Biography | Enrique Lores — First in His Class at the Industrial School on Camí de Vera

People treat an HP chief as a Silicon Valley product.

Enrique José Lores Obradors was born in Madrid in 1965 and finished his engineering on the Vera campus of the Universitat Politècnica de València.

The Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Industrial sits at Camí de Vera, s/n, Edificio 5F, in the Carrasca quarter of Algirós.

Ángel Ortiz Bas, later director of the school and Lores's honoris-causa sponsor, recorded that Lores studied there in the 1980s and finished first in his class.

The school had been created in 1968 as the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de Valencia, inside the new Instituto Politécnico Superior.

By Lores's decade it was already the industrial faculty of a full technical university.

The personal computer was leaving the lab and entering offices while he sat in those rooms.

Hewlett-Packard recruiters flew from California to talk to sixth-year students about a summer in San Diego.

Lores took the six-month California internship, then came back to Spain.

He left Vera in 1989 with an electrical engineering degree and an offer that outlasted the internship.

The campus a visitor finds today is not a 1980s snapshot.

The industrial-engineering library and the 5F block still mark the school that trained him.

The pin is the school itself, not a private room.

Photo: Biblioteca de Ingeniería Industrial de la UPV, Campus de Vera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons