Northeastern and Co-op Help Alumnus Find a Healthy Balance
Joe Davis, E’65, chemical engineering, built an impressive and varied career at Gillette that spanned 31 years. His Northeastern experiences, including two formative co-ops, taught him to balance his responsibilities at a young age and guided him to his ideal career.
Joe Davis, E’65, chemical engineering, knew he would be an engineer at a young age. He credits this to his father, a Northeastern Law School grad and plumber, who chose the path for him while working on a contract at MIT.
“He came home with a slide rule, and at 10 years old, he said, ‘You are going to be an engineer,’” says Davis. “I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Despite the initial uncertainty, Davis dug into his studies, taking advanced-level math, science, and language courses throughout high school that would count for college credit. He was also heavily involved in extracurriculars, playing the clarinet in middle school before playing football for his high school team. The latter, coupled with his high grades, earned Davis scholarships from universities nationwide, including Northeastern, which he chose for its locality and engineering program.
Davis entered Northeastern during a critical moment in his life. Married and with a child at a young age, he found himself juggling numerous responsibilities most young college students were not equipped to handle, all while trying to manage his campus commitments and football scholarship. The co-op experience was vital in teaching Davis how to effectively balance the different facets of his life, which helped him thrive in all aspects of his Northeastern career, provide for his budding family, and ultimately kickstart a successful career at Gillette.
“I learned to focus, to say ‘I’m here now, this is all I can worry about,’” says Davis. “When I came home, it was the wife and the kids. When I was on the football field, it was my football plays and conditioning. When I was in the lab, I would focus on that.”
Originally a civil engineering major, Davis’s first co-op was with the survey company New England Survey Service (NESS). The job meant that he would take a significant pay decrease compared to the union wages he was earning then, but Davis determined it was a necessary sacrifice to kickstart his engineering career. “I decided I had committed to being an engineer, and I would take whatever the co-op paid,” Davis says.
Davis used his time at NESS to connect extensively with his project managers and peers, learning as much as possible about the field. He ultimately concluded that a career in civil engineering would not be realistic for him after realizing how much time would be spent away from his family while traveling to project sites.
He changed his major to chemical engineering shortly after and eventually took a position at Gillette for his second co-op. He recalls the heightened expectations his supervisors and peers had for him in the early stages of his co-op after his predecessor was fired for poor performance.
“People would say, ‘You better be better than him,’” Davis says.
The high bar set for Davis encouraged him to work hard over the three years he completed co-ops at Gillette, during which he worked on several projects and collaborated with different chemists throughout the lab.
As his co-ops progressed, Davis began to take notice of Gillette’s sales and marketing teams, becoming interested in the variety of work available to them and the number of projects they worked on at once. Seeing a future for himself on one of those teams, he registered for an MBA program at Babson College, which began a month after he received his diploma from Northeastern.
To fund his MBA, Davis enrolled in Babson’s evening program while continuing to work full-time as an engineer at Gillette. The evening courses were coincidentally attended by executives at Gillette, providing a convenient networking opportunity for Davis. “I was running into high-level corporate people, and I made some great connections,” he says.
Davis worked on Gillette’s new line of stainless steel razor blades as an engineer. He began receiving mentorship from his manager during this time, who would go on to hire Davis into the engineering management department after he completed his MBA. Davis remained in this position for a few years until he transferred to information technology, opening many doors for Davis, including an assignment running Gillette’s data center.
Beyond his career achievements, Davis established himself as a well-accomplished member of Northeastern during his academic career. While playing for the school’s football team, Davis was the president of Northeaster’s student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and served on the executive board of his fraternity. He stays involved with Northeastern today, managing an email database of over 600 former football alums.
Davis’s Northeastern journey was not easy, and he was often left to his own defenses to juggle his responsibilities without an extensive support system behind him. In overcoming these challenges, Davis experienced Northeastern to the fullest and used his various commitments to learn how to manage his time and guide his future career path.
“To have an opportunity to have the whole Northeastern experience and to learn to focus on one thing at a time, [I learned] to not get so spread out that you fail in all of them,” Davis says.