillaumin said. Alumni contributions at DTE, matched by the company, all go into a scholarship fund established in memory of Lloyd Coombe, a 1951 MTU grad who worked at Detroit Edison and was in the process, when he died in 1987, of establishing a scholarship for children of MTU alumni who work at the firm and attend Michigan Tech. From left, the students are: Chris Robinette, Erik Czarnik, Emily Callow, Nick Johnson, Darrell Robinette, Meg Guillaumin, and Matt Dubiel.