Fostering Alumnae Connections at SEAS
Before an audience made up almost entirely of women, including more than 60 SEAS alumnae, whose graduation years spanned the decades, and current undergraduate and graduate students, De Luca praised the education she received at Columbia.
“The School gets a lot of credit for my success,” she said. “It gave me an education beyond engineering.” She recalled the words of one professor in her sophomore year,“We are not training you for a job; we are educating you to be tomorrow’s leaders.” De Luca has certainly lived up to that expectation.
After a successful early career as a software engineer and sales person for Digital Equipment, she stayed home to raise two sons (“I never regretted one moment of it”) and then faced the challenge of getting back into the workforce. Starting as a consultant at a college, she was asked to teach programming courses and, ultimately, was invited to join the faculty and became the Dean of Instructional Computing. She then enrolled in an MBA program to hone her business skills where she successfully rebranded herself as G. Mercedes De Luca.
De Luca now has what she calls her “ dream job” as global customer experience officer and chief information officer (CIO) for myShape, Inc., an on-line retail store that delive rs a pers o n a l shopping experience for women to help them find clothes that both fit well and flatter their body shapes.“My number one passion was always technology,” said De Luca,“and my number 1.1 passion was fashion. I used to go shopping in between classes.”
Her work environment now is quite different from the one she left at Yahoo!, where she was the lone woman vice president in the technology organization in a company with 15,000 employees. As head of Yahoo’s global IT and business solutions, she traveled frequently to the company’s 80 locations in 22 countries. It was while she was at Yahoo! that she began to work on a fashion portal when fate stepped in and she was approached by a search firm to join myShape. “Sometimes, you make your own rain,” she said.
De Luca had many pithy and useful observations for her audience. Among them:“Networking—it is never too early and it is never too late; Create a ‘nifty-50,’ of connectors to make a network. Start with a ‘nifty-5;’ Say what you want out loud or else people won’t know what you want; Pay forward—help someone young and teach each other.” She enumerated her five core operating principles in business:“Integrity; Everyone has a gift, figure out what it is; Nothing is impossible; Put your heart in what you do; Leaders go first—walk the walk and model the way.”
Dean Navratil also introduced SEAS’s first woman graduate, Gloria Brooks Reinish ’45,’48,’74, who, like De Luca, was an electrical engineering major. Reinish began her career at Bell Labs and Sperry Gyroscope, took time off to raise a family and, in 1961, began teaching electronics at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She later returned to Columbia to pursue a doctorate in bioengineering while still teaching full-time. At the same time that Reinish was working on her EngScD degree, her daughter, Nancy Passow ’72, was a SEAS undergraduate. So far, theirs is the only instance of a mother and daughter enrolled in SEAS simultaneously. Reinish, who was named a full professor in 1976, served as department chair and chair of the Bioengineering program, is still teaching in Fairleigh Dickinson’s Electrical Engineering Department.
