Biography|Hock Tan — Two Mechanical Engineering Degrees in This Court in One Year

People treat Broadcom's chief executive as a dealmaker who arrived fully formed in a private-equity boardroom.

The first American institution that took a chance on him was a Cambridge courtyard.

Tan Hock Eng was born in Penang, then still a British protectorate, in 1951 or 1952. In 1971 a scholarship brought the eighteen-year-old to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His parents could not have paid the fees. The Institute did.

Building 3, at 33 Massachusetts Avenue, is the west wing of the Maclaurin Buildings. Mechanical Engineering still keeps offices here, around Killian Court and under the Great Dome of Building 10.

In 1975 he finished a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and, later the same year, a master's in the same subject.

Commencement at MIT is staged on this grass. The court faces the Charles.

The columns face the river, not a closed quad.

A later Harvard MBA is well attested. The year of that degree is not pinned in the public record the way 1975 is, so this pin stays with the year that is solid.

The courtyard is still the public face of the campus. A visitor can stand on the lawn without a badge.

What changed here was not a product launch. It was the first time an American school bet on a Penang student sight unseen and then handed him two engineering degrees in a single calendar year.

Photo: Madcoverboy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The 2008 frame shows Killian Court and the Great Dome, the same court that holds commencement.