Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 26)

©2008 All images courtesy of Don McMillan. McMillan incorporates PowerPoint into his corporate comedy shows. “Yep, that’s me,” McMillan humbly confessed. Next thing he knew, McMillan was surrounded by eight guys clamoring for an autograph. “Then one of the guys says, ‘Can you sign this cardboard cutout for me?’ Now, the other seven guys are thinking, ‘Why does he get the cardboard cutout?’ So a wrestling match ensues for the coveted cardboard cutout. Just about the time fists are about to start flying, the 7-11 counter guy comes out with a bunch of other promotional stuff—hats, shirts, beer holders—and calms the mob. I still owe that man for saving my life. And I don’t even know his name.” Fortunately for McMillan, the reaction of his old college buddies to his sudden fame was considerably less riotous. “I got a kick out of telling my friends, ‘I know that guy,’” says Dave Pietruszynski ’81. Pietruszynski, like McMillan’s other college friends, wasn’t surprised by his former classmate’s success. “Don was the class comedian and super smart,” Pietruszynski says. But McMillan, who graduated at the top of his electrical engineering program, saved his humor for study groups and friends. “He never broke up a class. He was too respectful for that,” Pietruszynski says. Jim Schick ’81 fondly remembers those study groups at Lehigh. “Don is incredibly smart,” Schick says. “He had this ability to translate what we were learning into something funny. He’d take engineering formulas and act them out like a cheer. It was great!” McMillan even managed to find humor in physics—a subject that countless generations of college students would attest is no laughing matter. Recounts Schick: “Don had this great joke about a neutron going into a bar and ordering a drink. The bartender says, ‘No charge.’” McMillan says that he began to discover his comedic gifts during his college days at Lehigh. “My friends knew I was funny, but nobody else did,” he says. “We were social engineers. That’s where most of my esoteric jokes come from. It was a great time, and I really came out of my shell.” In writing classes, he frequently threw in a bit of humor, and he honed his problem-solving skills (which would later prove especially useful in performances) along with his comedic abilities during study groups. “This is classic Don,” recalls his former M & M dorm-mate, Michael Bak ’81. “We had this loft apartment during senior year, and Don had just joined the campus security group. We were watching a nature show and learned about a snake called the green mamba that lived up in trees. Don takes on this superhero persona of the Red Mamba (since he had red hair and lived in the loft), complete with cape, as he’d leave for security.” After graduating from Lehigh, McMillan earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University (in one year on a special scholarship from AT&T Bell Labs). McMillan then went to work as part of a team for AT&T Bell Laboratories that created the first 32-bit microprocessor. In layman’s terms, that would be the central command center of a computer. “The 32 bit was standard for 20 years, but now it’s the 64 bit that’s standard,” McMillan says. “In its time, the 32 bit was unheard of because it had 1 million transistors on it, but now that’s nothing.” After moving on to Silicon Valley to work for VLSI Technology as a chip designer, McMillan developed more than 50 standard and ASIC designs. That was an exciting time for McMillan, but he knew that keeping up with the fast pace of project completion just wasn’t what he was wired for. During his six years at VLSI, he began 26 LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN

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Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Alumni News Cover Story: In Galileo's Wake Technically Funny The Healing Game Looking for America The Last Word

Alumni Magazine - Spring 2008

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