12 People Who Engineered Change Without a College Degree

It’s the exception and not the rule, but a few people have achieved monumental technological success without ever earning a college degree.

Charles Murray

October 6, 2017

13 Slides
12 People Who Engineered Change Without a College Degree
For most, a college degree is a way to help open doors. For a precious few, however, no help is needed.To be sure, they are a small group – people who invented and envisioned their way to monumental success, ignoring naysayers along the way. In most cases, they simply replaced the degree with clear foresight, a powerful belief in themselves, a willingness to launch their own companies, and a little bit of brilliance.What follows is a peek at the few. From Edison to Ellison and Gates to Zuckerberg, here are the technologists whose knowledge and determination led them to success, despite their lack of a college pedigree.    

Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 33 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and auto.

About the Author

Charles Murray

Charles Murray is a former Design News editor and author of the book, Long Hard Road: The Lithium-Ion Battery and the Electric Car, published by Purdue University Press. He previously served as a DN editor from 1987 to 2000, then returned to the magazine as a senior editor in 2005. A former editor with Semiconductor International and later with EE Times, he has followed the auto industry’s adoption of electric vehicle technology since 1988 and has written extensively about embedded processing and medical electronics. He was a winner of the Jesse H. Neal Award for his story, “The Making of a Medical Miracle,” about implantable defibrillators. He is also the author of the book, The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1997. Murray’s electronics coverage has frequently appeared in the Chicago Tribune and in Popular Science. He holds a BS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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