Biography | Pat Gelsinger — The Electrical Engineering Degree on the Mission Campus

People point at Stanford when they explain how an Intel technician became an architect.

The first four-year degree was earned here, on a Jesuit campus built around Mission Santa Clara de Asís.

Gelsinger finished a bachelor's in electrical engineering at Santa Clara University in 1983, magna cum laude, while still on Intel's payroll.

The university sits at 500 El Camino Real. The mission church on the grounds is the public building a visitor can actually walk up to.

Santa Clara College opened on this site in 1851. It is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California, and the only California mission that became a university campus.

Intel paid the tuition. The hours were the problem. He later described those years as grueling, farm work habits applied to night classes after a full shift.

Two years later he added a Stanford master's in electrical engineering and computer science. That second degree belongs on the Farm. This pin is the first one.

The 386 design team and the 486 architecture job came after this diploma, not before it.

A trade-school hire with a Santa Clara bachelor's is a different Silicon Valley story from the one that starts in a Stanford laboratory.

Photo: JaGa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.