Shawn Blanton '87 teaches electrical engineering and computing at one of the most prestigious universities in the field. But he started out getting a C in his computer design class at Calvin.

A bit traumatic at the time, perhaps, but now the Carnegie-Mellon associate professor believes it just shows how Calvin stacks up against other schools.

Professors from both the University of Arizona, where Blanton received his master's degree, and from the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate, commented on the excellent educational background he had.

"When I was at Calvin there were 10 electrical engineering majors. Two were geniuses," Blanton remembers. "One now is a Navy pilot and one is a missionary, but they were always wrecking the curve. After I left Calvin, I felt as if I was competing with average Joes." In fact, his computer design project at Arizona was judged best of the 60 or 70 prepared by graduate students.

Blanton credits a summer job in Grand Rapids with keeping his interest in computer design stoked after the disappointing Calvin grade. He programmed computer controls for industrial stamping machines after his junior year.

"I found it interesting that you literally had to write a program to control that machine, and you had to think about safety measures," he says.

His specialty now is computer-aided design, methodologies and associated software tools to help computer architects design things such as the Pentium IV from Intel. "In particular," he explains, "I'm focused on how to test the computer chip. What happens is that they are manufactured in a very complex process and sometimes the chips have defects. Detecting this is a very difficult problem. I try to figure out how to discover them."

Blanton always assumed he'd go right into the workforce after graduation, but a counselor steered him toward graduate school.

"Then I thought I'd get my master's and then go to work," Blanton recalls, "but a prof at Arizona pushed me into teaching. There was nothing grand about the decision—I saw it as a challenge and went for it."

It helped, of course, that his first academic conference as a graduate student was in Toulouse, France. "I thought, 'Hey, this is a pretty good life,'" he says.

Even the decision to go to Calvin seemed to have been made for Blanton, a Detroit-area native. His mother sold Amway products at the time and figured they could take a trip to Grand Rapids together his senior year of high school—Shawn to visit Calvin, his mother to visit Amway's corporate headquarters.

"I remember telling people the whole time I wasn't even going to apply, because I'm going to U of M," he said. "But I did apply, and I found Calvin to be a lot of bang for the dollar. With scholarships and aid it's a much better bargain than University of Michigan. Still, even once I got there I figured I would transfer. What kept me there was I grew to have friends there, and I just didn't want to leave.

"It was tough, though. At the time, the number of minorities that were there you could count on one hand. But I don't think I would choose differently. I got a good education and have done well academically at every institution I went to."

Indeed, Blanton wishes more Calvin alumni would apply to Carnegie-Mellon's graduate programs, especially in engineering.

"They'd do very well here—they could shove others around at our expense!" he jokes.

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